The Secret to Surveys and Research: Gathering and Using Proprietary Data in Marketing
In the world of journalism, there are few stories more coveted than the exclusive. The more often a publication can scoop its rivals and provide...
4 min read
Cathy Boudreau : Dec 4, 2020
Table of Contents
If you’ve shopped at a major retailer recently, you’ve likely experienced omnichannel marketing. Let’s take the cosmetics retailer, Sephora, as an example of how it works at its best. Customers who have downloaded their mobile app are immediately recognized by Sephora’s IT systems as soon as they enter one of their brick-and-mortar stores, and it brings up a map of the location on their smartphone, complete with details on sales and other promotions. Beauty advisors in the store help customers determine which products will work best for their features and the look they’re trying to achieve, and they scan every product customers try. After the visit, the customer will be sent a complete list. If the store itself is out of something a customer wants to buy, no problem — it can be easily and seamlessly ordered and shipped right there in the store.
This marketing strategy is typically presented from a B2C perspective, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less relevant for B2B companies. But before we get too deep into how you can develop and execute an omnichannel marketing strategy, we should first define what it is.
Omnichannel marketing is a step up from multi-channel marketing, which is something every marketer does. No matter what business you’re in, you’re almost certainly interacting with customers via email, your website, social media, and digital advertising, just to name a few. Omnichannel marketing ties all these channels together to provide the customer with a consistent experience no matter which channel they use. It’s a powerful strategy for driving customers towards a sale no matter which channels they use to interact with your company.
But it takes a lot of planning, research, technology, and commitment to pull it off. Here are some of the major steps you need to take:
So, what might a mature omnichannel marketing strategy look like in a B2B environment? Let’s say you are a cloud storage provider, and a prospect clicks on a promoted tweet to download a white paper on collaboration in a hybrid cloud environment. At your website, you collect some basic information — company, title, phone number, name, and email — and that information is correlated with the customer’s IP address and stored in the CRM system.
The marketing automation platform will send a follow-up email inviting the prospect to watch a recent webinar on collaboration via the cloud. At this point, it won’t send them information about data consolidation, ease of management, and data protection. All of these are important value propositions for your service, but you know that this prospect is a line-of-business manager. She cares much more about collaboration than IT management, which your marketing automation stack knows because of your research into her persona.
When a sales rep reaches out over the phone, he will know exactly what her role is and can respond with messages tailored to her needs. And because he understands the customer journey, he knows that his next step must be to get IT involved, because they will play a key role in making the sale. The data storage manager will have a different, but consistent experience with your channels than the line-of-business manager, because their needs are different. And from there, the journey continues until you finally get them to sign on the dotted line.
Omnichannel marketing is not just a buzzword. It’s one of the most effective strategies in modern marketing. But it’s no easy feat to pull it off. A strong omnichannel program requires a substantial investment of time and money into IT integration, planning, and coordination. So, before you jump in, make sure you have all the pieces in place. If you do it right, you’ll see the results: better close rates, increased sales, and happier customers.
Need help developing your omnichannel marketing strategy? Get in touch!
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