The Power of Omnichannel Marketing: How It Can Transform Your Local Business

Maintaining a consistent brand, image and reputation has become increasingly important for businesses, and doing so while implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy could help take your company to the next level.

Omnichannel marketing involves creating a consistent and seamless experience across all channels that customers use to find or purchase from your business, including your website, social media platforms, email, print ads or a physical store. This ensures that your brand message and consumer experience remain attached, no matter where or how a customer is interacting with your business.

Omnichannel marketing is perhaps most vital for small and local businesses, as they have the opportunity to attract loyal, and potentially repeat buyers, stemming from visibility, relevancy and consumer trust.

Omnichannel Marketing By the Numbers

Omnichannel marketing focuses not only on your presence across multiple platforms, but also how you integrate your brand to deliver a unified message and experience to consumers. The goal is to make all interactions feel similar and connected, no matter what channel customers are using to find your business.

According to BusinessDashers, marketing campaigns with three or more channels have shown a 287% higher purchase rate than single-channel campaigns.

In a survey from Salesforce, 80% of consumers said they believe the experience a business provides is equally important as its product or service. Meanwhile, 79% of consumers expect consistent communication across departments, with 55% believing that it often feels like they’re communicating with separate departments rather than just one company when making a purchase or utilizing a service.

Eliminating this with uniform messaging across all channels will often be more appealing and create additional customer loyalty.

Benefits That Stem From Omnichannel Marketing

Many benefits stem from omnichannel marketing strategies which can help businesses attract more customers and improve their bottom line, including:

• Enhanced and unified customer experience – Omnichannel marketing is predicated on customer experience, with many consumers more likely to purchase from a business that provides a seamless encounter across all interactions. Providing consumers with multiple ways to find your business while remaining consistent across each channel can greatly enhance a buyer’s experience.

• Increased visibility and convenience – Marketing in a similar manner across several channels can also give your business greater visibility to potential customers, particularly in the growing digital space, which can increase audience reach. In turn, spreading your brand across multiple channels can make finding and utilizing your business more convenient for customers. 

• Improved brand awareness and customer loyalty – A consistent brand and image at all touchpoints is key to success. By creating similar experiences through print ads, digital ads or social media posts, brand awareness is heightened and can improve customer loyalty. On average, 89% of customers are retained by businesses with omnichannel marketing capabilities, according to BusinessDashers.

• Increased conversion rates – Many of the above points, including a unified message, increased brand awareness and heightened visibility, are key factors in increasing conversion rates. According to BusinessDashers, brands with high omnichannel customer engagement grow revenue by 9.5% annually.

• Data to improve your marketing strategy – One of the hidden benefits of an omnichannel marketing strategy can come from what it can do for your business internally. By tailoring strategies across multiple channels and tracking engagement, companies gain additional insights on how their customers interact, and how to best market their business going forward, potentially saving on future advertising costs.

• Potential increase in search rankings – Search engines like Google tend to value businesses with consistent and accurate information across all platforms. While there might not be a direct correlation between omnichannel marketing and SEO, a steady brand image can help increase visibility in local search. That can give businesses an advantage over competitors while perhaps helping them compete against bigger brands.

A Closer Look at the Vital Marketing Channels

Print – While print advertising has often been viewed as a dying breed over the last several years, it can still prove incredibly valuable for businesses, particularly at the local level. Print ads with consistent brand messaging through direct mail, flyers, magazines or newspapers continue to deliver strong response rates. 

According to OfficeDasher, over 80% of consumers still trust print ads the most when making a buying decision, with print marketing also showing a higher recall rate compared to digital. Worldmetrics.com also notes that consumers who receive print ads tend to spend around 28% more than those who do not.

Digital – Combining digital advertising with print has become commonplace and is a strong strategy to increase visibility while creating brand retention. Digital marketing can include email campaigns, search engine ads or website personalization, and allows for customer tracking. This compliments print ads by helping businesses further target consumers who may have already shown interest in a particular product or service. 

