In a world where consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. However, omnichannel marketing provides a unique opportunity to connect with consumers in a personalised way.
What advantages does omnichannel B2B marketing provide?
These are only some of the advantages omnichannel marketing provides, however, the most important benefit is the ability to quickly build trust with customers. This is crucial in any B2B environment, as customers need to feel reassured that they are dealing with reliable and competent professionals.
With this in mind, we compiled insights from 15 experts (listed below)within the B2B marketing field, and distilled their insights into a list of top tips for content marketers:
To become an omnichannel marketing master, keep reading to gain in-depth insight into the field and learn 11 invaluable tips for creating your own successful campaign.
Who we are: With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
Creating an omnichannel strategy provides a huge opportunity for B2B businesses to unite sales and marketing around a defined process and methodology. By doing so, they can provide a consistent, coordinated customer experience across all channels – from the initial awareness stage through to purchase and post-purchase follow-up:
Omnichannel marketing is a holistically focused multiform approach to marketing where all online experiences, interactions, and messaging on customers’ touchpoints are cohesive. Specifically, omnichannel marketing unites individual channels and brand touchpoints and turns them into a single, seamless experience across the entire interaction a customer has with a brand. The approach focuses on a customer-centric connection, limiting redundant back and forth communication, and zeros in on advancing the correspondence.
A standout feature of omnichannel is that it amplifies the customer experience philosophy, and moves businesses towards a more proactive interaction with leads and buyers. The approach places the customer at the core of a business’ marketing and syncs up messages to satisfy the buyers’ need for a continuous journey across multiple channels.
When focalising on omnichannel marketing in a B2B setting, trends suggest that the buying scenario has evolved drastically and that B2B buyers are actively informing themselves more via different channels over the course of their decision-making process. In highly competitive markets, it is important for B2B businesses to bring in this all-routes strategy to ensure they get in front of buyers as they gather intel, by uniting customer-focused units.
In line with advancements in the digital world, 65% of marketers are applying two or more media channels in their advertising campaigns. 44% of those marketers use a minimum of three platforms. A huge reason for this is that the positive impacts of insight-based marketing are becoming more evident, and all intelligent businesses want a piece of the pie.
Today, one in two B2B businesses are prioritizing the provision of an omnichannel experience for their prospective customers. This is a consequence of millennials becoming the new decision-makers, and 74% of them value deep-seated social media responsiveness. Research suggests that the typical B2B buyer now uses six different channels when making a decision. Furthermore, 70% of customers have revealed that cohesive experiences from sales and marketing outreach are vital to winning their business.
B2B Omnichannel marketing is no longer an edgy experiment just for trailblazing marketers who are bold enough to try it out. It probably never really was. What it is, is a profound insight-based strategy that B2B businesses can use to rise above the competition and approach clients’ preferences in newer, deeper ways.
Have you ever heard about account-based marketing? This strategy focuses on key accounts or businesses, incorporating buyer personas to better determine how to communicate with and service these high-value clients. By establishing which clients are most beneficial to your business, much like account-based marketing, you can pinpoint your ideal segments.
Before jumping into the strategy, determine which of your clients generate the most revenue for your business, inspire your employees to work harder and identify which clients you have the best relationships with. These are your ideal clients. Find out everything you can about them, and identify what it is that makes them so valuable to you. Determine how they prefer to interact with your business and the nature of their engagement patterns with your brand.
Once you have a clear set of high-value clients and insights on them, it is time to sort them into ideal segments. The intention is to make it possible for you to create more tailored experiences based on the segments each client fits best in. Truth is, not every single client needs the same purchasing path, and chances are that different sectors prefer different channels. This is why segmenting your audience is vital to master omnichannel marketing.
Now you have ideal segments identifying your high-value businesses. To intensify the opportunity of tailoring each client’s marketing, the next tip is to identify your ideal prospects within the buying company. While on their buying journey, your prospects will be providing you with elaborate insights into their intents and inclinations. With an omnichannel marketing strategy, you will be able to unite the right data from different channels to target and engage with your clients uniformly in a way that matches their behaviours, needs and wants.
