Why Should Your B2B Use Omnichannel Marketing?
It’s omnichannel time!
B2B buyers today make decisions using 6-10 (or even more) different channels, which made omnichannel marketing increasingly popular among all marketers, including B2B ones. McKinsey and Co.’s research points out that omnichannel marketing is 83% more effective than all other methods of reaching and interacting with customers. Moreover, this approach proves to be far more cost-effective.
What does omnichannel marketing actually mean?
It’s a bidirectional communication strategy incorporating both offline and online channels to interact with customers. It integrates various platforms and devices to engage with customers to create a more convenient, personal, and seamless user experience. Using websites, social media platforms, email campaigns, chatbots, ads, and much more, this marketing approach results in higher conversion rates than one marketing mode.  Clearly, more channels mean a wider reach, which means potential increase in customers for your company.
In addition to offering customers a better streamlined and positive experience across all channels, omnichannel marketing provides a consistent, recognizable brand tone and vision, and messaging can be tailored to individual needs as they move down the sales funnel. It allows your customers to experience your brand the way they desire and customize your content based on previous interactions by retaining real-time information on multiple platforms.
Increasingly, organizations are using omnichannel marketing to engage customers and build more cohesive customer experiences. This way, they can provide the information and services needed to help customers make rather quick, well-informed decisions at any given time and facilitate more personal interactions. Soon enough, omnichannel marketing will become the norm in B2B sales.
Omnichannel marketing VS. Multichannel marketing
As both involve engaging customers across multiple platforms, it’s easy to assume that omnichannel and multichannel are the same, but they’re not. Through multichannel marketing, content and campaigns can be distributed across multiple channels, i.e. online marketing, print marketing, in-store marketing, etc. While there are many channels for interaction, the content and engagements are often siloed. Customers will receive different messages across channels depending on the sales goal. In contrast, omnichannel marketing is innately customer-centric and strives to improve the customer’s cross-channel experience. Besides ensuring brand accessibility across online and offline channels, the omnichannel approach creates the best user experience across channels cohesively. As customers move across devices as well as online and offline platforms, transitions are seamless, and the messaging is based on previous encounters.
To sum it up, omnichannel marketing aims to deliver a seamless, personalized experience across different channels to customers, whereas multi-channel marketing aims to deliver the brand’s message across different channels. Omnichannel marketing focuses on the customer experience, while multichannel marketing focuses on operations.
Channel that omnichannel
Today’s customers have become increasingly selective about which brands they prefer to engage with or buy across multiple preferred platforms. While omnichannel marketing is challenging to implement, when done correctly, brands can reap several valuable benefits:
- It generates more customers- You can gather more data from a wider audience group when you use more tools and gain valuable insights into customer behavior through analyzing that data. This means that you can enhance and modify your engagement strategies, to build personal, meaningful relationships with your prospects. You will also gain access to a large variety of potential customers that you might not have even considered before.
- It cultivates loyalty – Attracting new customers isn’t enough in today’s world. It is vital to maintain a loyal customer base. Omnichannel marketing helps you build loyalty in several ways. Firstly, it allows customers to seamlessly transition from your offline store to your digital store offering more payment options, faster responses, and shorter wait times. The seamless experience you provide will keep your customers coming back. In addition, it gives you a greater opportunity to engage with your customers across multiple channels. Customer experiences (CX) are becoming increasingly important to B2B customers, who want to do business with companies that put the customer first, shifting the focus from one device to another. Omnichannel marketing promotes personal correspondence and allows the brand to create a recognizable tone and image based on the audience’s values and needs, which in turn increases the likelihood that customers will become loyal to the brand.
- It increases engagement level – By definition, omnichannel means being accessible on multiple platforms. As a result, you offer many more opportunities to engage your customers, allowing for a consistent experience across all those channels. If you do that, your customers will know what to expect from you no matter how they interact with you, producing better engagement across all channels.
- It boosts sales and revenue – When you attract more customers, increase loyalty, and engage with them more, more of those customers will move down the sales funnel and generate more revenue. Loyalty that leads to repeat customers will generate 40% of your revenue. Customers who engage with multiple touchpoints tend to be 30% more valuable than those who engage with only one.
- It allows for better analytics and data – Omnichannel offers B2B companies access to larger and better-quality customer data. Your customers’ journey can be tracked across all channels and interactions in real-time. So, brands can better understand customers’ engagements across channels, as well as when, how, and how often the customers prefer to engage. Such rich data facilitates superior marketing campaigns and lowers costs by optimizing media spending while creating further targeted campaigns.
Customers expect it!
Increasingly, customers want the ability to research and shop online, remotely, as well as in person. Therefore, B2B businesses must take advantage of Omnichannel strategies. As the customer journey unfolds across multiple channels, the customer experience responds to the previous points of contact along the way which develops long term loyalty and expands your customer base. Achieving that kind of brand awareness, customer engagement, sales, and customer retention, should be everyone’s mission. So, turn on that omnichannel!
We can help you do that – it’s what we do.
