Picture this: a bustling business landscape where the heartbeat is measured by performance marketing, stealing the limelight for all the right reasons. In a world where companies crave not just success but crave concrete proof of their impact and expense justifications, performance marketing emerges as the hero of the story. It’s the guiding hand that not only fine-tunes ad campaigns but dances with the rhythm of maximum returns on investments. Join me in this article where we unravel the vibrant threads of active channels propelling performance marketing’s success — from the artistry of native advertising to the strategic moves in content marketing. We’ll demystify how it all works, shed light on the undeniable benefits, and candidly discuss the challenges this hero faces in its quest for glory.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Ever met the clever cousin of advertising? Well, that’s Omnichannel marketing for you — where you don’t just pay for ads; you pay for results. It’s not about flaunting your brand; it’s about making things happen. Imagine a world where your ads aren’t mere decorations but catalysts for action. Picture this: instead of crossing your fingers and hoping users notice your ads, performance marketers roll up their sleeves for results. For an online business, it’s like teaming up with partners who earn a slice of the pie for every sale. This isn’t just marketing; it’s marketing with a mission. Businesses get to be savvy, identifying the ads that work like magic and giving a boost to the ones that need a little push. Curious about where to invest your ad money wisely? Let’s dive into this dynamic world where marketing isn’t just a show.
Successful Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns
Omnichannel marketing isn’t your typical run-of-the-mill strategy — it’s the real deal, a game-changer that shifts the spotlight onto measurable, tangible results. But that’s not all the marketing magic we have in store. Ever heard of affiliate marketing, where partnerships thrive and affiliates rake in commissions for every sales triumph? And there’s programmatic marketing, the automated wizardry of ad buying. Now, what sets Omnichannel marketing apart from the crowd? It’s the unwavering focus on goals, specific actions, and outcomes that you can see, touch, and measure. Stay with me as we dive into a comparison table that unveils the secrets behind Performance Marketing, Brand Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, and Programmatic Marketing. Trust me, it’s a journey worth taking!
1. Sephora
Sephora, a beauty retailer, focuses on creating a personalised omnichannel experience for its customers. The company achieves this through in-app messaging, personalised push notifications, and simple methods for customers to schedule in-person consultations.
Furthermore, its in-store technology supports employees in accessing customer preferences and suggesting suitable products. Sephora’s loyalty program also plays a significant role in this strategy.
2. Starbucks
Starbucks has developed a mobile rewards app that prioritises consumer convenience by seamlessly integrating mobile and in-store experiences.
The app lets customers conveniently reload their Starbucks cards from their laptops or phones. By using the mobile app for payments, they can earn points to redeem a free coffee in the future, skip the queue during rush hours by ordering beforehand, and more.
3. Nike
Nike has adopted an ecosystem approach to omnichannel marketing, expanding the brand experience and providing customers with an increasingly comprehensive platform of deals, community engagement, and content.
For example, Nike’s SNKRS and Run Club apps enable in-person meetups, running groups, and events. The brand also boasts an app that delivers personalised workout routines and fitness programs. By doing so, Nike creates experiences beyond their shoe and apparel offerings and caters to customers’ daily routines.
Marketing Channels for Performance Marketing
Dive into the vibrant world of Performance Marketing, where success is not just a strategy — it’s an art. Let’s unravel the magic behind five powerhouse tactics that agencies and advertisers wield to draw in visitors with finesse:
Tactic 1: Native Advertising
Ever heard of an ad that seamlessly blends into its surroundings, like a chameleon in the marketing jungle? That’s native advertising for you. Designed to harmonize with the platform it graces, whether on websites, social media, or elsewhere, these ads don’t scream ‘advertisement.’ Instead, they masquerade as regular content, be it articles, videos, or social media posts. Their real strength lies not in hiding but in their ability to captivate attention. Take a cue from NYTimes; they didn’t just slip the ad into their newsfeed — they made sure it turned heads.
Tactic 2: Social Media Advertising
Imagine a goldmine where users not only connect with you but also willingly spread the word. Welcome to the realm of social media advertising, a treasure trove for performance marketers. While Facebook holds the crown, platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter beckon, offering doors to connect with new customers and share your message far and wide.
Tactic 3: Banner (Display) Ads
Sure, ad blockers and banner blindness are challenges, but some companies are still rocking display ads. How? By infusing creativity into interactive content, videos, and captivating designs that grab your attention, even in the era of digital noise.
Tactic 4: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
In the vast landscape of online searches, having a website optimized for SEM is key. Cost per click (CPC) is the name of the game for paid ads, while organic SEM relies on search engine-friendly content and savvy strategies. Enter the world of Performance Marketing, where every click counts.