Large amounts of data come into your business via many different channels. For example: customer behavioural flows from your website and/or app, preferred social media platforms, purchase and return patterns, interactions on live chat and chat bots, customer-initiated communications, information from forms on your website, mouse-tracking heat maps, cookies and customer responses to company-initiated communications.
By leveraging all beneficial pieces of data, your B2B company can lower friction and create sharp, highly relevant messages and experiences. If you are able to stitch together all valuable pieces of data in a way that truly makes sense, you can build prospect profiles in one place, and hence obtain data for ongoing success.
At SnellMedia, we’ve found that we are able to create the best marketing strategies and content for our respective clients by forming a clear, detailed data portfolio for each client. This enables you to get an overview of the data you have and the data you still need, and to analyze the insights you’ve gathered as you move forward.
The intention of omnichannel marketing is to make the customer’s interaction with your business seamless and easy across all the channels you see fit to connect. For example, your customer can initiate a Facebook Messenger chat with your company one day and pick up the conversation where they left off days, weeks or even months later on your website’s live chat. This type of interaction focuses on customer experience versus customer service.
There is a need for you to ensure that your marketing strategy is following a customer-centric approach where your connections with customers are focusing on them and their individual needs. Why is this important? Because 84% of customers say being considered a person, not just a number, is crucial for them to bring their business to you.
If you want a successful omnichannel strategy, you need to start somewhere and connect at least two of your channels together. It won’t take long for you to realise the benefits of merging the channels, and you will be able to slowly add more channels to ensure an even more seamless customer experience across your most important channels.
Before you determine what channels to use, make sure you consider the audience’s preferences. With a detailed customer data platform and alignment across your business in terms of customer centricity, you should have enough invaluable insights to understand the preferred channels of your target audience.
Additionally, you will have a top-tier understanding of how your customers are being digitally present on their channels and the amount of time they spend on each channel. Your success will, to a large extent, be determined by your ability to harness all insights on how your customer segments want to interact with your business, and what their terms are for a successful interaction. Today, 51% of customers experience that businesses are falling short on meeting their expectations for an optimal experience.
Knowing what channels are preferred for your clients tells you what channels to use for each client’s marketing campaigns. In other words, the data you received should dictate what channels you adopt in your campaigns. A part of this tip is also to continually optimize your use of each channel to ensure that all channels are providing a cohesive message based on each channel’s conditions and functionality and that the different marketing tactics used can coincide in an omnipresent harmony.
Also, as technology evolves, so does the amount of channels available. Make sure you keep tabs on what channels are being introduced to the market, and in time, how your ideal customers are moving around and developing their channel preferences.
A huge part of omnichannel success is your ability to deliver contextually relevant content. Since cohesiveness is key, the context of each interaction must inform the next, and each post must fit with an ongoing conversation that is already in progress. With an audience in mind, make sure to always deliver content based on their contextual need for your message.
Related to this is the need for transparency in the conveyed message. While we realize that a common assumption is that B2B businesses are hesitant towards multi-channel approaches for fear of sharing conflicting information that puts their sales at risk, we believe that B2B businesses, with a thorough focus on transparency, are highly likely to succeed with omnichannel marketing as long as they uphold authenticity in their message.
We’ve touched upon this tip quite a few times throughout the article already, but for the sake of clarity and your success, let’s highlight the necessity of sharing consistent messages. Consistency is key for successful omnichannel B2B marketing. In order to ensure that your messages and experiences align with the needs of each segment you are targeting, you must ensure that they remain consistent across all channels.
Additionally, be sure to respond quickly to customer feedback and make adjustments in real time in order to ensure that you exceed their expectations.
By doing so, you will build trust with your customers and reap the rewards of an omnichannel marketing approach.
Smooth and seamless designs and content are your optimal way of creating a B2B omnichannel marketing strategy beyond any other. Ensure that your customers receive an effortless, intuitive brand experience, no matter their purchasing method, and that all your channels simultaneously convey transparency, trustworthiness, and professionalism.
Omnichannel marketing strives to build a better buying experience for your customers regardless of where they go to buy or where they look for information prior to purchasing. The cohesiveness and simplicity of the customers’ interactions with your brand or offer generate more stable sales opportunities and substantially increase customer loyalty. Why? Because a sleek, coherent experience insinuates reliability.
