The 4 Best Practices for Building Your First B2B Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
The head of procurement for a construction company visits your website, clicks on the live chat bubble, and initiates a conversation. The following week, they go on your company’s social media account. A few days later, they shoot you an email requesting a quote for 10,000 units of SDR26 HDPE cable ducting pipes, then a week later, they visit your company offices to discuss your proposal.
This is the new business landscape. Clients are finding and interacting with you on multiple channels. As a digital agency in Dubai, we are excited about this development. Imagine the possibilities presented by your increased accessibility to your target market and your prospects’ willingness to engage with you on various platforms.
At the same time, we know it can be challenging to navigate this brave new world. Hopefully, the following best practices will help you build your omnichannel marketing strategy.
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing refers to establishing your brand and reaching your clients across multiple channels.
What are these multiple channels? These include your website, social media accounts, SMS, social media, app, and messaging platforms. Your office, call center, trade show exhibits, and brick-and-mortar locations are also part of these marketing channels.
However, you must remember that omnichannel marketing doesn’t simply mean having a dedicated team to handle every channel. In a multi-channel approach, channels effectively stand alone, isolated from other channels.
In omnichannel marketing, your marketing strategy is cohesive and encompasses all channels. Your brand is consistently presented from channel to channel. More importantly, you don’t miss a beat even when a client interacts with you using multiple channels. You always have a handle on a client, and you can effectively track him and personalize your interactions with him even if he flits from one channel to another.
In short, omnichannel marketing creates a superior connected experience for your clients.
Omnichannel Marketing Best Practices
Omnichannel marketing requires skills, indeed, so if you can, obtain professional help. Remember, too, to adhere to these omnichannel marketing best practices.
1. Consistent Branding
You should have a consistent voice, a unified message, and coherent visuals no matter which channel your client uses to engage with you. The way you talk to your clients on social media should be consistent with how you respond to them via email or chat.
It’s not just the tone and color of your voice that must be consistent. The message itself should be coherent, too. You should ensure that the problems your service solves and the benefits your product brings come through in all your platforms.
2. Personalization
Suppose you’re a plastic pipes manufacturer. Your HDPE pipes can be used in the energy sector, housing and commercial development, and municipal infrastructures. In each of these use-case scenarios, you are dealing with a different customer demographic.
To be precise, to an oil and gas company, your product is a conduit for transporting their products or toxic waste. Meanwhile, municipal development clients use your pipes to ferry wastewater to water treatment facilities. In other words, your product solves different problems for different companies. Thus, your messaging could also vary depending on your audience.
Note that your messaging should still be unified and consistent across channels. A procurement manager for a construction company will still receive consistent messaging whether they go to your social media, visit your website, call you on the phone, or read your email. However, you will have different messages tailored to specific client groups or demographics.
When you send a marketing email to a specific client, you should tailor your message to their needs and background. You should also customize it according to where they are in the client journey based on their past interactions with your company.
3. Data-Driven Approach
For successful personalization, you need to take a data-driven approach to marketing. It’s best to have a data management platform that gathers data from all marketing channels into a central database.
This breaks down data silos. Data from social media channels, call centers, emails, text messaging channels, and all other channels are collected in real-time and integrated into a single data platform. This provides marketing teams visibility over all their marketing activities, initiatives, and critical performance metrics.
With a centralized data platform, you can analyze client data, arrive at conclusions, and adjust marketing campaigns accordingly. This also ensures that different teams handling the various channels will always have real-time information about clients at their fingertips.
4. Omnichannel Marketing Automation
A marketing automation software or platform can take your omnichannel marketing to the next level. Marketing automation will help you personalize your marketing and maximize the usefulness of your marketing data.
Used correctly, this tool will automate your lead generation activities and nurture such leads through personalized marketing via different channels until they can become sales.
Starting Is the First Step
Don’t be overwhelmed by omnichannel marketing. At its core, it’s all about taking a holistic approach in your marketing efforts.
That being said, there is a right way to implement an omnichannel marketing strategy. One of these is ensuring coherence in your branding and messaging across the various channels you use to engage and interact with your clients.
Our brand strategy agency Dubai can help you achieve this. Other best practices include personalization, data analytics, and marketing automation.
It doesn’t end there. There are many other best practices to remember. The best course of action is to embark on omnichannel marketing under the guidance of marketing professionals.
Talk to us now so we can help you benefit from a well-thought out omnichannel marketing strategy.