As consumers, we now are familiar with buying and searching for products through a variety of different platforms. Whether it’s using YouTube or Google to research a brand before you buy, or interacting with an ad on social media, we are all accustomed to engaging with content from brands.
The best of these brands understand that several platforms can be appropriate to reach their intended audience and place helpful, informational, or entertaining content to draw in new customers, or re-engage existing ones. They use multiple platforms, all at once, to produce one consistent and engaging message: a message that is designed and personalized to resonate with their audience.
So, how do these brands accomplish this, and how can your business benefit from implementing a similar strategy? Or even better, how can your business get started in building a cohesive online experience?
The good news is, with the right partner, this strategy isn’t just reserved for large corporate companies. It can also be effectively used in small-medium sized businesses as well. To get started, here is a guide on everything your brand must accomplish to achieve a complete online experience for your customers:
- Omnichannel Marketing
- Elements of Online Experience
- Tying it All Together
Omnichannel Marketing
The strategy in question is called an omnichannel strategy, and it aims to use multiple platforms to create a holistic experience for digital consumers. It does this by employing consistent branding across several touchpoints, along with mass personalization to tailor content for each stage of the potential buyer’s journey. The key difference between an omnichannel strategy and a multichannel strategy is that an omnichannel strategy relies on establishing synergy between many channels. By doing so, you can effortlessly track and deliver a seamless experience for potential or existing customers.
Elements of a Online Experience
To start crafting the details of this strategy, you first need to identify which platforms your business needs to be active and engaging on. While this seems like a simple step, it is undoubtedly the most important one. Choose the platforms where you have seen past engagement, have a strong following, or know that your customers interact with.
Usually, for B2B companies, having LinkedIn, Instagram, a Search Engine Marketing presence, and a website tend to be the most popular options, whereas B2C companies could interact with potential customers on any of the top platforms available.
Implement surveys, or internal campaigns to assess how your customers research for your product/ service category and learn how they make decisions about brands on those platforms. Understanding how customers in your segment interact/ make decisions about your brand and your products will be massively valuable in crafting your strategy later on. Nonetheless, in order to create a complete online experience, you most likely need to have a functional and engaging website, so that when customers interact with your content across other platforms, they can take a specific action.
Finally, it is worthwhile to take the time to understand the individual strengths of each of the channels you’ve selected, so you can tailor your individual approaches to fit with their unique capabilities. For example, Google Ads excels in using its search engine to place ads where people are actively searching for resources or your brand. Whereas Facebook and Instagram excel at delivering high quality, visual content directly into each customer’s feed. Focus your efforts on those strengths, and you can expect to receive positive results.
Tying it All Together
Once you have selected all the platforms and channels, and you have a good idea of how you can communicate your strengths to your potential customers, it's time to focus on building that synergy across the platforms. At the most basic level, use similar headlines, descriptions, graphics, and identify key phrases to use across all the platforms/placements: building credibility and trust. Next, after deciding the specifics of the messaging, decide how it fits into the larger “journey” your customer will go through.
This involves answering key questions such as “How should my content appear to someone who hasn’t interacted with my brand?” and “How should I tailor my content to people who are advocates of my brand already?". At each stage of this “journey” your content/ efforts need to appropriately reflect and be personalized to where the customer is in your marketing funnel.
Finally, once you have decided the right mix of content, the appropriate channels, and how the customer journey works, you need to set up tracking on your website and tie it in with all the different platforms you plan to promote on. This data will be essential in making key decisions on any content or changes in the strategy as a whole! It will also be informative in optimizing any future paid campaigns or initiatives so you can directly compare results.
If you would like more information about omnichannel marketing, or if you want to learn about JNT’s offerings, don’t hesitate to reach out!
