The Ultimate Guide to Omnichannel Marketing: Strategies and Examples

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Definition and Importance of Omnichannel Marketing

You may have heard omnichannel marketing described as multi-touchpoint marketing, big-picture marketing, or holistic marketing. Put simply, it’s the marketing equivalent of not putting all your eggs in one basket.

It’s a description of how your various channels interact with each other to create a consistent brand experience for your audience. It encompasses both physical and digital marketing channels, and will often encourage customers to make use of several of them.

An example of this would be an in store shopping sign encouraging customers to scan a QR code to take them to a specific landing page for a running promotion. The social media pixel on your website would then enable you to market to that user on a platform like Instagram or TikTok.

The Difference between Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing focuses on the specific channel and transaction, while omnichannel marketing considers the customer journey across multiple touchpoints. Not only that, it looks at how to create the best experience as your customers move between channels.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Enhanced Customer Journey and Experience

An omnichannel marketing strategy that’s well delivered evaluates the effectiveness of touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey, enabling consumers to engage with brands on their own terms. It gives a consistent experience, which leads to a better customer perception of your brand.

Increased Customer Loyalty and Retention

Following on from the previous point, better customer perception of your brand contributes to developing strong relationships with customers. Strong relationships lead to increased loyalty and retention. We often hear the phrase ‘the best customer is the one you already have’ – and it’s true!

Improved Marketing Efficiency and ROI

When you implement an omnichannel marketing approach, you gain visibility (and understanding) on the role each touchpoint plays in the customer journey. Different attribution models, such as custom, W-shaped, U-shaped, time decay, linear, and full path models, can provide insights into the role of each touchpoint in the customer journey. This visibility can yield some genuinely fascinating data. Data that you can use to take decisions with for a truly consumer-centric approach. All the time, keeping the comprehensive customer journey top of mind.

Omnichannel Marketing Strategies

When you take an omnichannel approach to your marketing strategy, it becomes apparent quite quickly how it’s all interlinked. Think of it this way: Google Ads (or your chosen social media platform) are not the be all and end all.

Consistent messaging across marketing campaigns is crucial in an omnichannel strategy to ensure a seamless customer experience.

Creating a Seamless Customer Experience Across Marketing Channels

Ensuring a seamless experience also requires understanding the behaviour of your customers.

• Consistent messaging and keywords across all content will mean you’re findable regardless of where you are searched for. Developing a brand identity with clear guidelines for messaging and creative helps facilitate brand awareness and recognition.
• Omnichannel marketing demands multi-touch attribution. Yes, this can be resource intensive, but this data is pure gold. The marketing team can use data from multi-touch attribution to optimize campaign spend and messaging.

Creating customer journey maps for each audience segment helps brands create targeted campaigns. Two widely accepted wisdoms from the marketing world are that different demographics interact with your content differently and in different spaces, AND ‘meet your customers where they are’. Hold these in mind when developing your segmentation and personalisation plans.

Different size businesses will have different capabilities for the data analysis that enables this approach. Are you a B2B and B2C company? Spend some time investigating if trade customers tend to find you via one route, and your domestic clients with another. Ideally, you can have a marketing strategy for each audience.

If you don’t, figure out where those audiences intersect. It really can be as simple as that. (Clue: It’s probably Google My Business and Google reviews you want to pay attention to!)

If This Then That

How do you begin to implement an omnichannel marketing approach? Look at the adjacent channel to the one you’re currently focusing on.

Understanding your target audience is crucial for implementing an effective omnichannel marketing approach. By gathering data about their preferences and behavior, you can tailor your strategies to better communicate with your specific customer demographics.

If you’re only doing SEO

Having strong SEO is a fantastic foundation to start running Google Ads, as your relevancy scores will be strong. (We have discussed the importance of this score here.)

If you don’t have the budget for ads, look at seeding your keywords into text-focused social platforms, such as Threads and X. If you’re uploading fresh content regularly (and not just tweaking existing pages), then getting that content out to your email list is an obvious step.

No email list? Get a newsletter sign up box in your web header, stat!

If you’re only running paid ads/ppc

Running PPC gives you vital insight into the keywords that performs best for your brand. Picking up SEO optimisation, and regularly uploading content around those keywords, will bolster your ad performance.

Threading those keywords into your content on socials is another step. And if you’re already doing that, then approaching content creators to do collaborations – ensuring they use your keywords- will be a great next step. Getting other people using your keywords and brand language is a real coup in an omnichannel marketing strategy.

If you’re only running socials

If you’re socials-only, you might have more time than money to throw at this, so we suggest checking out how you can make your social content go further. Different attribution models can provide insights into the performance of social media campaigns. Getting a YouTube channel is a no-brainer for brands with a breadth of videos, especially if there’s an opportunity for educational content.

Getting your content onto your website in some form while focusing on SEO is a natural scoop-up, as is sending out the content by email to your mailing list.