Transcripts
1. Introduction: As a small child, I found myself gravitating
toward commercials, print advertisements,
and magazines. Then it just
continued from there. I found myself, in
my later teen years, working with friends and helping them to market their
talents and abilities, and I found that they
were being successful. I didn't know this was
marketing at the time, but fast forward, years later, I ended
up falling into a marketing position and I
haven't looked back since. I get to play every day, that's what it feels like, and I love it. Hi, there. I'm Jessica
Nevins, Marketing Executive. Today we're going to dive
into omnichannel marketing. I'm going to walk you through
strategies that will get you to a solution for you
and your organization. We're going to learn what
omnichannel marketing is. I'm going to give
you a definition. Then from there, we're going
to dig a little deeper. We're going to
understand the benefits. We're also going to understand the pitfalls so you
can avoid them. We're going to get deeper into your customer and how
to keep them engaged. We're going to analyze the
data that you learn about. Then we'll talk about
taking all of that in building an omnichannel solution that works for you and
your organization. We're becoming more and more integrated with
technology and this is an important foundational aspect to make marketing and
technology work together. For your class project, you're going to be
putting together an entire omnichannel
marketing solution for you and your organization. Then, once you've
had that complete, you can share it in
the Project Gallery. Then feel free to
ask questions in the discussion area and
I'll be happy to respond. It is my hope that
this class speaks to marketing leadership and anyone in the marketing department, and also those in the customer experience
department. Let's get started.
2. Defining Omnichannel Marketing: Omnichannel marketing
is so important for your organization
because it helps you to very distinctly connect with your customer in a way that
makes them feel engaged, and in a way that makes them
feel like you're offering them the solution to their
need or to their desire. The definition of
omnichannel marketing is a cohesive solution that leverages several
different channels to market to your
customer effectively. Those channels work together to get the message
delivered to the customer. Omnichannel marketing is a cohesive solution
that leverages all the different elements
of technology coming together to speak
to that customer, so that from their perspective,
it looks seamless. The different channels in an omnichannel
marketing solution look like social media, you have email marketing, you have outside ads. By outside ads I
mean something like a billboard or something
like a magazine ad. Then you have direct mail which can look like fliers that
you get in your mail. It can look like an actual piece of mail
like a self mailer, or maybe a letter package where it looks like
a plain letter, but you open it up
and it's actually an advertisement for you
or marketing to you. It can also be in store. The point of sale, meaning in a storefront is also part of
omnichannel marketing. Also your website. Whether or not your
website just provides content and awareness
for your brand, or whether it is an e-commerce store
that you have online. It's all of those
elements working together in a cohesive solution to market to your customer. The difference between omnichannel and
multichannel marketing. Now, you can hear
about both out there when you start
looking and hearing, well, what is the difference? It looks like the
same because there are the same elements in
multichannel marketing, however, they don't
talk to each other. In omnichannel marketing, think of it as a circular motion with your
customer in the center. It is customer centric, meaning that the channels within omnichannel speak to each other and provide a solution together to speak
to that customer. In multichannel, they're static, they don't flow together. They sometimes to a customer might appear to be disconnected. What are the pros and cons
of omnichannel marketing? Well, there are a lot of pros. With the pros, you can really
connect with your customer. They feel like
they're being heard and seen because you're hitting all the elements and it's a seamless
solution for them. It appears to be easy. It makes it easier for them
to complete a purchase or to access your service or whatever it is that
you're offering them. It's a very easy
solution for them, so the customer walks away feeling like they
have what they need. However, some of the cons to omnichannel
marketing is that, if you don't have your technology speaking to
each other in the right way, it might fall flat and you might miss communicating
with that customer, or there might be a disconnect. The timing might not be there. It's really important to ensure that you have those working
together at all times. Now, obviously, we live in
an imperfect world where sometimes power outages
happen or Wi-Fi drops out, or a website goes down. That happens. That can be a con, if you have a campaign
running or if you are in a holiday rush, but know that you can
get right back on track and start reaping the benefits of those
pros once again. With omnichannel marketing, what it takes to create a seamless solution for your
customer is a few things. Cross-form
functionality, which is what I spoke to earlier with
all the different points, all the different elements of the channels that are going in. That's the cross-platform
functionality. Understanding your
audience in that, segmenting out areas of your audience and specific
audience buckets, I'll call them, to speak to them in a way that works for them. Lastly, making sure that
you have KPIs in place, and by KPI I mean a Key
Performance Indicator. What do you want to see
happen in those channels? For example, when
an email is opened, are you going to measure what their
click-through rate is, what they're clicking on within your e-mail and if that is translating into ultimately
a sale on your website? I'm going to walk you through an example of
omnichannel marketing. On omnichannel, as we
talked about before, we have these
different elements, these different channels, so that can look like
your marketplace, and by marketplace that speaks to your online
store, for example. Then you have your
physical store. Some of you may or may not have a physical store experience in your organization
and that's okay. We can still work through that. But for those of you that do
have a physical storefront, that is part of your
omnichannel solution. Then you have social media, which we talked about as well. In your marketplace solution
is your inner marketing. Because if they
are in your store, you are going to want to have an inner marketing
solution attached to that. That's an extension
within your channels. Then you have your shopping ads. That's something that
can either be part of your social media experience or possibly a search engine
experience or beyond, like I talked about with
billboards and print ads and also having direct
mail pieces as well. So that's your
omnichannel solution. Your next step is to take
action on what you learned. Understand how
omnichannel marketing can work in your organization, and take an
evaluation of whether you have a potential
omnichannel solution, whether you have one in place, whether you are currently in a multichannel
marketing solution, or if you have nothing in place. If you have nothing in place to figure out which one is
going to serve you the best, and walk through the
examples that were provided and start to lay the groundwork
for your solution.
