Businesses these days operate in a, as it’s dubbed, omnichannel world. Products are sold on multiple platforms, marketing touch points are planted on every (street)corner and consumers’ attention is being caught whenever they’re entering the online or offline world.
Businesses therefore invest heavily in marketing strategies that aim to encompass all these touch points, on all channels.
But despite the intention, the execution of the strategy is hardly ever omnichannel. Too often these strategies are implemented in a single-channel way.
Digital marketers tend to get different targets for digital campaigns compared to other communication teams. Recent developments by both Facebook & Google allow marketers to measure store visits that originated from digital marketing efforts. But the potential of the tooling is hardly ever understood properly and thus not always used. All too often the ROI of money spent on Google / Facebook Ads etc. gets measured based on online sales without taking offline purchases into consideration.
In short: target setting and evaluation occurs in silos. Retailers that started off offline, have a hard time adjusting their strategy to encompass both online & offline target setting in one overall approach, and thus the results are often disappointing.
In our experience a so called omnichannel strategy can only be successful and boost results if an organization embraces an omnichannel way of thinking both in strategy & execution. Omnichannel / RoPo – which stands for: research online, purchase offline – should not just be a buzzword floating through the organization, but a mentality implemented from within every layer of the organization.
The question however is: “How do you achieve this?”
Read along & find out.