Overall, 62% of consumers will disregard a business if they can’t find it online, while 70% of consumers will visit a store based on information found online, further highlighting the value of a strong digital presence.

Social – Social media advertising gives businesses the opportunity to interact with potential customers in real time. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are ideal for sharing timely promotions, behind-the-scenes content, customer testimonials and engaging visuals. When integrated with print and digital, social media advertising can help extend the reach and relevance of your message.

According to synup.com, 93% of marketers say their social media marketing efforts have increased business traffic. Meanwhile, 78% of shoppers research social media before making a purchase, and 63% of consumers make plans to visit a business after a positive interaction on social media. Customers who engage with a business on social media also tend to spend 35-40% more on that brand’s products and services.

Different benefits derive from each part of an omnichannel marketing strategy, but ultimately, they often complement each other. This highlights the importance of keeping experiences consistent and convenient for customers across each platform, as each step in the buying process can be influenced by a different channel.

How to Implement an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy For Your Business

1. Understand your target audience – It is important for businesses to have a deep understanding of their target audience before implementing any marketing strategy. Collecting data and gaining insights about needs, preferences and the channels that consumers are most likely to use can help solidify your target market. This can be done by conducting surveys or interviews, analyzing behaviors on social media platforms or looking into customer interactions at touchpoints like websites and landing pages.

2. Analyze consumer data – Once a business has collected insights to better understand its audience, it’s necessary to analyze the data in order to implement the most efficient marketing strategy possible. Identifying customer needs is a significant step in this process, as businesses that identify all potential touchpoints where consumers might interact with your brand can ultimately improve customer experience.

3. Choose the right channels – Each marketing channel offers different benefits, so businesses must choose which they want to implement and where they want to focus the most resources. This can be physical touchpoints like newspaper ads and billboards, or digital advertising through emails, social media and paid ads. Quality over quantity is often the best rule of thumb, as businesses should aim to find a valuable mix of channels focused on where their target audience spends the most time.

4. Unify messaging and branding – A unified brand and message reinforces the identity of a business, so it’s important to make sure branding is consistent across all channels, both from a visual perspective and when it comes to product or service information. This can make your brand more memorable, help you stand out from your competition and create reliability and trust with your brand among consumers.

5. Integrate marketing channels – Once a business chooses what channels it wants to use, proper integration is imperative. Between print, digital and social media, each plan of action should be strategically crafted depending on the channel. Equally important is managing and adapting depending on the performance of each platform. Investing in the proper tools to help measure what’s working best can help a business become more effective and efficient with its omnichannel execution.

6. Analyze results and optimize – Businesses should optimize their strategy based on what the data is saying about trends within their target audience. While it is important to come up with an initial game plan, the everchanging landscape of the business world makes adaptation necessary. Constantly monitoring things like customer retention, conversion rates or customer acquisition cost helps businesses quickly identify what changes they need to make, and how to promote most effectively.

Real-World Success Stories of Omnichannel Marketing

Many businesses have implemented successful omnichannel marketing strategies in recent years. Slazenger, a sports equipment brand, personalized customer experiences across multiple marketing channels. After partnering with Insider to execute an omnichannel marketing plan, Slazenger saw a 700% increase in customer acquisition, and a 12% increase in click-through rate (CTR).

Similarly, Diamonds Direct, one of the largest jewelry retailers in the United States, partnered with Experro to expand its presence online beyond its brick-and-mortar store locations. After doing so, the company saw 42% revenue growth within one year, while also increasing its mobile site speed.

Best Version Media Can Implement an Omnichannel Solution For Your Business

Best Version Media helps local businesses implement an omnichannel marketing strategy through its print, digital and online presence advertising solutions. BVM has been helping businesses grow through print advertising for nearly two decades, and also offers valuable digital advertising tools that can help you reach more local customers while improving your bottom line – all from one convenient dashboard.

Connect with BVM today to find an omnichannel solution tailored to the needs and wants of your target audience.