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The omnichannel experience isn’t just a marketing strategy — it represents a fundamental shift of the consumer’s position in the traditional purchasing process. Omnichannel enables the customer or the client to choose how they want to interact with a company or product line without having to compromise the quality of their interaction.
A successful omnichannel retailer is less concerned with a broad, multi-channel marketing campaign and focuses instead on creating a seamless media experience for customers engaging with their brand.The key here lies in an ability to allow your brand to proliferate across every channel.
According toMarketo, one of the leaders in automated marketing software, “Each piece of the consumer’s experience should be consistent and complementary.”
Whether a customer is visiting the store, making a purchase through a mobile app, or liking a photo on Instagram, they must be able to engage your brand in a way that is both seamless and effortless, regardless of the device or channel....
However not many brands and marketers have been successful in deploying omni-channel strategies for a simple reason – we are operating on top of an increasingly broken and fragmented ecosystem that is CHANNEL FOCUSED and not CHANNEL AGNOSTIC. The shift requires fundamental change; I call these the FIRST PRINCIPLES OF AN OMNI-CHANNEL STRATEGY (in no specific order)....
Demand marketing combines content marketing, public relations (PR), and social media to create the perfect outreach vessel, and this infographic dives right in on how this approach can be used to bring your message to the exact place you need it: right in front of your customers.
70 percent of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads. Don’t get lost at sea with your marketing plan – You need all three components in order to keep your ship afloat....
Customers don’t want to be told what they can do. What they can buy, or where and when they have to do so. They want to be able to choose. That’s why choice, to the modern consumer, is so important.
Multichannel marketing is about choice – giving your customers the choice to interact with you in a way that’s convenient for them: at a time of their choice, at a place of their choice, and on a device of their choice.
By using the right platform(s), you can integrate your digital and traditional marketing activities and reach the right customer with exactly the right message at exactly the right time....
Content marketing is all about who sees your content and how often. But as content marketers, we know there’s more to marketing your content than throwing it out into the universe and seeing what sticks.
We have a wide array of platforms, tools and knowledge at our fingertips that allow us to get a little help in rounding out the promotion of our content. But at times, it can seem both overwhelming and overkill to deploy all methods of promotion.
What if you could take advantage of all aspects of promotion without overwhelming your audience? Check out how to maximize your promotion by implementing an integrated approach to your content strategy....
Within the digital marketing industry, terms such as multichannel, omnichannel and cross-channel are often used interchangeably to convey the real-world challenges brands are encountering in their attempts to keep up with customers who move fluidly across today’s increasingly fragmented landscape.
While these three concepts are related to one another, there are important distinctions that set them apart.
Direct Marketing News recently examined this topic in an article entitled “Have Marketers Outgrown Multichannel?” In the story, the following definitions are suggested....
Although some marketers claim to use a single platform to grow their business, these successes are, quite honestly, the exception rather than the rule. For the rest of us, success is achieved by sharing the right messages with the right people across a range of platforms. The best marketing mix is the combination of the most effective tactics and platforms to showcase your products and/or services, to tell your story, and to provide to the right people the information they need in order to make the decision to buy from you....
A Romanian Coca-Cola ad appears to have broken new ground in integration between Twitter and TV by including live tweets during an ad.
...the ad included a subtitle bar that let the brand run tweets that consumers sent in using the hashtag #LetsEatTogether. Ad agency MRM Worldwide in Romania edited the tweets, five to seven of which made it into each ad placement.
The campaign addressed the fact that 60% of people don't eat meals together, but instead eat them solo while sitting in front of the TV. The tweets were often invitations to specific people to have a meal together (with a Coke, of course.) During the spring campaign, Coke's Twitter followers in that country increased by 15% as hundreds of tweets aired on TV. The effort also made the evening news....
With so many channels available for brand messaging, how do we successfully go about creating a multichannel marketing campaign? Here are five easy steps.
Multichannel marketing is becoming increasingly important to marketers. Being that we are bombarded by nearly 3,000 marketing messages a day, there’s no way to know which platform will get us to bite. The best bet for marketers is to use many mediums to spread their message.
So, what is multichannel marketing?Essentially it’s sending your brand message through a variety of channels. It’s also known as multitouch marketing. Let’s say you want to launch a new product; your new Fresh Fig candle. You’d want to develop a plan for getting more sales through many channels....
Today's consumers are using many channels to consume information. Are retailers thinking about an omnichannel strategy? If not, they should!
It’s well established that today’s consumers use multiple channels – mobile, Web, social media, in-store – when engaging with retailers. On any given day, a shopper might research a clothing item online, visit the brand’s Facebook page and then purchase it in a store where she can try it on; the next, she might see something in a store on her lunch hour, price-check it on her smartphone and purchase it online at home, after checking in with the retailer’s social media pages.
