5 Omnichannel Marketing Benefits for Brands

It’s estimated that less than 10% of consumers are brand loyal and of the millennial generation – whose purchasing power will hit $1.4 trillion this year – only 1 in 5 are self-described brand loyalists. In an age where brand loyalty seems like a thing of the past, connecting with consumers effectively is more important than ever. 

Adding to the already complicated brand and consumer relationship, consumers now spend more time across different platforms than ever before. It’s no longer a world of in-store shopping. Consumers want to buy online, buy in-person, engage with brands on social media, share product reviews, chat with an online representative, buy online and pick up in person, and even buy in-person and have it shipped to their home. Every consumer’s journey and preferences are different and as advertisers, it can be daunting to try and find the best path forward.

Luckily for brands, digital advertising technology poses new opportunities to interact with customers across multiple channels, track interactions and purchases, and build better in-store and online shopping experiences. Enter the benefits of omnichannel marketing

But first, what exactly is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is an approach to marketing that addresses the customer experience on each channel – desktop browser, mobile, retail, social media, podcast, and any others you might use – and how customers transition between each channel as they make purchases.

So, what are 5 omnichannel marketing benefits?

1.Reach Consumers Where They Already Are

As mentioned above, where consumers spend time shopping, interacting, and learning about new brands is varied and constantly changing. If you’re siloing your digital marketing budget to one channel, you’ll miss out on consumers who are spending their time elsewhere. 

2. Better Consumer Insights

Even if you are taking advantage of multiple digital advertising channels, without an omnichannel marketing solution in place, you may be missing out on key insights about your consumers. Tracking a consumer from an initial point of content, through various touchpoints along the way, all the way through to point of purchase (in-store or online) is one of the biggest omnichannel marketing benefits. With this data and insight, you may find that certain messaging, time of day, channels, or offers resonate better with your audience – leading to more sales. Having this 360-degree view of your consumers will allow you to better target your consumers for future campaigns, leading to an overall higher ROI. 

3. More Strategic Ad Targeting

We’ve all experienced this scenario. One day you buy a product online and the next day (or hour) you’re served an ad for a product you already purchased. It’s frustrating for consumers, but for advertisers, it’s wasted media spend. With an omnichannel marketing solution in place, you can better target consumers based on their intent – across all channels. That consumer that just purchased a desk for their home office now its time to move to upselling or cross-selling. Maybe they’re interested in a new office chair to go along with the deck they just purchased? Maybe they’ve been thinking about upgrading their dining room chairs too and just need the extra push? Maybe test a few different ads using dynamic creative optimization or DCO? After a purchase is made is the perfect time to keep interacting with consumers – it can drive incremental sales and brand loyalty. 

4. Changes Made Quickly

One of the biggest omnichannel marketing benefits is through the analysis of consumer insights, you’ll know which channels are working the best at a given period of time. Maybe your Google ads are performing better based on the specific KPI of the campaign, you can easily switch budget from your Facebook ads to Google to optimize the success you’re seeing on that channel. With Digilant’s rapid response capabilities, you can quickly swap in and out creatives across display and social to ensure you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck.

5. Cost Efficiency 

Let’s say your consumer has been having great interactions with your brand via video ads, browsing online, and even chatting with an online representative about a few questions they have. Over the weekend, they go into their local store and make a purchase. Seems like the perfect scenario. However, without an omnichannel marketing solution in place, you’ll miss that transaction. Without knowing that this consumer made a purchase, you’ll continue to target and interact with them with untimely ads (see #3). Setting up an omnichannel solution will allow for a full in-store and online picture of the consumer journey – diminishing the risk of missed opportunities to drive additional sales. 

How do I get started? 

Figuring out where to get started with navigating the different channels, tactics, and data of omnichannel marketing can feel overwhelming. Finding a strategic digital advertising partner with experience and expertise across these channels is essential. At Digilant, we start with consumer research to define the target audience, which leads to the development of an integrated media strategy and sets the stage for campaign analysis and measurable performance. We understand what an omnichannel marketing strategy requires and our team of flexible and agile experts are ready to help. Let’s talk.

