What's an omnichannel marketer?
An omnichannel marketer is a marketing professional who plans and executes marketing strategies that provide integrated, seamless experiences across multiple channels. This includes digital channels, such as email campaigns and social media platforms, as well as offline techniques like in-store promotional strategies or direct marketing.
Each of these channels represents critical customer touchpoints that guide shoppers on a journey toward making a purchase. An omnichannel marketer can create a unified marketing approach that increases customer satisfaction and conversion rates by ensuring that all touchpoints are aligned in their messaging, promotions, and brand voice.
What does an omnichannel marketing expert do?
An omnichannel strategist must have a deep understanding of multiple online channels and how to apply these learnings in ways that can be personalized to individual customers. It's their responsibility to map the customer journey, identify which traditional and digital marketing channels customers interact with, and ensure that messaging stays aligned with your core values.
This idea of meeting customers where they are separates an omnichannel marketing strategy from conventional multichannel marketing. A multichannel approach seeks to put messaging in as many places as possible rather than offering a personalized customer experience tailored to the individual consumer. To make this happen, omnichannel marketers also need to know how to leverage digital technology to optimize the management of their channels and increase customer acquisition.
Customer journey mapping
To design an effective omnichannel strategy, knowing how customers navigate your brand ecosystem is essential. This means understanding:
- Which channels are helping consumers to discover your brand
- How a customer interaction on one channel feeds into another
- Any common pain points that shoppers encounter
- Where/how shoppers are converting
- Which channel(s) provide the biggest stream of revenue
Mapping out the customer journey and distinct customer personas enables you to identify and analyze every key touchpoint that takes place, from the moment of brand discovery to when a purchase is made. This is important to help your brand better meet shopper expectations and differentiate itself from competitors.
Identifying and optimizing marketing channels
Rather than maintaining a presence in each and every marketing channel, an omnichannel strategy requires identifying which channels are the best fit for customer preferences and shopping behaviors.
For example, if your brand primarily targets a Gen Z audience, a strong social media preference is vital to building and cementing strong customer relationships. Email marketing, meanwhile, is less likely to be of interest to this particular customer base.
Once you've identified your channels, omnichannel marketing consultants will work to improve engagement with potential customers. This process may include refining your content strategy, boosting spending, increasing community engagement, and setting key metrics to measure success.
Marketing tech stack analysis
Even with an entire marketing team behind you, creating positive brand experiences across multiple is hard work. This is why you need to streamline the management of your channels by having the right toolkit.
An omnichannel marketer can optimize your tech stack through their experience of the unique demands of your marketing channels. Social media management software, for example, will help you manage your online presence across channels from one convenient place. If this is integrated with a more general project management tool like Hubspot, this also ensures that information is updated automatically across multiple platforms, freeing up cross-functional teams to work on more creative projects.
Brand and messaging strategy
For a truly unified marketing approach, your messaging and brand voice must be aligned across channels and provide an integrated experience. If existing or potential customers encounter conflicting information or impressions of your brand, this undermines brand trust and can affect customer retention.
In practice, omnichannel marketing consultants will oversee the creation and refinement of brand messaging over time to ensure it provides relevant, personalized customer experiences. This process involves customer data collection, behavioral segmentation, designing channel-specific brand guidelines, and omnichannel data analysis.
Marketing automation
As campaigns and planning grow more complex, automation has become increasingly important to execute omnichannel strategies effectively. By automating workflows where possible, omnichannel marketing professionals can focus more on creative initiatives while refining digital experiences and improving the overall effectiveness of campaigns.
As well as reducing time-intensive, manual tasks like scheduling social media posts and sending emails, automation software helps to enhance personalization by segmenting shoppers based on behavior, preferences, and A/B testing. These automated workflows identify and nurture leads through targeted messaging, which in turn leads to higher conversions.
How much does it cost to hire an omnichannel expert?
The cost of hiring an omnichannel expert depends on several factors, including:
- Whether you're hiring an in-house position or a consultant
- Years of experience
- Industry/niche
- The scope of responsibilities
A full-time omnichannel marketer can earn between $60,000 - $120,000 per year, depending on their experience and seniority. The range for independent omnichannel consultants also varies, with marketers making between $50 - $400 per hour.
Strategies for working with omnichannel specialists
1. Base all your decisions on data
Data-driven marketing is crucial with any strategy, but especially in omnichannel. With so many moving pieces, your omnichannel strategy needs to rely on one source of truth to keep messaging consistent. Customer data collection should take place across every channel to help you understand the user experience and where you can provide more relevant offers and content.
Without data, it's impossible to understand consumer behavior and understand what is driving customers to take certain actions. It's worth noting that less than 40% of companies are gathering or using first-party data effectively; by providing omnichannel specialists with this information from the outset, you're going to see measurable results much faster.
2. Align with your various departments
Omnichannel marketing efforts never take place in isolation; a cohesive approach to marketing requires teams such as Content Creation, Sales, Customer Success, and Analytics to be aligned in their approach. If the idea of a unified brand experience doesn't apply to your whole organization, this leaves open the possibility of inconsistencies that add friction to the customer experience.
For example, if your customer service team has access to a log recent customer interactions, but your sales team does not, this can cause problems when someone is handed over to another team. When there's no paper trail for your sales team to follow, this can result in duplicate activities during the lead nurturing process that could push away potential customers.
3. Conduct customer research
To create personalized experiences that inspire customer loyalty, your business needs to have deep insight into who your target audience is and how you can solve their pain points.
If you're considering launching a new product or expanding into a new digital marketing channel, getting the opinion of your customers should be your first point of call. Some ways to conduct customer research include:
- Email surveys
- In-app NPS surveys
- Contact forms
- Social media listening
How to hire the perfect omnichannel expert
Keen on hiring an omnichannel marketing specialist? Here's how to do it successfully:
1. Pick your goals
Before you bring an omnichannel marketer into your organization, you should have a clear set of objectives for what you want to achieve with your omnichannel strategy. Otherwise, knowing whether you're hiring the right professional for your needs is difficult.
For example, if one of your omnichannel marketing goals is to boost customer retention, then you should look for someone who is an expert in building cross-channel retention marketing campaigns. Creating a list of short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals is a good idea for clarity.
2. Write a job description
Once you have a clear set of goals, you need to create a job description outlining the full scope of the role and the successful candidate's responsibilities. A job description should be comprehensive and include the following:
- Job title
- A brief summary of the role
- Key responsibilities/tasks
- Relevant long-term metrics/goals
- Required qualifications/industry experience
- Information about the company/culture
3. Ask your network
Your professional network is a goldmine of recommendations for omnichannel marketing professionals, especially when they can back this up with the direct experience of working with an individual. If industry experience is essential for your marketing role, focus on asking your contacts in this space if they know anyone suitable. This will help you to zero in on high-value candidates that tick all the boxes, rather than fishing in the dark on job sites.
4. Use Mayple
Trying to find an omnichannel marketing expert independently can be time-consuming and stressful, especially when you're already tasked with running a business. If you don't have much time to hire marketing professionals, knowing what you should be looking for in your ideal candidate can be challenging - and if a candidate is everything they seem.
Instead, consider leveraging a purpose-built platform like Mayple to connect with top marketing talent you can trust to deliver. Our AI-powered algorithm uses 50+ factors to match your business with the right marketing professional to achieve your goals and grow your business.
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