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, three-quarters of shoppers use their smartphones while in-store to make a purchase decision, and according to Vantiv VNTV 0%, Inc., half have research and purchased an item online and then picked it up in the store. But how aware are consumers of all this channel-switching? Do they think, “Wow, I’ve really used a lot of channels today!” Or even, “Hmmmmm – which channels should I use to engage with my favorite retailer?”
I’m thinking probably not. They’re just doing what consumers do, flitting from channel to channel like a butterfly, as fickle as can be, calling to mind the flighty “followers of fashion” described in The Kinks’ 1966 single. What is an Omnichannel Strategy? With consumers freely using whichever channel suits them at the moment, retailers must attract, engage with and gain the loyalty of these followers of fashion, and they can do this by creating a consistent experience among all channels — the so-called omnichannel experience.
An omnichannel strategy begins with generating awareness on digital channels, because while brand awareness in the past was all about signage and window dressing on High Street, it’s perhaps more important today to stand out on digital channels. Indeed, in emerging markets, mobile devices are the first channel through which consumers may experience your brand....
How are you integrating social media at your workplace? If you are not spending time integrating, you may be headed in the wrong direction....After working with social media platforms, I have really found the key to success is “Integration”.
Integration of social media into other forms of marketing media and business processes is the key to success. At some point, I think the term social media will go away and people will once again refer more to the internet as a whole rather than social media.Here are some great ways to integrate social media into your current marketing media and your business processes...
Think about it this way: It used to be you’d have a crisis communication plan written and it would stay in a drawer until your PR team pulled it out the following year, dusted it off, and gave it a good rewrite.
I’m sure you see or hear this a lot: Traditional PR is dead! Media relations is dead! Websites are dead! Marketing is dead! Advertising is dead! Newspapers are dead!
Granted, sometimes those things are written to motivate people to click on a link, but all of the customary ways of communication are far from dead. Instead, we find it’s necessary to integrate the things that are “dead” with digital public relations....
...Inevitable is the classic "quality versus quantity" debate. In rebuttal to the pushback that Vaynerchuk's comments received, he astutely asks, "why not both?" Why can't brands create a lot of high quality content? Sure, some of this content will work and some will miss the mark. Not all attempts will result in a viral homerun, but we live in a real-time world, where individuals are increasingly looking for more context from their content.
Content providers are going to have to play a very different game. A personal case study comes to mind. On May 21st, I published my second business book, CTRL ALT Delete. Along with a digital experience to compliment the launch of the book, my digital marketing agency, Twist Image, took the interesting stats and data from this experience and created a SlideShare. Instead of simply tweeting and sharing the link throughout my online social spaces, I shared some of the unique stats (akin to Vaynerchuk's tripling down). I expected this deluge of content to upset my online community, provoking negative comments and pushback.
Much to my surprise, the SlideShare quickly surpassed 100,000 views, and the number of new followers and friends coupled with the retweets and shares sent my overall analytics through the roof. Creating what Monty refers to as "digital clutter" seems to have been the most effective strategy to get the word out. How did this happen? People aren't "on the ready" just because I decided to hit a publish button. The frequency of posting matched with the quality created greater attention and focus on the message. It's a tough lesson for new media thinkers to hear: traditional tactics like frequency and repetition work....
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The average American family uses about 150 products, according to marketing consultant Jack Trout. When you consider that supermarkets today carry close to 47,000 items, it makes you wonder where that leaves the other products vying for space in American kitchens.
Consumers are notoriously tough to convert, and getting their attention is a challenge. For CPG brands, this all adds up to an incredibly tough environment for new product launches.In fact, launching a CPG product is among the most difficult business endeavors facing brands today. It requires a rigorous cross-channel strategy to differentiate the product and encourage consumers to give it a try. In other words, successfully bringing a new product to market demands a relevant brand marketing conversation.
Making sure that conversation goes as planned requires expertise and an understanding of the latest and greatest tools and strategies. Here are five tips for successful product launches from the experts at Product of the Year....
Did you know: by the year 2020, more than 85 percent of all buyer-seller interaction will occur online?
And not just online, but through video and social media?
That means social media – and online interaction – isn’t going away anytime soon.It also makes finding your perfect social media mix more important than ever.In our latest #InfluencerChat, Ann Tran, Diana Adams and I tackled this topic....
Most people view content marketing as revolving around blogs posts, videos, and infographics – in short, all the usual suspects in terms of marketing content. They rarely if ever consider all of the other types of content that companies create — technical manuals, product data sheets, and customer service FAQs to cite a few examples — and how all of it could align with and support their efforts.