Tactic 5: Content Marketing
More leads at a lower cost? That’s the magic of content marketing. It’s not just about pushing your brand — it’s about sharing valuable information seamlessly integrated into your audience’s interests. Picture a camera company weaving detailed guides on choosing the perfect camera based on needs. Blog posts, case studies, and e-books become the tools of the trade in this cost-effective journey.
How Omnichannel Marketing Works
Imagine a marketing world where every move counts, every interaction is a stepping stone, and success is measured by tangible actions. Welcome to the realm of Omnichannel Marketing, where the rules are different, and the game is all about paying for results. Let me take you on a journey through the main goals companies aim to conquer in this dynamic arena:
1. Data Collection
The first step to ensuring an omnichannel experience for your customers is collecting current and accurate data. This will help you analyse your target audience better by recognising their likes and dislikes, purchasing tendencies, etc.
You can also gather the devices your customer uses to interact with brands and purchase products/services. However, brands must employ the right tools to collect such data online and offline.
For instance, an attribution model like Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM) merges the person-level metrics of multi-touch attribution with the past overall measurements of media mix modelling. This enables touchpoints to be guided by individual preferences and past trends impacting engagement and conversions.
2. Data Analysis
Merely collecting data is not enough — it’s just the first stage. Without a competent marketing platform and team to convert this data into valuable insights, the collected data is of no value.
Hence, brands must use an analytics tool to rapidly analyse and interpret customer data. Accordingly, your marketing team can quickly adapt and adjust omnichannel campaigns to meet the immediate requirements of the consumers.
3. Customer Journey Mapping
Despite coming in third on this list, drafting a customer journey map is best done before data collection. A customer journey map is a blueprint that examines the various stages between a customer discovering a brand and eventually making a purchase.
By creating these maps, brands can tailor their omnichannel campaigns more effectively as they consider individual interests, seamless user experience, economic factors, and more.
4. Personalisation While Following Brand Guidelines
Developing a brand image with well-defined creative and messaging guidelines is crucial for organisations. Adhering to these guidelines consistently across all channels can promote brand recognition and awareness through a unified message.
In addition, organisations can use brand tracking tools to gauge and forecast the perception of their brand among consumers. Accordingly, they can further enhance the omnichannel strategy.
This step is also where audience segmentation comes into play. The brand must divide its audience into various segments based on their interests, preferences, behaviours, etc. This allows more effective personalisation of the marketing channels, thereby meeting customer expectations.
5. Optimisation
The last and perhaps the longest step (for it never ends) is to evaluate the effectiveness of omnichannel marketing techniques. Doing so is critical to identify areas for improvement in messaging, campaign spending, and creative components.
Modern organisations should take advantage of media planning tools to generate “what-if” plans by considering multiple KPIs, budgets, media mix, target audience, etc. As a result, a detailed media plan can be created that maximises ROI and enhances future planning and decision-making.
Advantages of Omni-channel Marketing
Every customer’s inbox is overcrowded with personalized messages from different brands, so they’ve become picky when choosing one. So, even if you already have a large customer base, ensuring customer loyalty is complicated.
Almost every brand out there swears by omnichannel marketing strategies for the best results. Although implementing a multichannel marketing strategy can be complex, it offers numerous advantages once mastered.
1. A Distinct Brand Identity
A seamless and successful omnichannel strategy ensures a cohesive brand voice and image so customers can instantly recognize your company. Accordingly, an organization should create a brand image following the requirements and preferences of its target audience.
By prioritizing the overall customer experiences and leveraging brand guidelines to cater to various channels, one can create a more comprehensive omnichannel strategy for greater customer loyalty and consistent messaging.
2. Improving Experience
A practical omnichannel strategy focuses on the customer journey across multiple marketing channels (both online and offline channels) instead of centralising on a single channel. As such, it keeps the customer in the spotlight instead of the marketing platform, resulting in more sales and customer retention.
3. Better Attribution Data
To execute a fully omnichannel approach, utilising effective omnichannel marketing tools, such as customer relationship management and data analytics, is crucial to enhance the customer experience across all touchpoints. Businesses comprehensively understand the buyer’s journey by monitoring customer interactions across various channels. This includes how consumers interact with your brand and which campaigns are the most effective.
Additionally, the data gathered can be employed to improve the effectiveness of future campaigns and optimise media spending.
4. Revenue Boost
An omnichannel approach encourages customers to interact across various platforms and devices, engaging with multiple touchpoints and channels. This leads to a direct increase in customer engagement, whether through a desktop or mobile device, which results in more revenue.
