Omnichannel Marketing: It’s Baaaack!

If you’re paying attention at all to the digital marketing world, many people are talking about omnichannel marketing. Like we like to do in the marketing world, we make up terms that mean the exact same thing as the terms we made up before. We like to rehash marketing terms (see what I did there?)

We talked about omnichannel marketing back in the day when online marketing first surfaced.  Back then we discussed offline versus online, so the omnichannel approach referred to doing both online and offline marketing. Connecting efforts in both places provided the most impact.  

When I’m talking about omnichannel marketing today, I’m still talking about combining online and offline activities but we’re adding a more sophisticated digital component to the mix. So, same old, same old kind of.

Omnichannel Marketing: No Silos Please

Frequently, I notice that business owners or just people in digital marketing are trapped in their silos when it comes to determining what works for digital. They’re either all about organic or all about email or all about ads like Facebook or Google.

People are experts in different areas, and so naturally they like one form of marketing in digital better than another. The truth is, one form is not necessarily better than another.

Marketing channel decisions really depend on the target clients, target market, typical purchase behavior of the customer, the length of the sales cycle (long or short), and the type of budget allocated. There are lots of factors that go into choosing the type of marketing you should do.

But as a general rule of thumb, you should take an Omnichannel approach. You should not put all your eggs in one basket or another.

Omnichannel Marketing: You are Here and Here and Here

For example, take paid channels versus organic or SEO growth. We don’t know what is going to happen when it comes to SEO. I’ve talked about this in another video before. It’s completely plausible that websites might not be a thing someday. Who knows? Google keeps taking over the page more and more to where all you see are ads.

However, that doesn’t mean that you should completely abandon SEO and move into Google ads or Facebook ads exclusively even if you have more control over these paid platforms. You still need to do SEO and if you’ve seen my video on what SEO really is, you’ll know SEO is all about optimizing your site, not just for Google, but also for your website visitors (or people as I like to call them). SEO encompasses a lot of different elements.

If you focus only on paid or only on SEO, you’re limited to catching people all the way at the end of the funnel or all the way at the beginning of the funnel. You have to have a constant mix or an omnichannel approach. We’re constantly trying new tactics, letting the data tell us what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do moving forward as things change.

Conclusion

There are strategies that we might take today that are not going to work next week, because Facebook had an algorithm update or Google had an algorithm update, or Google gave some sort of new audience that’s available. So, in general, if you want to be smart about your overall digital marketing, take an omnichannel approach.

Take an ad budget and put it in Facebook, in Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, etc. – wherever you can find your audience. At the same time, take an SEO approach to improve your customer’s overall online experience.  Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.

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