3. Reaping the Benefits: What are the benefits of
omnichannel marketing? I'm going to walk you through my six benefits that you can reap from
omnichannel marketing. Number 1, greater accuracy
in customer behavior. You can really get a deeper understanding of who your customer is and
what their needs are. Number 2, enhanced
brand visibility. This really increases
the awareness of your brand so that you stay top of mind
with your customer. Number 3, helps the
process of segmenting your data further so you can really understand
your customer. We're going to be looking at elements of that
that you can pull out to create really
powerful segments to speak to your customer. Number 4, it's cost effective
and very easy to leverage. Number 5, sync across
various departments and channels to get that
cohesive solution going. Number 6, it's much
easier to get specific in your targeting to
your customers and even the larger audience
of your consumers. Now that I've walked you
through these bullets, I want to show you a specific example of putting
these into action for you. This is my active
campaign screen. Active campaign is an
email marketing solution that offers a way for people to opt
in to your product or solution and build an
email marketing list. From this list, you
can put in tags, you can create segments. By a segment, I
mean, for example, you have someone that has opted into your marketing
campaign for A, B, and C, let's just call it. What you can do is you can
create a tag that has A, B, and C so that when someone opts in,
they have that tag. What this does is it creates these tags in a
little bucket for you, which I call a segment. You understand
that this consumer gravitated toward that campaign. You can speak
specifically to them and that campaign through
having these tags in place. It is essential to have tags like this and
segments in place for your omnichannel solution
to work properly because you'll be able to leverage that through
all the channels. Now it's your turn. It's time for you to take a
look at your organization and realize how it could benefit from an omnichannel
marketing solution. Do this with your team, do it on your own, maybe as a collaboration piece with other teams within
your organization, just so everyone can see the potential opportunity that omnichannel marketing can
bring to your organization. Go ahead and pull up your
worksheet and get started.
4. Avoiding Omnichannel Pitfalls : In this lesson, we're
going to speak to the pitfalls of
omnichannel marketing and how you can avoid them. What are these challenges
that you might run into? Number 1, gaps in consistency. This one can really trip you up. Consistency is such a key factor to your omnichannel solution. If you aren't consistent in how you're showing
up to your customer, it creates a disconnect, so you must be consistent. Number 2, a break
in convenience. Remember before how I said that the advantage to omnichannel
is ease for your customer? If you have some tech glitches, it's going to make your customer very
frustrated and granted. Like I said before, we live in a universe that
can be imperfect at times, so things might drop
off, that's fine. But going back to consistency, which I just touched on, It's really important
that if you do run into a tech glitch, that you get it resolved
as quickly as possible. Number 3, the data you're
using isn't relevant. What that does is it creates a strong disconnect
with your audience, with your customer,
with your consumer. If you're not speaking
their kind of language or speaking
to their need, they'll tune you out. In today's marketing world, there is so much coming at
everyone on social media, online, it's constant. The way you can stand
out is to speak to them. When you generalize, you can lose your
customer very easily. It's really important
to be relevant. Let me walk you through a
real-world example because I think all of us at some point or another have experienced this. Say you go online and you put something
in your cart online, but then you get distracted, you walk away, you
forget about it. What happens? Usually, if the company is smart, the organization is smart, they have their
omnichannel solution in play and you'll get a follow-up, you'll get an email follow-up. Maybe if they have
your phone number, you'll get a text message says, "Hey, you left this
in your cart". Well, maybe you don't
have time to check out at that time so you walk away. Then you're on your phone, you're on Instagram let's say, and you're scrolling through and there's an ad for
their accompany. You're like, "Oh, yeah, I forgot about that",
but you're too busy. You'll do it later. Then you go into the store and you like XYZ product and so
you say to the salesperson, "Oh yeah, I was looking
at this earlier", but then they don't
know who you are. You tell them, but they
don't have your information. They try to sell you a different product and that
creates a major disconnect. It makes the customer frustrated
because you're saying, "Hey, I spent all this time
online with your brand, with your product,
don't you know?" Because a lot of
brands out there nowadays have a really solid omnichannel
solution in play. You can see this in a lot of different areas where
you'll go online, you'll put it in your cart and then you'll go into
the store and they'll say, "Hey, I know you, you have this in your cart. Is this the one you still
want?" Then what happens? That customer feels
heard, appreciated, valued, like you get them. That's all on a
subconscious level. But when you don't
have that in play, when there's that disconnect of, "I did it online, I have to do it again in store?" That is a huge pitfall
and it creates a lot of discord with
you and your customer. It's time for you to
take action again. Once again, I want you to
pull up that worksheet, and I want you to identify
potential challenges and the pitfalls that
you could encounter regardless of whether you don't have an
omnichannel solution. If you don't have one in
place yet, imagine it. Imagine what would
happen if you had a disconnect and identify those
challenges ahead of time. If you do have a
multi-channel solution, maybe look at the challenges in your multi-channel
solution and how to convert it into a
successful omnichannel solution. If you have an
omnichannel solution in play right now but you
do have those challenges, it's time to get
real about them. It's time to look at them
and figure out how to start putting solutions in
place. I know you can do it.