Interested in learning more about omnichannel marketing? Read about how custom omnichannel marketing analytics can make or break a campaign here.

Omnichannel vs Multichannel Marketing: The Critical Differences to Consider

Let’s talk omnichannel vs multichannel marketing. As you develop your marketing strategy, “omnichannel” and “multichannel” are two terms you should know.

When we talk with marketers about omnichannel vs multichannel marketing, many consider the terms to be interchangeable. However, in practice, omnichannel and multichannel are quite different. Today, many of the most successful legacy and disruptor brands are opting for omnichannel marketing over multichannel marketing. In this post, we’ll walk you through why and will share the differences between the two terms. 

To start, we’ll dive into the more traditional approach to marketing – multichannel marketing. 

Multichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing is an approach to marketing that reaches and engages with consumers through multiple channels like a desktop browser, mobile, retail, social media, podcast, etc. Each channel functions independently, often with different messaging, but with the same goal of reaching target audiences. 

Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is an approach to marketing that addresses each channel’s customer experience and how customers transition between each channel as they make purchases. Omnichannel marketing combs through and prioritizes the most useful marketing data to create a full picture of your marketing efforts and the touchpoints throughout the customer journey. 

Omnichannel vs Multichannel Marketing: Which is better?

In a perfect world, a consumer can click on a Facebook ad on their phone, browse a website, add a few things to their cart, then resume shopping on their laptop, engage with a shoppable ad and finish checking out without any fuss from using their phone and their computer to complete the purchase. 

The seamless customer experience described above can only be understood with omnichannel marketing. Here’s why.

Omnichannel marketing is integrated, multichannel marketing is siloed.

Multichannel marketing relies on channels that operate in silos. The data from each channel doesn’t interact with or influence the actions of other channels. Each channel has its own set of consumer data that will need to be manually aggregated and groomed with customer relationship management (CRM), customer data platform (CDP), or data onboarding solutions. Since this approach to marketing relies on disparate data sets, it is difficult for marketers to identify who and where their best customers are. 

Alternatively, with omnichannel marketing, you can precisely track consumer behavior and see which channels buyers are interacting with before purchasing. Using omnichannel insights, you can push more personalized and relevant messages to consumers at the perfect time on the ideal channel. And when your marketing is relevant, it’s less promotional and more informative. 

Just fifteen years ago, the average consumer used two touchpoints when making a purchase; today, consumers use an average of six touchpoints – all the more reason for an omnichannel vs. multichannel marketing approach. 

Greater visibility into consumer behavior across channels allows you to allocate your marketing budget better along the customer journey. While consumers may not fully understand what omnichannel means, they enjoy the benefits of a marketing strategy that delivers a seamless experience for researching and making purchases.

Evolving a multichannel marketing strategy to an omnichannel marketing strategy

From in-store, to Amazon, to Facebook, to mobile, to purchase, creating a consistent, unified shopping experience, whatever the channel, is now crucial to marketing success. But, it’s one thing to know why you should shift to an omnichannel vs. multichannel marketing strategy and something else entirely to take the first steps forward. 

  • Define and segment your target audience based on needs and preferences.
  • Identify the highest priority channels to integrate. For many marketers, digital marketing channels are becoming the highest priority channels to integrate – they are also the easiest. Channel integration can be done by an in-house digital team or by an omnichannel digital agency like Digilant.
  • Invest in an omnichannel technology solution to store audience and channel performance data.
  • Leverage automation and a team of experts to generate personalized messaging for each audience segment to push out across desired channels. 

While the initial steps to omnichannel marketing may seem simple, don’t be fooled, it can take some serious work to get it done. It’s probably why 64% of marketers cite that resources and investment are their top barrier to adopting an omnichannel marketing approach. If you are part of this 64%, Digilant can help. Contact us to learn more about the advantages of omnichannel vs multichannel marketing and how you can get started today. 

