Omnichannel marketing sounds like a buzzword

A clever growth hack to growth hack.

But in reality, it’s anything but.

It’s an evolution of consumer behavior. A seamless experience no matter how or where someone is when they’re always-on.

Here’s what an omnichannel eCommerce strategy is, why it’s essential, how it’s changing the landscape as we know it, and 8 content marketing ideas that other smart retailers are using to exploit its potential.

What is an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy?

Let’s take a trip down memory lane for a moment.

It’s starting to get chilly outside. You really need that new sweater to keep warm.

So you hop in the car and drive over to the store.

But they’re already closed. Or it’s out of stock. Whatever. Real stores are the worst.

Jokes aside, there’s a reason 40% of all product searches start on Amazon. Because products are never out of stock. Plus free two-day shipping for Prime members.

Convenience reigns supreme.

It’s only recently that we’ve conflated the terms “promotion” with “marketing.” Back in the day, Promotion was just a subset. Marketers also worried about Product and Pricing and… Place.

Place (or Distribution) is, “The process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user, using direct means, or using indirect means with intermediaries.”

Today, distribution -- how and where you sell what you sell -- is a marketing strategy all of its own. Just look at what’s happened in social media over the last decade:

• YouTube grew by piggybacking off of MySpace’s user base.
• Facebook targeted select college campuses.
• Airbnb went after Craigslist.
• And Pinterest used an invite-only.

Pinterest is especially interesting because of what they’re doing now: Buyable Pins.

People can (and do) shop for products directly on Pinterest, without ever leaving their site to checkout.

That’s omnichannel marketing.

Hubspot describes it as, “the ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels, while factoring in the different devices that consumers are using to interact with your business.”

Case in point:

BigCommerce’s Omnichannel Retail report shows that online spending is distributed evenly between marketplaces, large retailers, web, and category-specific stores.

It also then goes on to say that people are doing this shopping while in bed, in the car, while physically standing inside another retail store, and even on the toilet.

Omnichannel eCommerce isn’t a tactic. It’s about being everywhere at all times. Because that’s how people are increasingly shopping: Fragmented, hopping from device-to-device, and channel-to-channel.

Add to this that people will commonly require 6-8 ‘touches’ prior to purchasing, and you can almost guarantee these people are (already) interacting with your brand across multiple places.

Today’s customer journey is nonstop. And people don’t personally consider the shopping experience in terms of channels. Only us crazy marketers do.

With that in mind, here are eight additional content marketing ideas to make your omnichannel marketing strategy omnipresent and omnipotent.

[Omnichannel Marketing Strategy #1] Be Global, But Act Local With Localized Content (Marketing) Strategy

If your ecommerce site serves and ships internationally, this one is for you. There no better way to increase local visitors’ confidence than having your website to be served in their local language and currency.

Let’s be honest, nobody likes to feel like an alien on their home turf.

However, if you want your visitors to experience a complete omnichannel experience, your website needs to be more than a simple translated version of your English-version site hosted in a separate country-specific directory (i.e. /es/ for Spanish' version). Your visitors should feel local even if they’re interacting with a global company.

Nike is a great example of a company that does international omnichannel marketing right (as they should be with all that money in the bank!).

Here’s a comparison of what their Australia and Spain sites look like:

Not only the language is different, but the content is also different.

We all know how important customer reviews are. Now, imagine this:

People from Spain reading reviews from other Spanish-speaking people. People from France reading reviews from other French-speaking people. If that didn’t boost conversions, I don’t know what will.

Here’s an example of how Nike (yes, again!) display customer reviews based on their localized content.

You can (and should) do more than language and currency conversions. In fact, localization should also happen OUTSIDE of your website; your social media profiles, for example.

Adidas is a great example of this. If you go to their Adidas Indonesia Instagram profile, you’ll see not only the typical Adidas rock-stars, like Lionel Messi and Karlie Kloss but also the local influencers (and it’s in their local language too, which is a big plus!).

Here are a few ideas to localize your content marketing other than the ones we have mentioned above:

• Integrate or collaborate with local companies,
• Create local advertising (i.e. display ads, print ads, video ads, etc.) that appeals to locals,
• “Hijack” local news and trends,
• Choose local buyers’ preferred payment methods.

[Omnichannel Marketing Strategy #2] Don’t Let Your Mobile Site be the Achilles Heel

Omnichannel marketing is being driven, in large part, by mobile devices.

There’s only one problem…

The vast majority of mobile sites still lag behind the bigger, bulkier desktop ones. Which completely undermines any omnichannel marketing effort.

57% of users will not recommend a company to a friend if a mobile site is not designed well, and 40% of users will go to a competitor’s site if they have a bad mobile experience.

That starts with layout and hierarchy. Because on tiny screens, the important stuff needs to be front-and-center, with secondary elements collapsed underneath. (In nerdy web dev terminology, mobile-first responsive sites are built on a ‘grid system’ that allows for easy expansion and collapsing depending on screen size.)

Here’s an example of mobile-first design compared to the larger desktop version:

Screen size isn’t your only limitation, however.

Limited processing power is a big one. Because it gives way to a silent, deadly killer that many don’t like to talk about: speed.

For example, Google just recently announced new benchmarks for mobile page speed.

Their study showed that the average mobile landing page takes 22 seconds to load.

You already know off that’s slow. Like, snail-paced slow.

But here’s the really bad news.

“The probability of someone bouncing from your site increases by 113% if it takes seven seconds to load.”

Kinsta’s own Page Speed guide found similar results, with “74% of would abandon mobile sites that don’t load within 5 seconds.”

Smaller screens, limited processing power, and shoddy connections can spell disaster for over-bloated websites and CMS’.

 (to be continue...)

By Dennis - Coredna