Taking Omnichannel Marketing Outbound in 2020!

Omnichannel marketing is an important piece of any brand’s customer experience (CX) strategy, but too often it stops there. While a strong omnichannel CX is important, it's equally important to incorporate omnichannel marketing into your lead generation strategy. Content optimization, customer modeling, and profiling through a strategic optichannel plan will produce a strong customer acquisition system. Here are three ways to use the power of omnichannel marketing to enhance your outbound marketing and generate leads, acquire customers, and lay the foundation for strong customer relationships. 1. Omnichannel Content Optimization The biggest difference between omnichannel CX and omnichannel marketing is that the CX mostly happens on your owned channels, and it mostly engages existing customers and lower-funnel prospects deciding to become customers. But how do you get those prospects into the pipeline in the first place? Traditional mass marketing? That’s not the right way to introduce prospects to a highly targeted, personalized, omnichannel experience. Maybe Disney can pull that off, but most brands need to put more effort into building a strong foundation for the customer experience. That’s where omnichannel marketing comes in. We recently dove into how four brands deliver great omnichannel customer experiences by anticipating individual customer needs and removing obstacles that would have a negative impact on customer experience. In omnichannel marketing, you take that same approach to outbound marketing content. That can be as simple as offering a discount or as complex as creating videos to counter known buying objections. Great omnichannel marketing comes from understanding what your target audience wants and needs, and providing content that addresses those drives. At a minimum, you must develop ad content tailored to the specific segments you’re targeting. Blasting the same offer to all of your audience models is not omnichannel marketing. For prospects who are already pretty far down the funnel, target them with ad content that makes it easy to see that you offer the things they want and will make them easy to get. Not all prospect segments are going to be that far down the funnel, though. You may be using omnichannel marketing to drive awareness and get top-of-funnel prospects to sign up as leads and receive your newsletter. Here, educational content can be highly effective. If they’re new to the market, promote blog content that answers common newbie questions. If they’re experienced — but not looking to buy yet — promote high-value content that makes an impression and encourages them to come to you for answers (technology companies like Cisco and HubSpot do a wonderful job of this). Keep in mind that a targeted audience offers new opportunities to optimize content. For example, Google affinity audiences allow advertisers to loosely target visitors of competing websites. For these kinds of campaigns, you can talk specifically about the kinds of things those websites cover. 2. Turn Customer Data From a Microscope Into a Telescope Every brand has customer data, but even though that data lets marketers examine their customers in small — even microscopic — detail, most have a hard time using it to do much more than send birthday emails and make fairly shallow product recommendations. In order to use your data for true outbound omnichannel marketing, you need to turn that data around so it can be your telescope instead of a microscope. You can do this by examining the data to extrapolate traits from your existing customers that also should appear on likely customers — i.e., look-a-like modeling. The process is two-fold data science. First, you identify the segments you want to model in your customer data and look for data points they have in common. These traits may indicate someone is likely to become your customer, but it’s not a single-factor analysis. Each segment may have demographic, psychographic, and behavioral variables you can synthesize to create models that will help find other likely customers. Then you use those models to target both online and offline marketing. For example, Facebook has long offered look-a-like targeting to its audience. Google offers similar options across its whole online and mobile ad network. You can also use these models to identify mailing lists that include the right kind of audiences and target them with relevant marketing. Omnichannel marketing is not just for direct response, either. It is highly effective at getting the right content in front of your target audience on social media. You can use these models to target content promotion on social networks and make sure the right stories from your accounts wind up in the feeds of the right people on each network. 3. Make Omnichannel Marketing Optichannel As mentioned, omnichannel marketing takes everything you do to build your omnichannel customer experience and applies it to lead generation and customer acquisition. You can take this further to an optichannel strategy by constricting your outreach to just the channels where each customer prefers to engage with marketing. That may sound counterintuitive as part of an omnichannel strategy, but consumers and business audiences are both showing fatigue with being hounded by ads from every brand on every channel. There are benefits to actually limiting the channels you use for specific customers by selecting ones that can be effectively optimized. If you can identify the preferred channel of a specific audience segment — or, ideally, individual prospects — and create a great experience for them on that channel, you stand a much better chance of laying the foundation for a great omnichannel customer relationship. Omnichannel CX has been a breakthrough for many brands. Done well, the techniques it uses can provide your customers with the kind of experiences that keep them coming back — it’s like customer relationship magic. But if you can’t take those principles and apply them to your outbound marketing as well, you’re doing a disservice to brand growth. Use these tips to turn your CX strategy around and leverage the power of true omnichannel marketing.

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Taking Omnichannel Marketing Outbound in 2020!

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Andre Chandra

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