5 Digital Marketing KPIs You Can’t Ignore

Why are digital marketing KPIs important? 

The customer journey is no longer the 5-step unified path that we had hoped it would be; now, consumers experience a twisting, turning omnichannel journey before making a purchase. As digital marketers, our job is to ensure that we’re meeting these customers throughout their customer journey, with crucial touchpoints. This is where your digital marketing KPIs step in. 

KPIs play an essential role throughout your digital marketing campaigns, as they are established to keep your business goals on track. However, with the ever-increasing amount of data and information we have at our fingertips, it can be challenging to narrow down the most important one or two KPIs that will best keep your business moving in the right direction.

 

What should you consider when choosing a digital marketing KPI?

Keeping your audience at the forefront of KPI decisions is essential. The more information you have about your audience, their relationship with your brand or product, where they are spending time online, the better performing your digital marketing will be. Understanding the demographics, psychographics, and other aspects that make up your target audience is essential. Keep in mind tough, it’s also important to push beyond that insight to understand how your target audience moves through the customer journey. How many ad views it takes before a person is likely to click? What channel-specific touchpoints are critical to driving conversions? 

Having this specific insight will help push your digital marketing campaigns to the next level. And, these insights are gained with proper digital marketing KPIs. Whether you’re just starting your journey with digital marketing or looking to revamp your campaigns, we’ve outlined five key KPIs that will further push your audience insights and create a more seamless digital marketing experience, and ultimately, help to achieve your business objectives.

1. Impressions Served:

Simple but important to measure; impressions are the number of times your ad has been served to a person online. If you’re using your digital marketing campaigns for overall brand awareness, the volume of impressions can be more valuable than you might realize. Knowing this metric can help pinpoint how many impressions are required for your brand to stay top of mind with consumers as they move throughout their customer journey. This KPI won’t give you as much audience insight as others, but if you notice that traffic to your website has gone down, it might be smart to circle back to an impression-based campaign to promote brand awareness. 

2. Conversion Rate (CVR):

CVR measures the number of users who have converted on your website divided by the total number of users who have visited your website.

Here’s an example: you’re interested in driving sales on your website, so you set up conversions as your KPI. Your campaign results show that you’re getting 100,000 landing page visitors every month. It seems like your campaign is doing great! But looking further, you see that only a small percentage of landing page visitors ever make a purchase. 

To get a better campaign result, you can model your “converter” audience to find more consumers who look and act like them and shift your targeting to reach this more qualified audience online. A conversion-based KPI will push you to look at your campaigns this way, which will give you valuable insights to inform future programmatic marketing campaigns.

3. Cost Per Click (CPC):

CPC measures the amount of money paid for every click on an ad by tracking the total cost of a marketing campaign and dividing by the number of clicks. Programmatic advertisers can use the CPC metric to inform budget and bid amounts and to maximize the number of clicks based on budget. Keeping a close eye on CPC benchmarks and performance during programmatic campaigns enables advertisers to pinpoint when campaign efficiency is dipping and quickly course correct.

4. Cost per action (CPA):

CPA measures the cost associated with a particular action such as a sale, click, newsletter sign-up, etc. during a marketing campaign. If conversions are your goal, then tracking CPA will help you optimize the audiences, channels, and tactics that drive the most bang for your buck. Throughout your campaign, you will want to check the quality of users who have taken your desired action. For example, you may find that it is reasonable to pay a higher CPA for better-qualified users than a lower CPA for users who are less likely to take a final action or become loyal customers.

5. Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS):

ROAS is the metric used to measure the revenue you receive for each dollar spent on marketing. For many advertisers, ROAS is the single best metric for measuring marketing effectiveness. If you’re spending on marketing money and not making money in sales, most likely there is something wrong with your marketing strategy. Keeping a ROAS goal of 2:1, 4:1, or 5:1, will ensure your marketing efforts are impacting your business’s bottom line. 