5. Understanding Your Customer: Time to dive in to my favorite lesson in this
omni-channel solution, which is understanding
your customer. Really like ultimately
getting in there and understanding what they're about and what makes them tick. Where do we begin with this? Well, it's time to look
at who your audience is? Who is your ideal customer? Who is that ideal consumer? Do you have an
idea who they are? What they're about? What makes them tick? What keeps them up at night? These are all examples of questions that you can
start thinking about. Because you obviously
have a product, a solution, a service that
you're offering to the public. What kind of customer
wants that solution? What do you want them to do? Obviously, is to engage with your brand and your solution, but how do you get them there? What do they look like? What are their attributes? We're going to just dig
into that a little deeper. Now this is where it
gets really fun for me. I'm going to tell you what
some of these attributes are. You've got age,
you've got gender, you've got things
like marital status, is their presence of
children in their household? Where are they located? What's their household income? What's their education level? If you have the data available, you can look at, have they purchased
other products of yours? How long have they been
a customer of yours? You can look at other types
of models of behavior as well that are
applicable to your brand. Now that can get
really specific, and there's just a wide array
of possibilities there, so much so that we don't have
time to cover all of those. But, at the very basis, you can start with the key elements of understanding those
factors such as age, marital status, if that's
relevant to your brand. Those are things that can
be very much in flux, and once again, as I stated, those are just some examples. However, it's really
important to know what is relevant to your
product, to your brand, to your service, and then go from
there and figure out what makes your customer
tick and what they're about. Now it's time for you
to take some action. I had a feeling you
knew this was coming. [LAUGHTER] It's time for you to build out what I call a persona. Now, this persona can be
a fictional customer. We went through some
of those attributes, what are the attributes of that customer relevant
to your product, to your brand, to your service? What are they about? I want you to write a little
synopsis about each one. Take the time, pull
up your worksheet, and write out three
customer personas that are applicable to
you and your brand.
6. Building Your Omnichannel Solution: In this lesson, we're
going to talk about building your
omnichannel solution. Once again, I had talked
about earlier on, you want to make
sure that this is relevant to you and
your organization. Obviously, your
organization is going to be different than
someone else's. It's really important that you use some of those
key elements and those channels within
the omnichannel to figure out without
looks like for you. You're going to have
different audiences, and as we did in
the last lesson, we understood more about personas and what your
audience is looking for. What I like to do when I'm thinking about my
omnichannel solution for brands and companies
that I've worked with is I build out
what I call a journey. There's something in
marketing that we like to refer to as journey mapping. Now it can get very granular and you can
do it for campaigns, you can do it for emails, but the example that I'm
going to show you is just a little snippet of an
entire omnichannel solution. This is an example of a
solution where we had a call center and we had also emails and we had text
messages in play. What was happening is
they would go online, they would fill out a form and within that form was a request
for their email address, a request for their SMS, their phone number,
their cell phone number. What that did is it
went into the system to see if they were eligible for this particular
product or service. Now, they would call in, they would get their email that if they were going
through the process. They would get prompts
for these emails. Then, as you'll see
demonstrated in this journey, you see the little icon with the customer
service rep in there. You see the little
icons with the emails. What the journey is
doing is it's walking through every step that your
customer is going through. You're seeing that there's two different areas
here that it can go to, meaning that if they
make a decision, yes, it goes down one way. If they make a decision,
no, it goes another. What I want you to do
is I want you to start thinking about these things and what your journey
would look like. It doesn't necessarily
have to be limited to email or to SMS or to a
customer call center. It can look like going from your website to the
email, to the store. It has lots of
different elements, but what you can do
is you can look at, how that all works together. Ultimately, what you want
to do is to understand your customers' experience
and to build a great, fantastic experience for them that'll keep them coming back. It's that time again, time for you to take action. I think you know where
I'm coming from here, where I'm asking you to build
out your own journey map. If your organization
does not have an omnichannel
solution or has one, but it's not quite working. This is a perfect example to use your imagination to
build out a journey. Keeping in mind those
customer personas, what would they
like to experience? What I want you to think
of and constantly have in the back of your mind is
the customer experience. That is what's going
to drive your journey. Have fun when creating
your journey. I've given you some examples on the worksheet and also given you a link to access some
journey mapping software.
