Omnipresent marketing teams are thriving in this new age of ecommerce advertising. Today’s online consumer wants to build a connection with the brands they shop from. People are turning away from big name companies in favor of smaller focused brands providing fluid experiences for their customers.
This is where omni marketing and multichannel marketing differ. While both strategies implore the use of multiple sales channels to engage audiences, they differ in execution. A multichannel strategy is the use of multiple channels that work independently of each other. Omni Marketing strategies are cohesive and require each channel to build and funnel off one another. This creates an experience that feels responsive to customer needs and bolsters engagement.
But building a fully functioning omnipresent brand isn’t something you can achieve overnight. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a path to success for smaller and limited teams. All you have to do is establish a sustainable road to scale. And that’s what today’s post is here to help you achieve.
Before you start your omnipresent strategy it’s important to build your foundation to growth. To do that you have to take stock of the sales channels you already have used. Even if you don’t see how they might build off each other you still need to find a way to maximize your owned touchpoints.
If your team is already managing social accounts then start there. Begin aligning that content with your email campaigns, website promotions, or other in use channels. You don’t want to start developing new channels if you don’t already have a cohesive strategy for your in use channels.
Whether you have specialists assigned to different channels or a jack of all trades, it’s important to have a clear align content plan in place. Content calendars have been a staple of digital marketing for decades and for good reason. When preparing for your omnipresent strategy it’s important to have a cohesive calendar in place.
Your Facebook advertising needs to be prepared to support content around your scheduled gated content if that’s your email focus for the month. Say a customer sees your Facebook post on that subject matter, when they become interested enough to subscribe to your mailing list you can capitalize on that interest by already having your email content set up to expand on that original social content. Your content calendar is an easy organizational tool to keep your entire team focused and aligned.
Once your content is aligned throughout the entirety of your brand, it’s time to focus on how to create a fluid experience. This means that as your audience browses your brand’s content, they’ll start to move further down your funnel due to a constantly growing awareness of your content and value.
To achieve this you need to map out the different pathways your audience can take to engage with your brand. If a potential customer is browsing your social page, what might have brought them there? A request to follow in a blog? A facebook ad? Imagine those are the two pathways. Now ask yourself what might happen if your blog’s content is completely irrelevant to the content your ad focused on. If your social page is only aligned with the content of your blog, and not the ad, then that’s a whole audience of clicks you’ll fail to engage because your content doesn’t align with their initial interest. That’s not to say the content has to be 1:1. You can have a blog on the importance of flossing while your ad focuses on toothpaste, as long as your social content stays focused on dental health. Adjacent does not equal irrelevance.
Once you have these connecting pathways structured you can see how the web of content needs to connect to provide a responsive experience.
Now you should be ready to focus on the customer. Content aligned, pathways highlighted, it’s time to understand your audience and their needs.
Audience segmentation is key to an omnipresent marketing set up. It allows you to understand how to build content around the desires and needs of your viewers to create a brand to customer relationship that feels personalized and can sustain value.
Your touchpoint roadmap is huge here. Location within your marketing funnel is a huge indicator of your audience segments and the varying touchpoints they’ve interacted with will determine that location. Consider a customer on your mailing list. They’ve probably already chosen to subscribe or provided contact information in some form. If you only collect emails through contact forms then using your email marketing to push contact forms will cause audiences to become numb to your content.
Develop content so that as customers journey further down your marketing funnel they continue to build interest and momentum. Understand where top of the funnel content needs to reside and where you can begin pushing conversion focused influencers.
You don’t need to be increasing revenue at a record setting pace to have a fine-tuned omnipresent strategy. Once the pieces begin to fit together and your brand is cohesively speaking to your audience from every level of your online presence, then you’ve achieved an omnipresent strategy–or at least the foundation for one.
This is a great foundation to begin experimenting with your content and more so your audience. Find the pieces they’re resonating with, try to understand why certain elements of your strategy aren’t performing well and expand from there. Being omnipresent doesn’t mean a full fledged arsenal of social channels and sales touchpoints. You can be precise about what touchpoints and channels you’re ready to expand to. Spreading yourself too thin will only serve to deflate momentum.
If your Facebook audience is performing well, consider expanding on Twitter. If your visual content is doing great, jump into Instagram. You don’t need to green light a podcast because your newsletter is doing well but if customers are enjoying sections featuring guests or other thought leaders then maybe it’s a viable strategy. The point is to back your decisions with data. You can’t afford to waste investment trying to mimic what works for others if your data doesn’t back it.
An omnipresent marketing strategy involves a lot of moving parts and can slow down current momentum to take a moment to build one out. But like I said, all you need is the right foundation and trusting an expert to get you going in the right direction can be a huge boost.
My team and I have been building cohesive strategies for marketing teams of all sizes and helping them maximize their potential.. We can work out all the details and get you started on the right track or tackle all your omnipresent goals ourselves. It’s up to you, simply click here and book some time with my team so we can evaluate the best path forward for you.