If you notice that you are not getting your desired ROAS, the answer isn’t to stop your efforts altogether. Try looking back at the previously outlined KPIs – how are you tracking against your impressions served or CTR goals? You may find that stunted reach, unqualified website visitors, or overspending on inefficiency channels are impacting your ROAS.

Digital Marketing KPIs Can’t Stand Alone

Your marketing goals and challenges will determine the KPIs that you choose to track. If you already have a handle on campaign scale and engagement, you may find that a greater focus on CPC or CPA may be necessary. If you are starting with digital marketing, a focus on impressions served, and CTR may be the metrics you choose to focus on.

Regardless of the KPIs you choose to focus on; it’s essential to look at them together vs. independently. The KPIs you are focused on will serve as building blocks to quantify how well your digital marketing investments are working to drive impact on your business. A unified view of your KPIs will save you valuable time and resources by giving you a single source of truth and a quick path to identifying your digital marketing strategy’s weakest links. 

Finding a KPI Focused and Data-Driven Partner

Establishing digital marketing KPIs have never been more important, especially as advertisers must test and adopt new strategies that go beyond business as usual. Digilant’s digital marketing solutions are dedicated to this end. 

We use our institutional expertise to help advertisers transform their digital marketing strategy and measurement from the inside-out. We’ve observed that tracking digital marketing performance can be daunting and that advertisers are often unsure where to start — or, if a campaign is already underway, where to go next. As an omni-channel digital services company that always trusts data over a hunch, we rely on performance data to inform strategies and to ensure that we are driving results that our clients can bring to the board. 

Are you struggling to track and optimize your digital marketing KPIs? Click here to request a demo of our custom marketing measurement and analytics platform. 

Programmatic Advertising Explained: A Beginner’s Guide for Brands

Placing ads in the best place, at the best price, to the best audience is the crux of digital advertising. Creative and personalized messaging are also critically important. But if your ad never is seen by the intended audience, you can quickly fall into the trap of poor performance. For brands, programmatic advertising has quickly become one of the most efficient solutions to driving performance without the risk of wasted spend. In 2020, programmatic is estimated to make up 69% of all digital media spend, and it’s expected to continue to rise in 2021.

To help you start benefiting from more efficient and better-performing advertising campaigns, you can find programmatic advertising explained in the sections below.

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital advertising inventory. 

How does programmatic advertising work?

  1. A visitor lands on a website, and the website owner/publisher communicates with a Supply-Side Partner (SSP) to list ad inventory up for sale.
  2. SSP provides inventory and site visitor information to a Demand Side Partner (DSP) to make ad inventory available for advertisers to bid on. 
  3. Advertisers automatically place bids on ad inventory based on a predetermined budget.
  4. The highest bidder wins the ad
  5. The ad creative is served to the visitor on the website

All in .100 seconds.

 

With programmatic, advertisers and publishers use Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to buy and sell digital advertising inventory across digital channels like display, social, digital out-of-home (DOOH), Connected TV (CTV), and more. DSPs make it possible for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell digital advertising using automation instead of the traditional process that requires human negotiation and buying impressions in bulk. 

Using a DSP, brands can buy impressions dynamically, on an automated, one-on-one basis. Additionally, DSPs allow for greater transparency – brands can track advertising impressions throughout digital advertising campaigns to generate insights and optimize performance. This saves brands valuable time and money while also providing greater accuracy of ad placements and audience targeting.

Saving time means you need fewer people (often media buyers and sellers) to execute your digital advertising campaigns. While programmatic advertising isn’t 100% automated, it does allow brand marketers to spend less time on execution and more time focused on building smart digital strategies. Some brands do this in-house, while others work with outside partners like media agencies or media partners that are experts in programmatic. 

Early on, programmatic channels were limited to display, social, and video. Today, more and more programmatic channels are emerging: digital out-of-home (DOOH), Connected TV (CTV), podcasts, and more. 

