The latest marketing trend on the rise is omni-channel marketing, and it’s an extremely powerful method. Omni-channel marketing creates a consistent brand experience, communicates a unified message, and reaches your customers exactly where they are.
This marketing method focuses on creating the best experience for your customers and making their interactions with your brand seamless. Whether you have been in the omni-channel game or just starting your research, the success of this type of marketing hinges on quality data. Great data analytics will help you identify individuals, create a consistent experience, and track customer interactions with your brand.
1. Identify Individuals
Omni-channel marketing is a 1:1 marketing method. Instead of marketing to a target audience, you are marketing an individual. This means you need to know who this person is and what they care about. Let’s compare the difference of marketing to a target audience vs. targeting individuals.
Target Audience
When you market to a target audience, you select some general guidelines like age, income, and location. For example, let’s say you want to advertise to females in their 20s-30s, who make between 30-60k year, and live in the Midwest region. At first, it sounds like they might all have similar interests, but if you look closely you’ll find that there’s a wide range of lifestyle and behavioral data points. Some may be working professionals, some may be single, some may be newly married, some may have children, some may be very active, some may rent their home while others may own it. There are lot of differences in this target audience and what these females care about is going to vary greatly.
If you send out a single message to a target audience, it will resonate with some of the people in that audience and will miss the mark completely with others.
Target Individuals
Now, imagine targeting an individual. Let’s call her Rebecca. Rebecca is a 35-year-old successful career woman who has three young children and a dog named Ross after her favorite TV show Friends. She owns her own home in ABC neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Your marketing to Rebecca should look a lot different than your marketing to her neighbor Miranda who lives two streets over. Miranda is a 24-year-old female who rents her home with two roommates, teaches high school math and is working on getting her masters degree in education. Both of these women are in the exact same target audience, but they will have very different interests.
Omni-channel marketing focuses on identifying individuals, learning what they care about, and crafting your message for that individual. The best way to do this is to have really good data on who your targeted individuals are. Data Scientist can help you enhance your data and fill-in missing pieces about your targets. From names, addresses, email addresses, and IP addresses to lifestyle, behavioral, and spatial data points, data scientist can help you see a very clear picture of the individuals you are targeting.
2. Create Consistent Message & Experience
Once you have identified your targets and have learned more about them, then it’s time to create a consistent message and experience for them throughout all of your marketing channels. Instead of pitting channels against each other, omni-channel marketing harnesses the power of each channel and uses them together to drive business as a whole.
Let’s go back to our targeted individual Rebecca. Rebecca receives your direct mail piece and visits your website. Later, she encounters an ad on Instagram, receives an email, and then sees an ad on her connected TV. Each one of these is a unique touch point, but they are all sending the same message. We know that it takes multiple touch points before a new prospect is ready to take action, so why not make sure each point is building on top of the others?
Omni-channel marketing allows you to build momentum in your campaign and present a unified message across all channels. Seeing your message on multiple channels builds brand awareness and trust between you and your prospects.
Data scientists can help you find your target Rebecca on all of the marketing channels she’s interacting with. You no longer have to guess which platforms to use or hope Rebecca sees your message. You will know exactly where to put your message, so she can see it.
3. Track Customer Interactions with Your Brand
Finally, it’s important to remember that marketing is an ever-evolving process. Omni-channel marketing can give you great insight on how and where your customers are interacting with your brand. Data scientists can run match backs on your marketing campaign to see which individuals responded and how they responded. This information is vital to seeing which individuals you should remove from your list and which ones you should pursue. It will also help you adjust your next campaign to fit the needs of your target customers.
Omni-channel marketing is a powerful method, but it will only work as well as the data you put into it. If you want to know more about how we can help you enhance your data for your omni-channel marketing campaign, contact our team. We would love to help you succeed!