A well-structured omnichannel campaign resorts to sending the right message, personalizing it for each customer. This increases the probability of customers making future purchases from the same brand.
And even if you have just a handful of returning customers, they will constitute more of your total revenue. This is because they are easier to sell to, and they tend to spend more on your brand.
Limitations of Implementing Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
1. Inefficient Utilisation Of Customer Data
An effective omnichannel marketing strategy requires businesses to collect and manage customer data from offline and online channels. This process is undoubtedly complex, as different channels may use different formats and systems.
Users interacting with a brand tend to leave/submit information like email addresses, contact numbers, etc. However, most data becomes outdated as people move and change locations, rendering the collected data useless.
This further leads to a lack of coordination among the teams managing different channels, leading to disparate systems and outdated data. Overall, this hinders the ability of the brand to leverage customer data effectively.
But all is not lost if you comprehensively understand your customers and prospects. As such, it’s essential to identify and rectify insufficient, replicated, and outdated data to avoid wasting your marketing efforts.
Moving on, you must ensure that all the information you gather about the user is integrated into a single system accessible by both your sales and marketing teams. This will allow sales teams to collaborate and provide personalised offers to customers.
2. No Action On New Findings
A survey conducted by CMO Council and RedPoint Global indicated that marketers struggle to take advantage of their existing data to enhance experiences. Although 42% of marketers have employed more than ten solutions in data, marketing, etc., only 3% are confident about their data and systems being cohesively connected.
This is concerning because this data can provide valuable insights into customer behaviour and preferences. Failure to act on this data could result in an ineffective marketing approach.
That’s when one can address this issue by hiring technical professionals to optimise the available technology and customer data. These insights can help to develop a more effective omnichannel marketing strategy.
3. Not Identifying The Right KPIs
Omnichannel strategies can only become fruitful if marketers maintain consistency in all four stages: Awareness, engagement, conversion, and delight. Despite measuring overall campaign effectiveness, marketers often overlook measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at each stage of the buyer’s journey. This gap prevents them from gaining meaningful insights into each stage and hinders efforts to improve the customer experience.
Hence, instead of measuring overall campaign results, marketers should measure KPIs for every stage in their customer journeys. For instance, analysing unique visitors during the awareness stage or visit duration during engagement can determine user interest in your product. These insights can create appropriate personalised messages for prospects and customers.
4. Ineffective Marketing Strategy
Although marketers realise the effectiveness of devising omnichannel marketing, many struggle to develop effective strategies. This results in a disconnected experience.
To address this issue, marketers should prioritise the customer and place them at the centre of their strategy. Identifying the various touchpoints in the customer journey, utilising technology, and adopting a data-driven approach is essential for creating an effective strategy. Continuously testing campaigns is also crucial in acquiring and retaining customers, ultimately improving the overall effectiveness of the omnichannel marketing approach.
5. Isolated Analytics Measurement
In a research paper on the omnichannel marketing strategy, Glen Cook discusses the difficulties of evaluating stores’ performance that support digital sales. According to Cook, traditional metrics like profit, turnover, and sales may not accurately reflect a store’s profitability in the omnichannel context. Instead, the store’s value should be measured based on its contribution to the sales process.
Cook suggests that isolating different touchpoints for evaluation will not provide a complete view of the strategy’s effectiveness, as the boundaries between online and offline channels become blurred. So, to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the progress, it is necessary to view all touchpoints as part of a larger ecosystem and analyse them from a top-down perspective.
By doing so, one can identify which channels performed well and which ones need improvement, allowing for the effective realisation of loopholes and overall campaign performance improvement.
6. Improper Content Strategy
The success of an omnichannel strategy largely depends on the quality of its content. A poorly executed content strategy can lead to campaign failure. With customers using various mediums, such as social media, websites, and mobile applications, a “spray and pray” approach to content creation may be irrelevant to specific segments of users.
As such, a brand must identify the touchpoints customers use to interact with the brand and create content that aligns with their personas and needs. For instance, when you find an interesting reel on Instagram, you feel tempted to tap on the creator’s profile and check out more of their work. You may even sign up for their product/service. Similarly, relevant content highly increases the likelihood of purchase, subscription, etc.
7. Failure In Implementation
According to a study by Yes Lifecycle Marketing, coordinating campaigns across multiple channels is challenging for two-thirds of marketing executives at large companies. The study cites silos and organisational structure as primary reasons for implementation failure, with the addition of new channels like mobile apps and social media further complicating the process.