Why are brands turning to programmatic advertising?

1.Better Targeting

Target digital advertising campaigns based on thousands of data points, including interests, contextual, sentiment, behavior, income, location, job title, IP address, app downloads, purchase intent, CRM data, and more. Using robust sets of data to inform audience targeting, brands can serve ads to specific audiences online across all digital channels. With personalized messaging, traditional has not been possible through direct publisher buys. 

2. More Scale

Programmatic advertising allows brands to estimate reach before campaign launch and scale audiences as needed to hit desired reach and conversion goals. To scale target audiences or identify new audiences, brands can use lookalike modeling. With lookalike modeling, brands can model new audiences based on existing customers’ attributes and high intent prospects. This can be done at the start of a campaign or continuously to detect new audiences.

3. Real-Time Optimization

Brands can optimize digital advertising campaigns in real-time and throughout campaigns, which can’t be done with traditional digital ad placements. Because execution and reporting for programmatic ad campaigns are automated, brands can use performance data and insights to inform shifts in media investments towards highest performance audiences and channels.

4. Greater Return-On-Investment (ROI)

Advanced targeting capabilities and access to campaign performance data throughout campaigns help brands eliminate wasted impressions and budget. By quickly identifying poor performing audiences, tactics, or channels, brands can change course without wasting media spend. Similarly, brands can double down on audiences, tactics, and channels, driving the highest ROI.

5. Opportunities to Test and Learn

Access to real-time performance data gives brands the unique opportunity to test new marketing messaging and creative, targeting tactics and channels with lower risk than direct buys. Insights can be applied to campaigns as they are running and future marketing strategies, both online and offline. 

How Digilant is helping brands with programmatic advertising

Because brands have to make media dollars work harder than ever, they have to identify the digital advertising campaign performance drivers and detractors quickly. With the benefits of programmatic advertising explained above, we’ll now get into some real-world examples of brands doing it well.

Johnston & Murphy’s programmatic strategy

Footwear and apparel brand Johnston & Murphy wanted to capture online customer activity to better assess the influence paid media had on in-store purchase behavior. 

To do this, Johnston & Murphy turned to programmatic advertising to close the loop across channels and create a personalized customer journey online and offline. Working with Digilant, Johnston & Murphy onboarded first-party CRM data and matched it with online consumer data to get a complete view of all online and offline customer activity. This expanded view enabled Johnston & Murphy to activate current and future customers 1:1 through programmatic media channels.

The results? A 30% lift in sales for the audience exposed to media through CRM-enabled programmatic. Additionally, Johnston & Murphy has been able to attribute 2X the number of sales to programmatic initiatives with an attribution model that recognizes online and offline purchases.

PopCorners’ programmatic strategy

PopCorners wanted to raise awareness of its snack brand among health-conscious consumers in the US. To do this, PopCorners turned to Digilant to form a programmatic advertising strategy that promoted new PopCorners Flex and PopCorners Flourish products now available at specific grocers. The strategy included the following programmatic tactics:

  • Geo-targeting – to reach consumers in proximity to specific grocers
  • Demographic and Behavioral Targeting – to reach health-conscious adults, healthy snack buyers, and healthy beverage buyers.
  • Channel Optimization – to shift investments to the channels that were the best performing. For PopCorners’, the best performing channels were Facebook and Instagram.

The strategy led to a click-through rate (CTR) that was 7X the previous benchmark and helped PopCorners grow sales by 40%.

To read more programmatic success stories visit our case study library.

Are you ready to start with programmatic advertising?

Now with programmatic advertising explained, do you know how to get started? 

Finding success with programmatic advertising requires that you nail down the fundamentals of programmatic targeting tactics and performance analysis. If you are looking for guidance to get started with in-house programmatic advertising or need an outside team to take the reins, Digilant can help.

