Creating A Better Customer Experience With An Omni-Channel Marketing Environment

In today’s omni-channel marketing environment one of the leading challenges for brands is consistency; Consistency of messaging, of content, and ultimately of the customer experience.

All of these elements should work together to help attract new customers and retain loyal shoppers — something aided by consistent messaging.There’s little doubt that the omni-channel approach presents tremendous benefits to brands. With the sheer wealth of data gathered from customers, the aim is to personalize messages and offers and engage with audiences in a more meaningful way. Consider that brands with a strong omni-channel customer engagement boast a retention rate of 89% versus just 33% for companies with a weak engagement, according to research from the Aberdeen Group.

However, top of mind for marketers is still consistency. Compounded even further when an organization or brand is an international one or part of a franchise.

How does the global marketing team ensure that there is consistency in all materials, logos, graphics, and videos, in all languages, in all regions, and for all channels?

With the sheer volume of content being created, approved, managed and distributed — 70% of B2B marketers will produce more content this year than the previous year — very often agencies or brands will employ more people to deal with managing it all.

The issue isn't solved by taking this course of action. Instead, for the past several years it is technology that has been providing a solution. These organizations use digital asset management, content management, marketing resource management, or database systems to provide a smoother process internally. By deploying these technologies, marketing organizations have made their production workflows vastly more efficient—and those efficiencies have gone directly to the bottom line.

With so many different solutions, systems and applications, not connected in a meaningful way, sometimes technology can add to the problem. So how can agencies, brands, and organizations ensure that technology acts an enabler instead of a barrier?

Centralization

Very often the answer is centralization. For multi-region brands or even organizations with a multitude of sub-brands, having all assets and materials created, hosted and managed on a centralized platform or marketing hub can add that stability and also streamline creative operations.

With all materials hosted in one central place brands can ensure only the latest assets are used, regardless of region, language or promotion. In addition to being current, approvals are managed efficiently and any material that is out of date in terms of style, tone, or time can be automatically removed, ensuring accuracy across the board.

Of course, with so many systems and capabilities needed, no one platform exists that can perform all these tasks flawlessly. Instead, a likely scenario would be to have a solution that could effectively do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping control of the messaging, the creation of assets, approvals and even access. The same solution, used by both the brand and its agencies, can make production more efficient and bring greater control to creative content. It can also eliminate errors, making it faster and easier to search for assets, accelerate time to market, and make it simpler to repurpose content across campaigns.

By combining solutions such as PIM (product information management), CRM (customer relationship management), and DAM (digital asset management) systems on a content marketing hub, organizations can manage data across the business and gain updates and insights in real time.

Content in Context

This type of centralized solution can assist in making regional marketing campaigns and promotions more effective. Instead of using general or broadly appealing assets — be those brochures, adverts or videos — that are translated or tweaked per country, proper localized materials can be developed, managed and used, making campaigns more effective.

In the same way, personalized content, developed based on actionable intelligence, provides context and can be used to excellent effect. If not done well, brands are missing out on opportunities to increase customer loyalty, and by extension, retention.

A content marketing hub, for example, can gauge the interests of the desired target audiences, which informs marketers and helps them discover, upload, share, create, collaborate, and distribute content to a specific marketing channel. Knowing how customers are choosing to interact and engage with these marketing efforts is precious information that drives omni-channel strategies. Additionally, by learning your customer’s past interests and behaviors, companies gain unique power. This data can help marketing teams develop personalized offers, which leads to more significant conversion rates and higher sales.

Conclusion

Attaining consistency across channels and assets is challenging! Especially in today’s competitive environment where the customer experience is king. For the most part, centralization can be used by brands and agencies to ensure brand consistency, potentially cut costs and streamline operations. The trick finding the right platform to bring those capabilities to the business and, of course working with the right partner to implement and support it.

Learn how to streamline creative operations within your organization through proper digital asset management and creative production - click here to read our guide.