Influencer Marketing in Asia: An Interview with Aaron Brooks
Aaron Brooks
April 21, 2017
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The average consumer can experience more than 250 touchpoints across desktop, mobile, and bricks-and-mortar stores before they make a purchase. In fact, Harvard Business Review reveals that 73% of buyers use multiple channels during their shopping journey.
Not only do omnichannel buyers spend more (4% more in-store and 10% more online), but they also expect more from the brands they interact with. Seamless and frictionless customer experience is the name of the game if you don’t want to be left behind.
Let’s rewind and get back to basics, what does omnichannel marketing actually mean? Omnichannel marketing is a marketing approach that aims to unify all customer interactions with your brand into a single, frictionless customer experience.
Omnichannel marketing—unlike traditional marketing, takes into account the overall engagement of customers with your brand and offers tailor-made interactions, discounts, and rewards that reflect customers’ interests and expectations.
So, what does that look like in real life? Here’s an example:
In short, omnichannel marketing integrates all of the channels through which your customers can reach you, including your website, social media, and physical stores, giving you a more holistic overview of your customer’s interaction touch points, so you can offer a more personalised service.
Multichannel and omnichannel marketing may sound similar, but there are key differences between the two. While multichannel marketing takes into account the different channels through which your customers can reach you, each channel works in silo and doesn’t communicate with the rest of the channels in the pipeline.
In contrast, omnichannel marketing integrates all sales channels, creating a free flow of information between them.
Another distinction is in reach. While multichannel marketing may include social media ads and email marketing, omnichannel marketing looks at all the channels through which your customers can find you, and integrates them into the customer journey.
Omnichannel marketing may sound good, but it won’t work unless you have a clearly outlined strategy to guide your efforts. A robust omnichannel marketing strategy ensures that all your channels are working together and that they’re giving your customers a consistent, seamless experience with your brand.
It sets out key information about your messaging and brand positioning across channels, outlines how to use each sales channel to market your products and services, and details what data to collect along the way.
To help visualise it further, let’s look at how this translates to different sectors:
Retailers have to be particularly innovative in their marketing efforts. Not only do consumer expectations change all the time, but the technology that enables retail sales evolves constantly.
From in-store, website, and mobile-app interactions, all the way to live-streaming, augmented reality, and social shopping, consumers have endless choices when it comes to discovering and buying products.
Omnichannel retail marketing takes all these trends into account to differentiate your brand and provide a seamless experience.
Pharmaceutical brands often need to market to both healthcare professionals and individual consumers. These audiences will have different needs and expectations from your brand, so you need to use segmentation in order to tailor your messaging.
Individual consumers, in particular, can move between their GP, hospital, pharmacy or other healthcare services before they make a purchase, so you need to integrate all these channels into your strategy to send the right message at the right time.
Even though 91% of brands say they have or plan to work on their omnichannel strategy, only 8% feel like they’ve mastered omnichannel. This is not surprising when you consider that the channels through which customers find and engage with brands are continuously evolving.
Building an omnichannel marketing strategy can help focus your efforts, identify what works and doesn’t work, and build on prior performance to maximise results. Getting a strategy off the ground will need a significant undertaking, one that will most likely cut-across the organisation, beyond the marketing team. The tips below are intended to be a simple framework you can use to get started and identify your approach:
What do you know about your customers already? What time of day, or day of the week are they most likely to purchase? Are there any age, gender, and lifestyle differences between your different consumer groups, which need to be considered?
All of this information can guide your marketing strategy and how you choose to speak to each one of your target audiences.
Since omnichannel includes all the sales channels that your consumers will touch, you need to have the right tech to enable information sharing across channels. From a slick and mobile-friendly website to an easy checkout and payment process, you need an integrated tech stack that will remove friction and communicate across applications.
In order to get your customers to convert, you need more than just your marketing team onboard. As you’re working on integrating your messaging and sales channels, and incorporating the latest tech, make sure your sales, customer service, and other relevant teams are involved.
Setup a cross-functional taskforce and get representative voices from across the organisation involved. Communicate the benefits of what you’re planning to achieve. For example, share how the new piece of tech will bring them better leads, or how they can use the latest customer data to personalise their customer interactions.
Data is your friend. As you implement different marketing campaigns and ads, capture data on how your content, subject lines, and UX design performs. What sales channels are under-delivering? Is there a difference in conversion depending on when you send out your marketing emails? Does sending out an SMS help customers return to their abandoned shopping cart? Are the SMS messages ignored?
The more you dig into the data, the better you’ll understand what works and what doesn’t, to help you make better brand investment decisions.
