Today’s marketing is packed with buzzwords. While mostly innocuous (if a little annoying), the buzzword nature of marketing does have one major downside: It makes it too easy to dismiss ideas that deserve attention.
Such is the case with omnichannel marketing—a concept that brings together all the central elements of digital marketing, including data, content, experience, and personalization. In other words, omnichannel marketing is one buzzword that shouldn’t be ignored.
But what exactly is it? Isn’t omnichannel just another way of saying multichannel? In fact, there’s an essential difference: Multichannel marketing simply means that the marketing message is distributed across multiple communication channels.
Omnichannel takes all the individual channels and brand touch points and creates a single, unified, and seamless experience across the entire customer journey. So, the focus is on optimizing the experience across all phases of customer engagement and across all channels, screens, and devices.
It’s more than simply being in front of your customers wherever they happen to be. It’s meeting each customer in the right place, with the right message, at the right time—thus shortening the sales cycle and building much stronger, lasting customer relationships.
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This article, written by Ida Cheinman, first appeared in the December 2017 issue of Marketer.