Similarly, most marketing teams never engage their peers in other departments about their content marketing activities unless it’s to ask them to serve as subject matter experts for a particular project. Regardless of whether that’s due to a lack of time or interest, they also don’t go out of their way to understand what content other departments are creating, let alone try to corral those efforts or align them. As a result, it’s easy for silos to form and for other departments to create content without regard for corporate standards. And who can blame them? They have their own goals to meet and adhering to the marketing team’s guidelines is rarely one of them.
This lack of coordination can lead to two big missed opportunities...
Content marketing, SEO, and social media should work together synergistically. Each should be its own instrument, working together to create a perfect harmony.
But you're wondering just how to integrate the three to produce great business results, right? You're curious about how each compliments the other. Well, I wrote this article to show you the steps you need to be taking right away.
Much has been written about the distractibility of the modern American. In the past decade, diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorders have skyrocketed, the listicle conquered the internet, and there was even a report that goldfish now have longer attention spans than the average American.
Now it appears that watching television, itself a diversion, requires more focus than we can muster.
Forbes reports that a new study from the consulting group TNS found that 56% of Americans engage in another digital activity (playing with their phones, tablets, or laptops) while they are watching TV. That puts the U.S. ahead of the global average, which is 48%, but well behind Japan, where 79% of TV viewers are using a different device while they do it...,
Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ can be high efficiency platforms that serve as a hub for all your social media engagement activities.
...That said, social media should not be viewed as a standalone channel that is separate from other marketing initiatives. Instead, view it as a “multiplier” that integrates with and enhances existing marketing communication strategies.
In other words, rather than create social media campaigns, make all of your marketing campaigns social.Here are eight ways to integrate social media with other forms of marketing....
There are several components to an integrated marketing communications (IMC) plan, but you don't need to focus on every one. Choose the best for you!
Every time I have an opportunity to explain the concept of integrated marketing, I can see the sands quickly running through my listener’s hourglass attention span as I struggle to rattle off all the channels and activities. Trying to name and dissect the various components during a brief conversation is like getting called on to recite the human skeletal system two minutes before the bell rings. Let’s see…there’s the uh…
Recalling all the pieces into a written plan is no less daunting. A thorough integrated marketing communications (IMC) plan is one that coordinates messages and activities across various channels to achieve a common goal. Simply put, this means that IMC leaves nothing out. Good ol’ paper-based direct mail is in there with digital marketing. High-dollar advertising can ride alongside grassroots, get-out-in-the-community public relations.
Does this mean that your plan needs to include every channel? Not at all. While IMC recognizes the synergistic value of a coordinated set of marketing activities, this doesn’t mean that you have to do everything. Just make sure that everything you do aligns with an overall big picture strategy, is appropriate for the audience(s) you want to reach, and can be accomplished with your available resources....
Jason Corrigan shares two ways that you can maximize your brand’s exposure and conversion opportunities by developing a coherent system where your offline marketing channels positively influence and support your digital campaign.
Here’s another story about how PR and marketing should be best friends: more brands are spending money to bring attention to unpaid media mentions.
Edelman’s Steve Rubel tells Digiday that more and more marketers are working to “making sure the press coverage you’ve already earned works harder” by pairing with networks like Twitter or “you might also like” content recommendation services like Outbrain to push more traffic toward those media mentions earned by sheer luck, quality products or…hard-working, press-savvy PR teams. (You knew we’d get there.)
The advantage to this approach, of course, is that earned media will always be more valuable than paid. But the ROI is a more difficult to measure for retailers, who have trouble drawing a line between clicks on third-party posts and subsequent sales....
...Data included in our new UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2013 shows that more than half of agencies (52%) now offer a ‘full range of digital marketing services’, and increase from 45% in 2012 and 42% in 2011.In comparison just 12% of agencies specialise in SEO while 7% focused exclusively on paid search. A further 10% of agencies carry out both SEO and paid search...-
Here’s a specific example of how we are leveraging our attendance at a conference to create value and interest in our current and potential clients.
Our company focuses upon Cybersecurity, and there is a conference called BlackHat that has become a mecca for hackers, hackivists, and those who are involved in the security industry. Many of our customers are under budget constraints and can’t attend conferences,
so while going to training and seminars at the conference this year our security engineers will be leveraging social media to make sure that our customers and followers can virtually gain access to the latest trends and exploits....
PR packs power in the nutritional wholesomeness that is today's marketing smoothie. Today's hybrid PR is blended with the whole -- integrated marketing.Back in the day, public relations, advertising and marketing were firmly divided in their respective silos and disciplines. We in public relations were often referred to for real in jest as the “bastard step children” of marketing.
Often we’d sit in an integrated meeting of the disciplines and keep our traps shut until we tossed out a bit of value-added strategy into the mix while our peers across the aisle glared nicely.Today, the blended nature of marketing has public relations professionals up in arms. Some are balking at the integration of PR so cohesively into marketing. In short, these people are having an identity crisis....
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Color scheme? This is tough to consume unless you're really interested on the topic.