When you’re launching your marketing campaign, be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. For instance, if your target audience hangs out mostly on Instagram and TikTok, don’t spread yourself thin by throwing yourself into all the social media platforms at once.
Instead, focus on posting consistent content and engaging with your audience on key channels, and then slowly add more if you need to. Another thing to consider here is how your brand messaging fits into each one of these channels.
For example, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter all have different rules around how long your posts can be, what hashtags are the most popular, and how you can comment and engage with people.
Your email content is also going to be a different length and style. Make sure you’re aware of these differences and adjust your content and CTA accordingly.
Finally, don’t forget to integrate your different channels so that you have a centralised view of your marketing efforts. There are several tools (both free-to-use and subscription-based) that can help consolidate these views into a single dashboard.
These brands have really taken omnichannel marketing to the next level:
Amazon leads the pack when it comes to frictionless customer experience and exceptional service. The brand strives to be one of the most customer-focused companies in the world and today, they act as trailblazers in ecommerce, advertising and customer service. Amazon users have several ways to browse and purchase products, including on Amazon’s website, mobile app, and via Alexa – their AI-based personal assistant.
How do they do it? For example, you can browse items on your Amazon mobile app and add nothing to the cart, but the next time you log into Amazon via the app or website, you might be prompted to continue shopping for the same items. Amazon also does a great job in targeting consumers with ads and personalised product recommendations based on past behaviours. All of this has helped make Amazon the eCommerce giant it is today.
When it comes to shopping for your next beauty product, Sephora offers a great customer experience. The beauty retailer has integrated mobile and in-store so much so that once a customer enters a physical store, the brand’s mobile app immediately offers them a store map and current deals to benefit from.
Customers can always add products to their Beauty Bag, which is similar to a wishlist, and see all of their purchasing history if they’d like to buy the same items again. Sephora also offers a ‘Reserve-Online-Pickup-In-Store’ option to create an easy and seamless shopping experience that bridges online with offline.
Fashion retailer Oasis is another brand that has nailed omnichannel by making it super easy for customers to shop online, in bricks-and-mortar stores or via their dedicated app. The website and their mobile app are fully integrated so that customers can move seamlessly between the two.
The brand also offers Oasis Unlimited – a paid, annual membership club for unlimited next-day deliveries. Not only is this great value for the customer, but it also gives Oasis a wealth of first-party data to create future promotions and target customers with personalised offers.
You’ll find plenty of other brands to learn from over in our case studies.
In order for your omnichannel marketing strategy to work in orchestration, it’s essential for your brand to have a dedicated platform that unites your marketing channels to give you a bird’s eye view of your data. A good platform will integrate real-time data about your customers, their purchase behaviours and—subject to permission settings, their location and communication preferences.
Investing in software that helps facilitate omnichannel marketing will centralise all your customer data, including point of sale information that will allow you to automate processes. One of the many advantages of leaning into automation, is the ability to have access to the right information at the right time (like in the Sephora example) to personalise the customer experience.
For instance, once you segment your customers into different groups, you can automate the messages they receive at each phase before and after they’ve made a purchase. You can further nurture them by offering discounts and personalised offers based on their search history and prior purchases.
‘Show me you know me’ is the holy grail chased by customers, and an integrated omnichannel platform allows you to do precisely that.
There are several omnichannel marketing platforms out in the market, and which you choose will depend on different variables such as your immediate objectives, business need, functionality desired, and of course, your budget.
Here are some of our top pics we think are leading the way when it comes to functionality and value for money:
With so much competition, brands and entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for ways to stand out and build better rapport with their customers. Personalisation and targeted messaging capabilities have come a long way, and these marketing tactics are seen as crucial to responding to customer expectations as purchasing behaviours continue to evolve.
If you’re just at the beginning of your omnichannel marketing journey, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. As we wrap things up, some last pointers worth considering:
1. Start small. If you have a multi-channel operation, break your strategy down into individual modules that are tailored to each of these channels, and see where you can establish a common footprint.
2. Focus on your primary marketing channels first and incorporate more as you find out what works for your target customers.
3. Leverage technology where feasible and involve key stakeholders in the process, who can provide access to critical insights such as supply chain or fulfilment challenges that could impact the customer experience.
4. Test and learn. Not every tactic will yield results, but in the beginning, you’ll need to make small bets and trial different approaches. Use data to help make decisions and iterate fast.
5. ‘Show me you know me’ — we covered personalisation, but a final reminder never hurt anyone!
Feeling inspired? Influencer marketing should be one of the tactics you consider as you start to build momentum across social channels. Get started and create your next influencer campaign on Vamp.
