How and why omnichannel marketing works

Whether it’s businesses or individual buyers, today’s consumers visit various channels on diverse devices before making a purchase. That’s why meeting them at different places along their journey is crucial.

What does omnichannel marketing mean?

Omnichannel marketing makes it easy for people to recognize your brand or offer. Everything is consistent for a consumer, from using an app to shopping in-store. All marketing channels and experiences are cohesive, easy, and obvious.

It ensures a smooth brand experience (BX )and boosts your chances of conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. Prospects and customers are constantly moving between online and offline channels, and omnichannel helps your brand transition with them.

Omnichannel vs multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing came first and simply uses various channels independently to promote your brand or offer.

Martech and consumer behavioral developments have contributed to the evolution of omnichannel marketing. Today, marketers can make campaigns, promotions, and experiences cohesive across every online and offline channel, store visit, support center, or event.

So, how can omnichannel marketers deliver a seamless customer-centric experience at every touchpoint? The power is in the data and integrations that martech tools offer.

Integrated channels and customer data help omnichannel marketers determine prospects’ values, interests, and activities. Behavioral data is used to trigger workflows and events or retarget web visitors across digital. Marketers can also plan campaigns that are more likely to resonate, plan and collaborate more efficiently, and report more effectively.

B2B marketers recognize that brands engage with multiple buyers, suppliers and service providers through diverse channels– such as online platforms, social media, email, phone calls, in-person meetings, and more. Omnichannel marketing creates a harmonized journey across channels that’s easily communicated, comprehended, and recalled between buying groups.

Sounds good, but which techniques win at B2B omnichannel marketing?

Personalization

Omnichannel marketing uses data and analytics to personalize interactions with B2B clients. By understanding individual customer preferences, businesses can tailor their marketing messages and offerings to meet the specific needs of each client better. 

Turtl Analytics gives a deep insight into customer behaviors and that allows our clients to personalize current and future marketing content and increase engagement across all platforms.

Consistency

Consistency comes in many forms. Whether it’s your tone and voice, imagery, or consistent messaging across campaigns – aligning across channels is essential for omnichannel marketing. This consistency creates a coherent message and keeps your brand recognizable –  making the customer journey through your funnel smooth, easy, and confusion-free.

Customer journey mapping and lead scoring

Analyzing your customer’s funnel journey is crucial in ensuring that the various touchpoints, both offline and online, have clear messaging attached. Data helps marketers carefully nurture leads and plan lead-scoring models to suit their best-fit customers. Content engagement data shows readiness to buy and optimizes interactions for teams. Marketing knows how to organize and segment leads and which content to send. Sales know who to reach out to and what to say. Acting on engagement data is entirely customer-centric. It reduces friction in your pipeline while making sure customers feel valued and understood.

Cross-channel coordination and team alignment

A B2B customer may start their journey by researching a product online, initiating contact through social media, and finalizing the transaction via a face-to-face meeting. An omnichannel strategy ensures that the transition between these stages is united. The same goes for aligning efforts between channel partners and marketing and sales teams: Everyone should be saying the same thing and moving towards predefined goals.

Plan your omnichannel marketing strategy

We’ve developed a guide to help you plan out an effective omnichannel strategy which you can find at the end of this blog, but before then, ensure that you follow these steps to get the most from your campaign.

Understand your audience

Conduct thorough research to understand your B2B audience’s preferences, behaviors, and pain points. Identify key decision-makers and influencers within target organizations. Behavioral economics can tell marketers a lot about how their customers act and what makes them turn from leads into customers. We have a handy guide for B2B marketers about using behavioral psychology to reach decision-makers in B2B.

Click to read Drive decision-making in B2B marketing with behavioral psychology

Create buyer personas

Develop detailed buyer personas based on the research, including information such as job roles, challenges, and preferred channels. This will help get your product into the right hands.

Integrate data systems

Ensure that your customer relationship management (CRM) system is integrated with the right content marketing tools. Integrations enable a seamless flow of data across different channels to help with a fuller understanding of audience behavior, marketing impact, and our next point: consistency.

Consistent branding

Establish and maintain consistent credible branding, messaging, and visual elements across all channels. Consistency helps build brand recognition and trust, reducing friction a lead may have in deciding to buy from you.

Content marketing

Develop a B2B content marketing strategy that spans various formats (blog posts, whitepapers, videos) and channels (website, social media, email).

Want to tailor content to address specific stages of the buyer’s journey? Use a content creation platform that surfaces content intent data and is proven to deepen engagement levels. Avoid old-fashioned, dataless formats like PDFs.

Social media engagement

Identify which channels your audience is most active and use social media to boost SEO and awareness. Share relevant content, participate in industry conversations, and engage with your audience.

Most B2B marketers find LinkedIn to be the best social channel for their engagement, but keep track of your analytics – perhaps you perform better on another platform.

Email marketing

Try targeted and personalized email newsletters. Use marketing automation to send timely and relevant messages based on user behavior. If you;d like to learn more, see our comprehensive guide to email marketing with advice from our in-house expert Paul Fellows.

Personalization across channels

Making personalized content based on past interactions is proven to boost engagement. Ensure a consistent and personalized experience across all touchpoints.

Integrate customer support

Build a customer support channel (like ours!) and integrate it with other communication channels. Provide seamless customer support through chat, email, phone – anywhere that makes sense.

Analytics and measurement

Implement robust analytics to track the performance of each channel. Use lead gen performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of an omnichannel lead gen campaign.

Data feedback loops

Collect first-party data with a customer feedback strategy across channels. Use feedback to continuously refine and improve your omnichannel approach. How easy was it for people to recognize your offer? Did they enjoy your event?

By carefully planning omnichannel marketing, a B2B company can create a cohesive and effective omnichannel strategy that enhances customer engagement, builds brand loyalty, and drives business growth.

Turtl takeaway

Our guide covers the six key channels to capture, generate, and utilize demand. Each channel has a vital role in your funnel – often at different stages – which aligns your omnichannel marketing strategy across your sales pipeline. Instead of just trying to increase ROI on each platform independently, weaving channels together creates a whole environment that yields high returns across the board.

From this guide, you’ll get a  greater understanding of:

• Organic search and SEO
• Paid social
• Email marketing
• Webinars
• Paid search
• Your website

Each of these sections includes best practices as well as tips and tricks on how to make the absolute most out of each channel and how they can work in coherency. We also discuss the pitfalls of each channel – and how to avoid them in helpful pros and cons lists.

We’ve included a list of resources for each channel too, so if you want to dive even deeper into the world of omnichannel marketing be sure to check them out.

Click to read 6 key marketing channels to generate and capture demand