12 Ingredients For Building A Successful Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
When it comes to customer happiness, it often greatly depends on the entire customer experience, from finding a brand online, browsing their social media, shopping in their store and interacting with customer service. Savvy marketers know it’s vital to reach customers at every point in this journey, ensuring the experience they have is consistent and positive.
But creating a successful omnichannel marketing strategy to address this involves many moving parts. To be sure you end up with an impactful end result, you’ll first want to make sure you have all the key ingredients or elements necessary—consider the following 12 recommendations from the experts of Forbes Communications Council.
1. A Deep Understanding Of Your Audience’s Commonalities
A successful omnichannel marketing strategy requires deeply understanding your audience’s measurable commonalities across channels. This insight enables precise targeting and ensures campaigns resonate with shared interests. By uniting a broad audience around these overlaps, marketers can maximize ROI, boost engagement and drive conversions through tailored, consistent and impactful messaging. – Ryan Becnel, Energea
2. Consistent Messaging
One key ingredient for a successful omnichannel marketing strategy is consistent messaging across all channels. This consistency ensures that customers have a seamless experience and reinforces the brand’s identity and message, whether they engage through social media, email, in-store or online. This ultimately increases engagement, loyalty and conversions. – Maria Alonso, Fortune 206
3. A Plan For How To Connect To The Corporate Strategy
Marketing leaders should be able to show their teams and fellow execs how their plan ladders up into the larger corporate strategy. To do so, I’d ask myself how I’d present my approach to the board to demonstrate how my team had taken market data, customer insights, opportunity costs, plus short- and long-term goals into account. Being unable to do so makes for uncomfortable chats with the CFO in Q3. – Rebecca Takada, Outfoxr
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4. A Recognizable, Authentic Brand Voice
Maintaining a consistent, authentic brand voice across all channels is essential for successful omnichannel marketing. Whether a customer is reading your email newsletter, scrolling through your social media or reading a blog post, your brand voice should be recognizable—just adapted slightly for different contexts. It’s your company’s personality! – Bradley Keenan, DSMN8
5. A Fully Integrated Marketing Tech Stack
Once the paths to purchase for the target user are identified, it’s crucial to design a fully integrated marketing technology stack that covers all touchpoints to guide customers from prospect to purchase. Appointing a dedicated team member to oversee this, in collaboration with cross-functional partners like IT, legal, customer service and sales, is essential to ensure effectiveness. – Mark Rainey, inQUEST Consulting
6. A Seamless Customer Journey
A seamless customer journey is crucial for omnichannel success. By creating a unified experience across channels—online, in-store or on social media—brands reduce friction and make it easy for customers to engage. This smooth journey fosters deeper interaction, increases satisfaction, builds trust and drives conversions and loyalty. – Annie Austin, Oregon’s Mt. Hood Territory
7. A Human-First Focus
Keep a “human-first focus” by ensuring the supporting technology does not create more frustration and a negative consumer experience. Deliver an easy-to-navigate, seamless, mobile-first experience across all consumer devices as well as across websites, social media platforms, emails and other touchpoints in their journey. Don’t sacrifice consumer trust and service testing AI chatbots and unified data. – Toby Wong, Toby Wong Consulting
8. A Master Storyteller, or ‘Architect’
Every successful omnichannel marketing strategy needs an architect. Bringing together audience insights, messaging, content, channels and targets demands a master storyteller. It’s this architect who weaves the disparate elements together, transforming seemingly random acts of marketing into a powerful, integrated story. – Rekha Thomas, Path Forward Marketing LLC
9. Internal Team Cohesion
Teamwork within a marketing team is the most essential element that determines the success or failure of an omnichannel marketing strategy. Different groups within marketing tend to own different channels, so the internal cohesion of a team dictates how well such strategies perform. Double down on getting sub-teams within your marketing team to collaborate, and your efforts will prove more effective. – Nataly Kelly, Zappi
10. A Unified Customer View
A unified customer view is the cornerstone of any successful omnichannel strategy. This means having a single, comprehensive view of your customer across all touchpoints and channels. By consolidating data from various sources—like your website, email marketing platform, CRM and social media channels—you can create a holistic understanding of each customer’s journey, preferences and behaviors. – Patrick Ward, NanoGlobals
11. Empathy
Empathy is the secret sauce of omnichannel success. Understanding not just where customers engage but why they do ensures seamless, meaningful connections. Empathy aligns messaging with their needs, whether they’re swiping, scrolling or strolling. It transforms channels into a cohesive journey, making every interaction feel personal and impactful. – Astrid Pocklington, HYPERVSN
12. Personalization
A key element for a successful omnichannel marketing strategy is personalization. Tailoring content to consumers’ needs and preferences across channels creates a cohesive, customer-centered experience, fostering trust and engagement. Personalization drives better outcomes by delivering relevant information, improving buyer satisfaction and encouraging proactive engagement. – Kal Gajraj, Ph.D., CAN Community Health
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