Updated: August 6, 2019
Where is your customer? The answer is simple: everywhere. That’s why omnichannel marketing has emerged as a leading strategy for successful brands. Having a strategy that revolves around the customer journey enables brands to be responsive. According to a recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council study, this type of responsiveness is becoming the consumer expectation. It could even be the differentiator that sets brands apart from their competition.
But if you’re struggling to nail down an omnichannel strategy and enable responsiveness, where is the best place to begin? It all starts with your team(s). In order to create and execute a truly omnichannel strategy, you will need to build a team structure that promotes cross functionality.
The CMO study offers insight that supports several ways you can get started on creating an omnichannel team that is poised for responsivity.
Appoint the main overseer of your omnichannel strategy. This will be the one person that every team will report to. When there is a decision committee of managers, agreeing on a final decision can take too long and slow down the process, making it difficult to respond and react in the responsive way that is required. Of course, a committee can still provide input before a decision is made, but the main overseer should have full authority to make quick, insightful decisions that can be shared and implemented across teams.
Appointing an overseer is also useful for corralling all your content marketers. You want your content marketers to be working together so that they are all aligned. This is especially important when they are working on ideas that will be distributed through different channels since they should all be related and work together to enhance the customer journey.
Take measurements of how responsive your brand is to customer feedback through both digital and physical touchpoints. With consumers ready and able to engage through multiple touchpoints, the expectation is for their opinion to be heard and accounted for. The more time that you allow between feedback and responsivity, the more time the customer has to look elsewhere for something that is closer to meeting their needs.
Your time to market has a big impact on your ability to be responsive. Determine ways that will decrease time to market for physical and digital touchpoints so that you can increase your responsiveness time for consumers.
Work with vendors that will help enable responsiveness for your brand, from the software you use to the merchants you partner with. Make sure you choose responsive, scalable solutions that integrate with the other elements of your brand to improve efficiency.
One way to do this is through a Digital Asset Management (DAM) or Marketing Asset Management (MAM) solution like MediaBeacon. Using a DAM/MAM facilitates the centralized creation, retrieval, reuse, and distribution of content assets. With a single asset management source, your teams are more likely to use the same workflows and tools for content creation, sharing, and storage to help harmonize efforts, improve efficiencies, and speed up time to market.
Interested in learning more about the responsiveness requirement and how it relates to omnichannel strategy and customer satisfaction?
