What Are The Core Basics Of Omni-channel Marketing? By Cedarwood Digital

Omnichannel marketing is an integral part of most digital marketing campaigns, but getting all channels to effectively work together and report on them as one can often be a challenge, so how do you master the basics of omnichannel marketing and actually do it? does it work for your business?

Cedarwood Digital is one of Manchester’s leading digital agencies, working with a diverse set of national clients to improve their business’s visibility online through organic, earned and paid channels. With 12 years of Digital Marketing experience under her belt, Amanda Walls founded the business six years ago, which was recently named the UK Small Business Agency of the year in 2021, now Amanda shares some hacks on understanding omnichannel marketing.

Create branding guidelines and consistency

Regardless of the brand or service, when approaching an omnichannel marketing campaign, consistency is key. Users can take up to ten touch points before they engage with a brand and if you’re putting your brand in front of your target market, then having a consistent tone of voice, guidelines and material will help keep that user journey as smooth as possible. Ideally start with a brand guidelines document, one central hub where you keep everything including graphics, colors, fonts, tones of voice, branding approaches – basically anything related to how the brand should come across. Remember to reference this at every point of the omnichannel journey.

Understand your consumer

Once there is an understanding of how the brand should come across, the next step is to understand who this is coming to – who is your audience? Audience profiling plays a key role in omnichannel marketing because, when it comes to building a funnel and identifying the right channel for the right stage, it’s important to understand what that audience looks like and most importantly, what their wants and needs are. Audience profiling and building personas is a great way to start and this can be done through either initial market research, competitor analysis or just your own data and product knowledge!

Plan and identify your funnel

Building a funnel is essential to omnichannel marketing; the marketing funnel should consist of a number of different stages, usually Top Of Funnel (the research stage), Middle Of Funnel (the consideration stage) and Bottom Of Funnel (The Purchase/Engagement stage). At each stage in this funnel, a different channel or a different approach to channel should be used. In the initial stages, building a funnel and mapping each channel to each stage of the funnel will help you identify which funnels you need at which stages and help you develop an effective overall strategy.

Test your channels individually and together

Test and Learn plays an important role in any omnichannel campaign; this means looking at each channel initially individually and evaluating how it works to advance your business objective. After you have evaluated each channel, individually test it in cooperation with other channels; an example here might be using Display and Paid advertising together. Display advertising is usually used to drive brand awareness but may not be sufficient alone to drive conversion; by using this in conjunction with other more direct channels, such as Paid advertising or Meta remarketing, you can drive conversions. Often you need multiple touch points to drive conversions, so it’s important to put a value on each element in this journey and really assess how much value each channel brings and how they work best together.

Understand attribution

For anyone looking to undertake omnichannel marketing, attribution is key. Each channel will usually have its own preferred attribution strategy but, unless you can bring all of these together in one place, you could find yourself over-allocating to certain channels or under-allocating to others. Solutions to this can be found by using platforms like Google Analytics, along with additional features like UTM codes to help bring all the different channels together into one platform with one attribution model. In turn, this allows all channels to be shown together and a better understanding of how each one performs individually and also works together with the others.

By following the tips outlined above, you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful omnichannel marketing experience!