How Custom Omnichannel Marketing Analytics Can Make or Break a Campaign

Anticipating and understanding consumer behavior and engagement with your brand is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks for marketers and advertisers. Desktop, mobile, social, audio, TV and other channels are coming at us at an accelerated pace. With them have come fundamental questions. On which channel(s) will consumers discover your brand and products? Which channel mix is best for your brand to reach consumers? Where will consumers ultimately make a purchase? How can you outsmart the competition? The answers to these questions are important – and omnichannel marketing analytics can help. We’ve looked over the horizon to provide a more vivid picture of how marketing analytics can set your digital advertising campaigns up for success. Let’s dive in.

But first, let’s define omnichannel marketing analytics.

Omnichannel marketing is an approach to marketing that addresses the customer experience on each channel – desktop browser, mobile, retail, social media, podcast, and any others you might use – and how customers transition between each channel as they make purchases.

Omnichannel marketing analytics consolidates and organizes marketing data into a single view, so you can more easily understand marketing performance, improve your time-to-insight, and apply insights to improve marketing return-on-investment (ROI).

Analytics identifies the best target audience for your campaign.

Your target audience is a segment of consumers made up of past, current, and prospective customers who are most likely to be interested in purchasing your product or service. It’s virtually impossible to identify this audience without marketing analytics – whether you own it in-house or work with an outside analytics partner. 

Identifying your target audience starts with gathering and combining data from a variety of sources, including historical campaign performance data, website data, and CRM data. This can be done manually, but today there are tools like Adverity, Domo, and Tableau that can quickly organize and analyze data to generate insights into who is most likely to be responsive to your advertising campaign. For instance, you may be convinced that millennial moms are your target audience, but the data analysis may say otherwise. If so, you can redefine your target audience before campaign launch or optimize throughout the campaign as more data becomes available. 

Knowing who your target audience is will determine your campaign’s targeting strategy and will inform the campaign’s messaging and call-to-action. 

Analytics determines the highest performing channel mix for your campaign.

Analytics can be used to do more than just pinpoint your target audience – it can be used to determine the channel strategy for your digital advertising campaign. Once you understand who your target audience is, you can use analytics to map the most common path to conversion and to understand where your target audience is spending their time online. 

Mapping the path to conversion takes into consideration the different channels, devices, and creative formats or touchpoints your audience engages with leading up to conversion. Which channel(s) drove brand awareness? Which channels triggered a conversion? Knowing the touchpoints that are proven to move your audience through the sales funnel helps to inform where and when you make your digital advertising investments and sets your campaign up for success from the get-go.

Analytics can help you increase return-on-ad-spend (ROAS)

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker

Whether or not John Wanamaker’s quote rings true for you, one thing most advertisers can agree on is that they all want to make the most of each dollar they invest in advertising. To start, you can lean on analytics to establish your ROAS benchmarks by channel using historical campaign data, or, if you don’t have enough historical data, you can look to industry data to establish benchmarks. ROAS is critical for evaluating the performance of your advertising campaign and how it impacts your overall marketing goals. 

Once you have established benchmarks by channel, you can refine your campaign strategy to reflect which channels you can safely back scale on and which channels deserve additional investments. To further refine your campaign strategy and drive maximum ROAS, you can pair analytics with attribution data. Doing this will ensure you don’t scale too far back on critical channel touch points that may occur after the initial touchpoint and before conversion. 

Getting started with analytics to drive campaign performance

Omnichannel marketing analytics can make or break the performance of your advertising campaign, and the ability to conduct campaign and audience analysis quickly is critical to having smart strategy upfront and before a penny is ever spent on media.

Analytics not only shows you which audiences are most likely to become loyal customers but how your campaign is driving conversions and which channels along the path to conversion are worth investing in and which channels you cut back on.

Through conversations with our own clients, brands and agencies, we know that every advertisers’ analytics needs are different. Still, we have found that there are some quick wins to be had for advertisers who are willing to put data first when developing campaign strategies.

To learn how Digilant is putting data and analytics in the hands of advertisers, contact us today for a demo of our custom analytics dashboard solutions, or learn more here

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