What is your company’s primary digital marketing strategy? Perhaps you pay for SEO services and handle content creation on your own. Maybe your number one form of marketing is social media outreach. Here is the more important question: is your company practicing omni-channel marketing? If not, it is time to change things up.
Omni-channel marketing is essentially a holistic approach that sees a multitude of different marketing strategies as all combining to reach a single goal. That goal may differ from one campaign to the next. What does not change is the integrated approach that omni-channel dictates.
It’s All About the Internet
The need for omni-channel marketing is facilitated by the overarching nature of the internet. We no longer use the internet as a tool in passing. It is not something we might engage with a few times per week. The internet runs our daily lives. All of us interact with it multiple times throughout the day without even knowing it. Many of us never fully disconnect.
Device options are another consideration. In the old days, the internet and desktop computers went together like baseball and hot dogs. Today, the computer is but one device that gets us online. We also use smartphones and tablets. Then there are those devices that connect without any conscious effort from us. They include things like smart TVs, smart home systems, smart appliances, and even the entertainment and navigation systems in our cars.
Every device offers a new opportunity for engagement. Every engagement opportunity represents yet another avenue for marketing. The secret to success is marketing to customers without them knowing you are doing it. Hence the need for omni-channel marketing.
Full Marketing Integration
The people behind Webtek Digital Marketing, a Salt Lake City digital marketing and SEO firm with a second location in Austin, explains omni-channel marketing as fully integrated marketing. In other words, different marketing channels are not developed in isolation. They are not developed as separate entities in and of themselves.
Omni-channel marketing calls for developing all channels simultaneously and symbiotically. Each channel supports all the others and is simultaneously supported by them. Let us look at a basic example involving a company’s website along with its social media channels.
The company’s digital marketing firm might rely heavily on content marketing to engage with customers. An omni-channel strategy will dictate creating content that can be published on the website and shared via social media. Meanwhile, the company’s social media channels should be promoting the same topic as the content itself.
Website content links to social media and vice-versa. The company’s various social media sites link to one another as well. The icing on the cake is to go outside the social media-website arena and generate backlinks through guest posting, a video, or some other means.
One Goal, Multiple Channels
The omni-channel concept was first employed by the gambling industry a few years ago. A gambling operator that utilizes the strategy might get started with a land-based casino. To that casino is added half-a-dozen online gambling sites. A mobile app is added along with video terminals inside the land-based casino featuring online games for which there are no physical machines or tables.
Omni-channel in gambling concentrates on using a variety of environments and platforms to share the same opportunities with customers no matter where they live, their proximity to a land-based casino, or the devices they use to play their favorite games online.
This is exactly how omni-channel marketing works. It integrates all a company’s marketing strategies across multiple channels and every possible device. It is the way to market moving forward.