Let’s talk about customer experience (CX), shall we? It’s what defines your company’s success and sets you apart from the rest. It also happens to be an integral part of omnichannel marketing.
As opposed to multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing is best described as an integrated and comprehensive sales approach to reach out to prospects no matter where they are. Instead of targeting the social platforms individually, omnichannel marketing takes into account both online as well as offline channels to align messages, designs, and objectives to offer a seamless customer experience. This explains why you as a brand need to be ‘omnipresent’ at every step of your buyer’s journey.
The world of B2B marketing is mainly about ROI, but given the limited budget as opposed to B2C, it gets a tad bit more complicated than usual. Most B2B companies invest their time and money in multichannel marketing; however, they seem to be falling short on consistency and fluid customer experience. Implementing omnichannel marketing for the B2B industry means that manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors will have to optimize their sales channels in order to reach out, engage and meet their target customers’ needs.
Problems arise when B2B marketers try to integrate omnichannel marketing into their offerings. Brandon Spear, President of global B2B payment and credit solutions provider MSTS says, “If you purchase from a retailer who has a B2B channel from their e-commerce platform, then walk into a physical store, or maybe you phone them to place an order - how does that seller still maintain their omnichannel solution for you so they know who you are, and interact with you the same way, whether you're online, or on the phone, or in a physical store? That's a challenge.”
But having said that, MSTS was able to announce its launch of Credit-as-a-service (CaaS) solution, which is an omnichannel set of applications to enable B2B sellers to manage all the aspects of their customer relations. This way, they get to focus on improving the overall customer experience in the long run.
Since customers don’t just interact with a brand over one channel, omnichannel marketing can integrate their experience throughout all the channels. Take a look at Centro for instance, it’s a company that merges programmatic advertising software with tools for buying, media planning, analysis, and reporting. Jared Rosenbloom, Director of Media Strategy and Operations at Centro says, “In multichannel marketing, the goal is to have as many touchpoints as you can – you want to push your message out as many times as possible to as many people as possible. It’s cheaper because your efforts don’t have to be coordinated. omnichannel marketing is different: It’s about understanding the path to purchase that an individual takes and how can we speak to them at different points on that path.”
To sum it all up, it’s only a matter of time before every B2B marketer out there switches to omnichannel marketing. With the assistance of technological advancements, it won’t just enable you to offer seamless customer experience but also strengthen and build customer lifetime value for the existing customers.