MarketStar Blog

Over the past few years, the retail industry has been negotiating with the challenge of adopting an omni-channel strategy for providing a unified experience to its customers across all channels. The reason for this is not hard to find. According to research1 conducted by the Aberdeen Group, companies with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, increase their annual revenue by an average of 9.5% year-on-year and decrease their cost per customer contact by an average of 7.5% each year. 

Here are four steps to achieving a seamless omni-channel retail experience: 

Start with a Clear Strategy 

Any strategy that you develop for creating an omni-channel experience should begin with the customer. All stakeholders within the company, be it marketing, customer success or product need to buy into this new approach of making the customer the center of all that you do. 

In order to develop a clear strategy you need to identify the key touch points that your customers frequent and see how you can enhance their journey at each one of them, based on the stage at which they are in the customer journey. 

New Age selling requires that your engagement with customers be contextually relevant to what they are looking for and where they are in the customer journey at any given point in time. You are thus able to offer timely solutions to problems for which they are seeking answers. That’s context-driven marketing, also called contextual marketing. 

Live streaming has become a game-changer in the digital marketing world. It offers businesses a unique way to connect with their audience in real-time, creating a sense of immediacy and engagement that pre-recorded videos can't match. Live streaming not only helps you build stronger relationships with your customers, but it also adds a personal touch to your brand and makes your audience feel more involved.

As customers seamlessly navigate between different channels during their buying journey, it is important for brands to reach out to and engage with them at each of these touch-points. One such channel that has fast gained importance in facilitating this journey is video.  

With more than 3 billion hours of video watched on YouTube alone per month, video is becoming one of the most important channels for content discovery and engagement. And the best part is that utilizing the channel requires minimum monetary investment for marketers. But even though this channel can be used for free, not using it right would be a costly mistake for brands.  

We have outlined some of the best practices for brands that are looking to use video as a channel for enhancing customer experience with the brand: 

Creating a video is not as simple as picking up your camera and filming; there are many aspects of the planning and actual execution of videos which need to be carefully decided upon to have an effective video campaign. Various aspects such as the type of audience that the video is intended for, the video format, the design etc. need to be carefully planned out. Here are some of the points to keep in mind while creating videos for your business: 

It’s often said that when it comes to marketing, data is king. Numbers don’t lie – with the staggering volume of data being generated today, the truth about your customers’ needs, preferences and behavior patterns are out there; all that remains is for you to gather that data and decode it. This is where Data Management Platforms (DMPs) have a key role to play. In this article, we’lllook into five key challenges that must be overcome for the successful implementation of a DMP. 

Mobile is an ideal channel for real-time engagement with prospects and customers who consumer information using multiple devices. Armed with high-spec phones, today’s professionals not only rely on mobile devices to stay connected round-the-clock, but also to keep their fingers on the pulse of news, markets, etc. and to make purchase/business decisions when working remotely. 

In today’s complex dynamic digital world, marketers must engage a multi-instrumented customer with a shorter than ever attention span at multiple touch points across multiple channels, sometimes at the same time. And they may have all but 30 to 300 milliseconds at any one touch point to grab the customer’s attention, share their story, make a connection and secure their intent to purchase. 

Only a few years ago, the term social media was restricted to social interactions on a Friendster or MySpace page. Fast forward a few years and you find social media playing a pivotal role in almost all aspects of our daily lives and interactions – from purchasing decisions to election results. With the clever blend of convenient technology and interaction capabilities, social media is now redefining how people communicate, consume and distribute information.  

Did you know that 50% of people learn about the latest happenings and events in the world through social media? Studies have found that the average time spent by people aged 18 to 64 years old on social media is more than three hours daily! What does this mean for the B2B marketer? It means that if you are not where your customers are, you will be losing precious business. 

The rise of social media networks has caused a significant shift in the manner in which people interact with brands. When pleased with a brand experience, customers now express their sentiments in the form of a like on a Facebook or LinkedIn page and when displeased, send an angry tweet on Twitter with the ability to do irreparable damage by going viral. As a B2B marketer, this change in customer behavior coupled with the opportunities presented by the channel itself means that you can no longer afford to ignore this medium. 

With the advent of new social networks, there is a tendency and also an added pressure for marketers to utilize all the social channels. But B2B marketers must strictly only use those channels which are effective for the objectives they plan to meet. This means that while making a social media marketing plan, you should map your overall objective to social media channels which are effective in meeting those objectives. Here is a list of some of the most important objectives for B2B marketers along with the social media strategies for each one of them: 

Technology over the last five years has integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, and it’s not just coming from Silicon Valley anymore. It’s spreading (some may think like the plague—thanks mom), from New England based start-ups to the newly termed Silicon Slopes of Utah. Huge surges of technology start-ups resembling the dot-com days have emerged. Everything has become more efficient, better integrated, and dare I say more complex. Especially as we start talking about direct sales teams.