A part of the seamless experience entails the application of a smoothly continuous communication tactic as well. Back in the comparison of the approaches, we mentioned an example of how businesses can optimize the seamlessness of their communication on their channels by merging chats and storing all service history across the different chatbots on the website and the additional chat-options utilised. While the example alludes to Facebook Messenger and Website Live Chats, further opportunities may be available soon.
Imagine how easy your communication with a customer or client can become if your Messenger, chatbots, email and potentially even Instagram or LinkedIn can collectively store all data from your service occurrences, making it effortless to keep track of what the customer needs in the touchpoint they’re at without having to ask the same questions over and over.
Bringing back the holistic experience, since 75% of B2B purchasers are buying online, and with eCommerce being the second largest B2B buying channel next to email, it is undoubtedly crucial that B2B companies optimize the online purchasing journey and the connection points within it to benefit the needs of their customers.
Omnichannel’s ideal is supplied by insight from dependable data – both gained and applied in real-time. To properly sort through, analyze, and store all valuable pieces of information and insights, B2B businesses need to develop their infrastructure to accommodate technological changes and make use of efficient technology tools that can evolve in line with their goals.
The tech needed is not strictly related to omnichannel, however it can easily facilitate the success of your omnichannel efforts. Examples of omni-facilitating tech are:
As you will quickly realize, no strategy or tool should be implemented untested, and omnichannel marketing is no different in that sense. Your most important task is to ensure that the strategy reaches its highest potential and systematically syncs up with what your buyers are expecting. With this, there is a need to monitor and measure all outputs transpiring in real time both before, during, and after the strategy is implemented.
This way you will be able to exploit the potential of your B2B omnichannel marketing campaigns and make certain that you are reaching your prospects in the best way possible.
Incorporating an omnichannel strategy can be as easy as connecting two channels to start with. For example, at SnellMedia, we merge our website’s live chat with our Facebook page Messenger to create a seamless experience for potential customers who have discovered us on Facebook after seeing a post about a specific digital marketing hack.
When someone engages with our team on Messenger, and later (hours, days, weeks or months) starts a live chat on our website, we can continue that same conversation from the point where we left things off. Therefore, if on Messenger the prospective buyer was asking for pricing on various services, we could easily determine what we talked about earlier and the specifics when it comes to our wide and complex range of services, prices, negotiated terms, and any discounts offered at the time.
Omnichannel gives priority to customer experience (vs customer service) and places the customer at the centre. This seamless interaction instills confidence and professionalism, and creates a lot less friction, as opposed to the buyer having to start over again with another sales representative that could possibly offer different solutions all together, or worse even, different prices and terms.
This is especially true when it comes to complex services like ours (and products like many of our clients). If any of this was to occur, we not only spend more time trying to finalize the deal, it comes at an increased risk of losing it altogether.
Other examples we use at SnellMedia to add to our omnichannel experience:
While both approaches focus on bringing in multiple channels to amplify their online presence, there are some essential differences in the characteristics of that presence. While multichannel focuses on reach and exposure (speaking to the customer), omnichannel marketing focuses on relationships and seamless experiences (speaking with the customer).
We can definitely sympathize with people experiencing issues in nailing the fundamental differences between the two approaches. If you are looking for a deep dive into exactly what differentiates multichannel marketing from omnichannel, have a look at our additional blog post where we cover the differences in cores, intentions, and customer philosophies.
Are you interested in learning more about omnichannel marketing and how to incorporate this trend in your marketing strategy this year? Are you part of a B2B company looking to join the other 46% of companies planning to optimize their customer experience tactics over the next few years? Are you looking for a better way to connect with your buyers and amplify the opportunities for them to convert easily?
At SnellMedia, our philosophy is to create tailored marketing strategies for each unique business and guide you towards better solutions and options that address your values and KPIs. As an experienced B2B digital marketing agency, we build personalized, compelling campaigns designed to maximize your ROI.
With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
We love to help B2B businesses reach their goals and marketing potentials. If you are curious about how we can help you, make sure to get in touch!
