The New Omnichannel Consumer – When it comes to running a successful business in today’s modern world, there is nothing more crucial than presenting a cohesive, unified message to consumers through the multiple digital and physical channels used to communicate your brand. This principal is known as having an omnichannel presence and is what often determines the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. As the next-stage digital growth specialists, Fresh Digital Media has helped multiple clients to intelligently integrate and consolidate their messages in meaningful, culture-aware ways that help drive the consumer across and throughout multiple platforms in order to create a user-centered experience centered around uniting multiple channels of communication.
So, what exactly is an omnichannel approach and why is it so important? At its roots, omnichannel communication unifies your message and brand across all platforms so that your target consumer is easily able to navigate across and between them. And while inter-platform communicability might have been a secondary priority ten years ago, in today’s post-pandemic age of online shopping and digital reliance, having an omnichannel presence is not just encouraged—it’s vital to survival. According to research conducted by McKinsey and Company, “more than half of customers engage with three to five channels during each journey they take toward making a purchase or resolving a request,” and they expect the information they access across these channels to be consistent. McKinsey also reported that not only is the general consumer preference moving towards preferring an omnichannel experience—it’s becoming the universal expectation.
How to market to the omnichannel consumer
Tailoring your brand so that its message is identical across all platforms can be a daunting task and requires a high degree of diligence to carry out correctly. However, there are several steps that you can take to succeed in adapting to the omnichannel consumer.
- Create a seamless user experience between your online presence and physical stores: Ensure that what the consumer experiences while visiting your online storefront is consistent with the experience that they will have when they enter your physical store. This can entail looking at your brand identity, overall message, and app and virtual logistics and comparing them to your physical brand components.
- Establish and maintain an identifiable brand across all platforms: Creating a brand that is recognizable and consistent with a clearly defined goal helps to tie all of your channels together—be they social media, website, or a physical store—and unify the experience that the consumer will have. This helps with overall customer retention and successful shopper-to-buyer conversion.
- Collect data about your consumers and use that to guide them through your online presence: Using an analytics platform or other service can provide you with actionable insights that allow you to map how your customers and consumers navigate through the various platforms associated with your brand before making a purchase. This can inform later decisions about which areas of your omnichannel presence need adjustments to create a more cohesive message.
- Focus on the brand, not the channel: Oftentimes companies tailor their content to each specific channel, which can result in a disjointed overall message that ultimately loses consumers. Create your brand independently of any platform and then emphasize adapting each platform to your brand, rather than the other way around.
- Account for cross-device interactions: Whether you are tracking consumers via an analytics platform or some other way, it is important to consider that consumers are often accessing your message from multiple devices. The format of these devices should be compatible—for example, the app interface should complement both the website and social media interfaces, and all digital platforms should align with any contact the consumer would have in a physical location.
About eighty percent of all buying decisions start online, meaning that businesses cannot afford to be cavalier when it comes to cultivating a cohesive digital approach across all platforms. Although the process of creating an omnichannel message can be a daunting one, Fresh Digital Media can work with you to craft and carry out a specialised strategy for delivering a unique, unified message tailored directly to your consumers across all platforms that they may be accessing, both virtual and physical.