7. Analyzing Integrated Solutions: Now we're going to dive
into the next lesson of analyzing integrated solutions, so let's dig in. What's the science behind
omnichannel marketing? Well, I can some it up for you in two words;
performance marketing. What is performance marketing? Performance marketing
is where we take a look at certain elements. Remember how I talked about key performance
indicators earlier on? We're going to look at those and why those are so important is that they can shape the
impact of your marketing, your campaign, whatever it is that
you're putting out there. Once you understand how your
customer is responding, it's going to make it very
easy for you to analyze that and to start making little pivots and shifts
where it's needed. Just to recap, there is science behind
omnichannel in general. Omnichannel marketing is a cohesive solution that
leverages technology. Yes, since technology
is an element there, there is some science. Once those things talk
together; those elements, those channels, once you have those channels talking together, then we can really fold in that performance
marketing element and then you'll have
your cohesive solution. With knowing your performance
marketing element, you can really start
measuring what's working and really build a
plan for success. As I was speaking about earlier, you're going to want to
understand those metrics, those key performance
indicators. Now you get to understand what works for you
in your brand. As you're listening to me, I just want you to start
thinking about these things. Are you going to be
sending e-mails? Are you going to be sending
out direct mail pieces? Are you going to be
sending out text messages? Are you going to be driving
traffic to your online store? Now, all of these elements have the potential
to be tracked, so within those
tracking mechanisms for example let's look at email. You can look at
click-through rates. Someone opens the email, you have an offer in there. They click on it, you
can monitor that. You can take that little
piece of data and start building that into an
Excel spreadsheet. Now, I shared my Excel
spreadsheet with you. There's a lot of
numbers on here, but please don't let that deter you and don't let
that overwhelm you. There is a method
behind this madness. What it is, and so remember
how we talked about segments. You'll notice that I have them really sectioned out
here by each segment, each column shows a
different segment. You'll see that on the far
left side of the spreadsheet, these are email metrics. They are the some of the
sent emails delivered, opened, clicked, unique
clicks, and so on. These are all metrics
that can be measured. Now I'm using email, but this can also be
done with other tactics. It can be done with direct mail, it can be done with
online visits. In that case, you'd
be looking at analytics tools for
online solutions. Take all of that information, drop it into a spreadsheet, and mine that data, and work with that data and
understand what's happening. You can build models from this. You can look at trajectories
and make projections. There's something
really exciting about that because you can
start to see trends. You can start to see what is resonating with
your audience, and once you get a
solid understanding on that you can really expand it and use it
to your advantage. Now it's your turn.
I want you to take some time to analyze your
integrated solutions right now. Take a look at what
you have in place. Do you do email marketing? Do you have an online store? Do you have a direct
mail campaign? I want you to look at all
these different elements. Do you have key
performance indicators? If not, what would they be? If you don't have any of
these things in play yet and your organization
is just getting started or maybe
it's a new division, then use your imagination. Start thinking about what
would you want to know? What would you want to track? Start building out your analysis and what it would look like, and go ahead and pull
up your worksheet. I've given you some
examples to start with.
8. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for spending this
time with me to learn all about omnichannel
marketing to benefit you, your team, and
your organization. We got to learn all
about the benefits. We got to learn
about the pitfalls. We got to learn how
to build it out. We got to learn how to speak
to your customer and to understand what
they're looking for so that you can continue to
build out that relationship. We got to understand what that solution looks
like and how you can keep it running to benefit you and your organization
and your customer. As a recap, it's time for you to take action with
your class project. What I want you to do is develop your cohesive omnichannel
marketing solution. Now I know we've had a few little milestones that we've touched through
all the way through. Now it's time to really
build that all together, weave it all together to
create your solution. When you're done, go ahead and share that in
the project gallery. And as always, feel free to ask questions and even add
to the discussion. Once again, thank you for taking my class and I hope to
see you again soon.
Jessica Nevins, Business Mentor | Marketing Strategist
