How Omni-Channel Marketing Will Evolve in 2014 (and Why It’s Time for You to Embrace It)
January 8, 2014
For many marketers, Big Data is a blessing (customer and buying process insight galore) and a curse (what does all of this information really mean?!). The good news is that 2014 should provide some relief, thanks in large part to the progressive maturity of applications designed to wed Big Data with omni-channel marketing campaigns.
By now, you’ve probably heard of omni-channel marketing. A year ago, Forbes declared it the next big thing, while several other experts have recently trumpeted omni-channel marketing as the “future of brand engagement,” and the “new ad age revolution.”
And while each of those outlets is correct in suggesting that omni-channel campaigns are becoming a business imperative in an increasingly digital world, the thing about this supposed “revolution” is that it’s not really a revolution at all — it’s more of an evolution of a practice that’s been around for decades.
“As a brand marketing tactic, omni-channel marketing is nothing new,” says Pete Gombert, CEO of local marketing automation software company Balihoo. “Twenty years ago, an omni-channel marketing campaign might have just meant that a brand marketer was trying to coordinate a television spot, newspaper ad, and direct mail campaign so that they ran at the same time, and generated a specific response.”
Today, however, the mediums through which those campaigns are executed have certainly evolved.
“Everything is digital now, so the challenge today is to execute an omni-channel marketing campaign that sends a coordinated message across several online properties or social channels,” Gombert explains. “It’s the same idea, but how we coordinate those campaigns, track their success, and measure their results is very much a process in its developmental infancy, and that’s the real evolution that’s happening.”
Understanding Omni-Channel Marketing in the World of Big Data
In theory, Gombert says that process of coordination, measurement, and execution should be easier in a digital universe where things are more transparent and move at a faster pace. But that’s not always the case.
One of the biggest reasons for that is the complexity and confusion that Big Data brings to the table, Gombert says.
While marketers today have incredible access to veritable encyclopedias of information about their customers’ wants, needs, preferences, pain points, and buying habits, that data can be overwhelming, particularly in the context of omni-channel marketing.
“It’s not enough to just understand that your customers are consuming information across a variety of platforms and digital channels, and then make sure you’re active in those mediums,” Gombert explains. “For an omni-channel marketing campaign to be effective, your digital channels must be able to communicate with and feed off of each other, and you need to be able to quickly digest and deploy data to do that.”
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Ultimately, that’s where some sort of automation platform should come in to play. “You can’t execute omni-channel campaigns at scale manually,” Gombert says. “It’s just not feasible. You need a system in place that can collect volumes of data, digest it, and quickly do something about it.”
The problem, however, is that for all of the technological advances in the online world lately, Gombert says that digital automation remains, in many ways, as inefficient and ineffective as its analog counterpart.
2014: The Year of Automation and Omni-Channel Marketing
The good news, however, is that Gombert believes Big Data and omni-channel marketing automation will take big leaps forward in 2014 as most major brands begin to leverage omni-channel automation in a more strategic, comprehensive manner.
“Omni-channel and Big Data automation are still very much in their infancy, but I think you’ll see a lot of maturity and consistency in that industry this year,” Gombert says. “There’s certainly recognition throughout the tech industry that consumers are digesting more information on a multitude of devices, and we’re going to have to find a way to empower businesses — both B2B and B2C — to use that data to automate and coordinate omni-channel campaigns.”
At the risk of sounding subjective, Gombert says that’s exactly what his company is focused on in the new year.
“That’s a strategic initiative that we’ve been focused on for the last year-and-a-half, but it will continue to be one of our primary goals in 2014 and beyond,” Gombert says. “We want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to leverage data to quickly execute more effective omni-channel campaigns. Right now, it can take months to actually yield anything valuable from Big Data. A year, two years, or five years from now, however, I think it’s going to seem insane that it ever took that long to do anything.”
How do you plan on executing more effective omni-channel marketing in 2014? Let us know in the comments below.
Image by Santi Villamarín