5 Steps to Establishing a Compelling Omnichannel Presence

By leveraging omnichannel marketing, organisations can cultivate relationships and provide personalised content, which is essential for generating quality demand.

Effective omnichannel marketing is built on tailoring messaging and creative assets to suit the unique strengths and limitations of each channel. By matching content to each platform, target audience, and the buying journey stage of prospects, businesses can deliver a more relevant and seamless brand experience, driving interactivity and engagement.

One of the key advantages of an omnichannel strategy is its reach and greater potential to nurture prospects. Leveraging an omnichannel presence empowers businesses to engage with prospects throughout the buyer's journey.

This increases the likelihood of generating and capturing demand, supporting effective lead nurturing, and encouraging buyers to progress through the sales funnel.

In short, providing a seamless and interconnected experience across the channels that prospective buyers frequent, builds trust and loyalty, ultimately increasing conversion rates and fostering long-term client relationships to yield higher CLTV.

Below is an example of a simplified buyer journey taking place over multiple channels. Note that typical buyer journeys usually span longer periods of time and even more channels.

Whilst omnichannel and multichannel marketing may have similarities, their implementation and focus are vastly disparate.

The table below highlights the key differences between these two approaches:

When implemented successfully, omnichannel marketing can assist an organisation in achieving multiple goals across different strategies:

Increased client satisfaction & less churn

The B2B landscape has become more competitive than ever. According to our 2022 INFUSE Insights research, 48% of vendors do not meet buyers' expectations.

Prospects are also becoming more independent, and have higher expectations on brands to provide an accurate and strong experience that meets their individual needs. In fact, according to a 2023 report by Gartner, 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience.

In a State of Omnichannel Shopping Statistics and Trends Report by InvesP, companies with omnichannel client engagement strategies retain on average 89% of their clients, compared to a client retention rate of 33% for companies with weak omnichannel client engagement.

Higher revenue generation

Even as early as 2017, when omnichannel marketing was not as widely adopted, its potential to enhance revenue generation and drive increased prospect spending was already clear. In fact, Aberdeen research showed that companies with strong omnichannel client engagement had seen a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue, compared to 3.4% for weak omnichannel companies.

This demonstrates the power of providing prospects and clients with a seamless, enhanced, and personalised experience across the channels they prefer.

Improved client lifetime value (CLTV)

Prospects are also likely to spend more with a personalised omnichannel experience— 35% of B2B buyers are willing to spend $500,000 or more in a single transaction in online channels (up from 27% in February 2021) (Mckinsey, 2021).

In addition, clients who engage with an omnichannel experience with three or more channels spend 13% more than those who experienced just one channel (Omnisend, 2019).

Omnichannel experiences are therefore central to maximising client value and supporting opportunities for upselling and renewals.

Optimised budgets

This approach, whilst necessitating a greater initial investment, allows businesses to improve the accuracy and return on investment (ROI) of their demand generation strategies, to generate higher engagement, conversions, and sales.

Creates a seamless experience

Omnichannel marketing enables organisations to create seamless experiences for prospects by catering to their individual preferences across multiple channels. This approach is in line with the current demands of B2B buyers, an effective strategy as 71% of buyers report making purchase decisions based on the quality of their experiences (Salesforce, 2020).

Furthermore, the data obtained from various channels helps organisations continually refine and adapt their strategies for better optimisation.

Given the diversity of the capabilities of each marketing channel, it is essential to implement a comprehensive content marketing strategy to support campaigns

1. Inconsistent messaging

One of the most prevalent mistakes in omnichannel marketing is a lack of consistent messaging across channels. When the brand message, tone, and style vary significantly across platforms, it can cause a disjointed experience for prospects and dilute brand identity. Adapting tone for channels is important (particularly social media networks), but it is still essential to maintain an overall cohesive brand voice.

2. Poor integration between channels

As the aim of omnichannel strategies is to deliver a seamless experience across various touchpoints, if channels are not properly integrated, prospects may face difficulties transitioning between them, leading to a fragmented experience.

3. Neglecting the importance of data-driven decision-making

Ignoring data analytics is a significant mistake in omnichannel marketing. To optimise campaigns and understand prospect behaviour, it is crucial to collect and analyse data from all channels.

4. Lack of mobile optimisation

With the growing reliance on smartphones for buying research and decision making, failing to optimise marketing channels for mobile devices can greatly affect the performance of an omnichannel strategy.

Brand websites, emails, or other marketing assets must be mobile-friendly to not risk losing prospects who prefer using mobile devices. This should also include ensuring that all content and designs are responsive and optimised for the mobile experience.

To establish a powerful and cohesive omnichannel presence across multiple platforms, it is crucial to carefully identify and understand your target audience, ideal client profile (ICP), and buyer personas. In the case of account based marketing, this process should be at a much more granular level to include the individual buying committee members at target accounts.

Gaining a deep understanding of target audiences allows organisations to identify their preferences, needs, pain points, and preferred channels, which provides the opportunity to tailor marketing messages and content to resonate with them effectively on the mix of channels that they frequent.

To ensure the relevancy of a brand channel mix, begin by auditing the channels currently being utilised. For most B2B businesses, this typically encompasses a website, email, and a few social media platforms as a foundation.

Before incorporating additional channels into the strategy, it is important to evaluate the current channels against targeting data from the previous step to ascertain whether the channels and existing messaging effectively align with the target audience. Performance metrics should also be taken into consideration to identify current opportunities to optimise or update existing strategies.

