Making Sense of Omni-Channel Marketing

by CMN Technology Solutions from Steve Smith of Tollanis Inc.

Today’s marketplace is increasingly dominated by digital marketing and media. While digital selling garners a tremendous amount of attention, it still only represents 11% of total retail sales in the United States. Smart entrepreneurs need to focus their efforts on creating an omni-channel approach to selling and marketing their products and services. Developing an online presence that presents your products and services in a way that is appealing and compelling is a critical component to your overall go-to market strategy. The challenges of developing a comprehensive Omni reach and an approach are many, and Catholic market businesses have the additional challenge of finding partners that cannot only help them navigate the challenges of the digital landscape, but also want to do so without compromising their values and faith

Any comprehensive go to market strategy needs to focus on both traditional online marketing as well as emerging social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and potentially Twitter. video is also becoming an increasingly dominant form of communication and marketing, in particular for the millennial generation that now represents the largest consumer segment in American history at 82 million people. additionally, this new dominant generation conducts more business and spends more time on their mobile phones than any other generation. It is their primary device to shop as well as communicate. any comprehensive go to market strategy needs to include a mobile component. As we can see from numerous emerging economies, mobile is a dominant force and is overtaking traditional forms of credit card and cash payments as well. The other emerging technology that is redefining retail, is the emergence of cloud-based tools and platforms. These new tools allow us to be able to work, communicate, and more importantly cell and reach our target audience without being constrained to a particular computer or device.

As faith-based businesses we need to be able to identify where our customers are, and how we want to market and sell to them. To unlock marketing and business opportunities we need to identify novel credible and actionable strategies that help us drive revenue and reach our target audience. One of the key tools in helping us accomplish this task is Google. With numerous tools at our disposal, Google allows us to create data and turn that into actionable insights. Analytics about our customers buying patterns, preferences, and behaviors, are much more easily collected and analyzed using digital channels over traditional media like print. By leveraging these online tools even small businesses can seem like a large organization, with the ability to reach globally, if that's the strategy you want to embrace.

A successful plan involves outlining your goals, asking critical questions, and choosing tools that help you drive sales and reach customers via the channels that they want to use. Whether it's social media with Facebook, online with Google, email or traditional marketing, our strategies need to include a comprehensive set of tools and approaches to market to an ever more diverse base of customers.