Introduction: An Omnichannel Strategy
“A Comprehensive Guide to Omnichannel Strategy” by Amine Ghorbel at LaGrowth Machine is a blog article about an omnichannel strategy in sales and marketing. The article defines the concept, explains its benefits for businesses, describes how to develop an effective omnichannel strategy and shares tips for the process.
I find this topic interesting because joggling multiple channels is nowadays reality for most companies. I wasn’t familiar with this concept, so I thought it would be nice to learn more about it.
The key ideas
Many companies use multichannel strategies in sales and marketing, but “omnichannelling” takes things further: it aims delivering a consistent and seamless experience to your customers on all of your company’s channels, and even seamless switch between channels. Multichannel approach means using several channels that are operated independently, whereas in omnichannel approach all the channels are integrated and have consistent content.
According to the article, using an omnichannel strategy has many benefits, such as better customer experience, reaching a wider audience, improved knowledge of your customers and more cost-effective results.
To develop an effective omnichannel strategy, the company needs to understand their customers and their needs and preferences, then choose appropriate communication channels and create a consistent voice across all platforms. The article also suggests using automation to manage their omnichannel strategy easier.
My thoughts
Since I was not familiar with this topic, I appreciated that the article not only defined the concept of omnichannel strategy but also explained the difference between it and the multi-channel approach. That helped me to understand the topic better.
It’s easy to believe in the benefits of an omnichannel strategy suggested by the article. For example, I’m a member of the Best Western Rewards loyalty program. Best Western has a website and a mobile app, so they use the multichannel approach. However, the website and the app are not synced, which means that if I’ve made a reservation on the app, it does not appear on my profile when I log in to my account on their website or I’m not able to manage the reservation. It’s so frustrating so it’s easy to see that Best Western would benefit a more omnichannel approach.
I also started thinking about small businesses, which are common in the tourism industry. I’m not sure if small companies necessarily have resources for omnichannel approach in marketing. For example, integrating physical store with online shop and an app is maybe becoming a standard for big chain stores. But I think that small businesses often use external services (like Booking.com or Expedia in case of accommodation) and don’t have possibilities to create a custom-made and seamlessly integrated presence across all channels. There are of course many factors to consider, but I’m curious about to what extent this is applicable to small businesses. The article did not discuss this.
This brings me to my third thought. The article was a good introduction to the topic, but all in all I found it quite vague. The examples lacked concreteness. How is an omnichannel strategy applicable in different businesses? How are real companies using it now? I searched for more information and discovered Hubspot’s article “What is Omni-Channel? 20 Top Omni-Channel Experience Examples” by Clint Fontanella. I think Hubspot did much better job at making the concept more tangible by providing many real-life examples and showing what kind of possibilities omnichannel approach does. Also the “step by step” instructions for planning a strategy were more concrete and helpful. Ghorbel’s article gave me a glimpse of this theme, but the piece was quite “empty” and trivial after reading Hubspots’ article.
Conclusions
Ghorbel’s article served as an introduction to omnichannel strategy in sales and marketing. It explained the concept clearly and gives you an idea of the topic, but I wouldn’t call this piece “a comprehensive guide” as it lacks sufficient examples and concreteness.
However, it was all in all interesting to learn about this topic. This is certainly something that I’m going to keep in mind in the future as I continue my education. I believe omnichannel approach is going to be bigger and bigger in near future, so it’s good to understand the principles.
References
Ghorbel, A. 2023. A Comprehensive Guide to Omnichannel Strategy. LaGrowth Machine 4.8.2023. Accessed 13.9.2024 https://lagrowthmachine.com/omnichannel-strategy/
Fontanella, C. 2024. What is Omni-Channel? 20 Top Omni-Channel Experience Examples. HubSpot 7.2.2024. Accessed 13.9.2024 https://blog.hubspot.com/service/omni-channel-experience