Also evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each channel based on factors such as:

Consider whether the channel allows for:

To ensure successful integration, consider the following steps:

1. Implement a central client data platform (CDP):

Invest in a CDP or a similar system to collect and consolidate client data from various channels. This platform should capture client interactions, preferences, purchase history, and other relevant information to create a unified client profile.

2. Enable cross-channel communication:

Ensure that your channels can communicate with each other seamlessly. For example, if a client initiates a conversation on social media, the conversation history should be accessible when they switch to live chat or email. Implement integrations and APIs to enable data sharing and synchronisation across channels.

3. Personalise messaging:

Leverage the client data collected in your CDP to personalise messages for individual clients. Tailor the content, timing, and channel to match their preferences and behaviours. Use automation tools and AI-powered algorithms to deliver personalised messages at scale whilst avoiding bloated workloads.

4. Provide consistent branding:

Maintain a consistent brand experience across all channels. Use consistent messaging, visuals, and tone of voice to reinforce your brand identity. This is essential for ensuring that the client experience (CX) is seamless, regardless of the channel they choose to engage with. A style guide will be invaluable for onboarding and guiding teams on how to create communication or content that contributes to brand identity consistently.

5. Implement a unified inbox:

Use a unified inbox or client service platform that aggregates messages from various channels into a single interface. This allows your client support team to view and respond to inquiries from across your channel mix, ensuring timely and consistent responses. Empowering teams with this view, as well as up-to-date client information will allow them to deliver a more seamless experience that does not rely on clients supplying the same information to multiple teams. It also helps unify intel on a single platform, which enables your team to glean more relevant insights.

To have a truly compelling omnichannel presence, brands need to optimise the experience to make it as unique and seamless as possible.

Leverage target audience data, such as browsing behaviour, purchase history, and engagement patterns, to deliver relevant and personalised messages fuelled with content tailored to each prospect’s needs and preferences.

Personalisation is effective across all demand strategies, however, it is crucial to ensure a seamless omnichannel experience. 27% of buyers find inconsistent messaging and irrelevant content on different channels frustrating (MoEngage, 2021). Investing in personalisation is therefore a crucial strategy for yielding client satisfaction.

However, implementing personalised experiences across your channels requires the correct tech stack and software to gather as much detail as possible on prospects. Comprehensive data combined with effective automation allows organisations to deliver personalised experiences that identify and address pain points in the formats and channels that prospects prefer.

Effective client journey mapping also enables the identification of pain points, opportunities, and areas of brand interaction that require improvement.

By leveraging these insights, organisations can optimise the prospect experience at each stage, recognising key moments where value, support, and information can be provided. Strategies built from client mapping should also allow for flexibility given the range of channel options prospects have for starting their buyer’s journey.

Tools can be leveraged to assist in enhancing the efficiency and personalisation of a brand’s omnichannel marketing efforts. Triggers based on prospect behaviour can be configured to deliver automatically relevant content at the right time. For example, sending follow-up emails with related resources after a prospective client downloads a whitepaper, or providing personalised product recommendations based on specific activity-based triggers.

A central element of maintaining an effective omnichannel presence is assessing the performance of your strategies.

Start by defining quantitative and qualitative goals that indicate whether strategies are worth the investment. These goals should be tied to the key metrics relevant to each channel you are utilising. This approach should also align with the brand’s overall business objectives, such as increasing sales, prospect or client engagement, or brand awareness.

Tracking these goals will inform your optimisation efforts and refinement of your channel mix in the case of low performance.

Use appropriate analytics tools to track and measure data from various channels. Google Analytics is a popular choice for monitoring website traffic, whilst social media platforms provide their own analytics dashboards.

Implement cross-channel attribution by establishing a method for assigning credit/attribution to different channels that contributed to a conversion or sale such as unique tracking codes or UTM parameters. Cross-channel attribution models aid brands in understanding the impact of each channel on the buyer’s journey. Organisations can use first-touch, last-touch, or multi-touch attribution models based on their specific requirements.

Analyse channel performance metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, engagement rates, and revenue generated to optimise resource allocation and prioritise high-performing channels.

Other factors to consider during an evaluation of each channel include ease of navigation (UX in general), personalised messaging, and responsive client service. Optimisation should also include content reviews per channel to identify what resonates best with target audiences.

Performing A/B tests on different channels, messages, creative elements, and offers will aid this initiative.

The importance of data analytics in driving key elements of omnichannel marketing such as personalisation and attribution is clear to see. Limited access to data and improper marketing attribution are the top two significant challenges in omnichannel marketing (AMA, 2020).

Some key data analytics tools and techniques for measuring and analysing omnichannel marketing performance include:

Conversational marketing complements an omnichannel marketing strategy by incorporating real-time interactions. This allows businesses to create a more personable experience across multiple touchpoints. In fact, 71% of clients reported an expectation for companies to communicate with a conversational marketing bot in real-time (Salesforce, 2019).

Some ways to utilise conversational marketing include:

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, client service organisations that embed AI in their prospect engagement centre platforms will increase operational efficiencies by 25%, revolutionising prospect and client care in the process.

Artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) offer significant potential for enhancing personalisation, client insights, and automation across various channels.

One area where AI excels is in providing recommendations and content suggestions based on user preferences, leading to improved prospect engagement and conversions. NLP can also play a crucial role in extracting valuable insights from interactions, thereby enhancing support.

Specific AI-powered tools and their applications relevant to omnichannel marketing include: