How a B2B Omnichannel marketing strategy will boost your sales

Before focusing on the sales benefits of using Omnichannel marketing strategies, it is important to know what the difference is between Omnichannel and Multichannel – names being used more and more in the marketing world.

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that consistently promotes the same message and information throughout your marketing and brand across all platforms focusing on the needs of the buyers.

Multichannel marketing strategy is using more than one channel to reach prospects. Leaflets, promotional adverts and social media platforms all form part of Multichannel marketing strategy. Multichannel is more about the message being conveyed or the specific product or service being sold.

Omnichannel strategies are preferable to Multichannel in B2B for a few reasons.

1. The prospect is the main focus

Multichannel marketing is about reaching as many prospects as possible and offering a variety of options regardless if people want to buy them or not. Omnichannel ensures buyers seamlessly interact with the brand across all channels building a relationship with them.

2. Thought leadership

Omnichannel marketing focuses on the buying journey allowing thought leadership that gives prospects the same message and experience throughout every channel and familiarises them with the brand.

3. Facilitating journey

Buying effort and redundancy in interaction gets eliminated through an Omnichannel system making the buying experience effortless and pleasant.

4. Integration and Alignment

B2B sales and marketing strategies can be summed up in one word: alignment. Marketing channels are not only digital, but events, sales calls and any other interaction with prospects. A strong lead needs to be present throughout –from your marketing to sales. If there is no alignment in all departments of the brand, the channels will not work together.

How to build the strategy

1. Identifying your prospects

Prospects are continuously making their buying journey accessible if you know where to get the information. Connecting with prospects on various channels and engaging with them where they are, will ensure you get the information you need to build relationships with them through your brand.

Putting together data from various places will help you determine your prospects’ favourite offline and online channels. For example, a company’s buyer could come across your website and subscribe to your newsletter. Someone else from the same company could visit your booth at an event and another person could maybe comment on one of your social media posts. If you can combine all this information and keep it in one place you can build a complete prospect profile.

2) Targeting the best segments

Use the information gathered to target specific contacts and companies according to characteristics and predictive indicators like lifetime value and pipeline stage.

Ensure your marketing and sales teams are on the same page and share the same goals. Using your prospects’ profiles, pick messages that will speak with them and also choose the platforms where the messages will be sent out on. A fast, efficient and reliable marketing automation programme is essential to sending your marketing campaign to your potential clients.

3) Hone strategies, share insights and measure engagement

Once you have unified data using your prepared prospect profile and chosen the channels for your activated campaigns, you can start collecting insights which your marketing team can give your sales team. Using the data collected from the responses received from the marketing campaigns, the sales team will have a better understanding of how to speak to prospective clients based on their wants and needs.

The feedback collected from sales calls can then be used in future marketing campaigns.

Following all these steps will ensure that you Omnichannel marketing strategies and campaigns will be successful and grow your business.