Omnichannel targeting: 5 ways to leverage consumer insights
Omnichannel targeting can be full of complexities that are difficult for startups and SMEs in particular to track and optimize. In a landscape that’s rapidly evolving, nobody wants to be caught standing still.
So how is it possible to leverage actionable insights from your consumers?
The importance of omnichannel targeting cannot be overstated. Statistics show that as much as 86% of consumers typically utilize two channels or more, and online shopping can involve multiple channels when users are searching for products or services that suit their needs.
In some cases, omnichannel marketing can involve blending the physical and digital, with consumers making their purchases using smartphone browsers as they queue at brick-and-mortar stores.
It’s for this reason that 87% of retailers have identified omnichannel targeting as crucial to their operations.
But how can omnichannel targeting be used effectively to improve the bottom line of startups and SMEs? The answer lies in leveraging consumer insights in an efficient manner.
With this in mind, let’s explore five ways to utilize these insights for omnichannel targeting to maximize ROI.
Harnessing the power of social listening
The single most important place to shape your consumer insights is social media. The beauty of social listening is that businesses can access raw, unfiltered insights into consumer sentiment in a way that’s difficult to replicate in any other form.
While survey responses can be conditioned because they’re more likely to be filled out by satisfied customers, and online reviews can be influenced by incentives and underhanded attempts at manipulation, social media allows businesses to get to grips with their public perception.
The great thing about social media is that it can shape omnichannel targeting by engaging directly with local target audiences. By tagging local places in stories and hashtagging localized events, it’s possible to communicate with your leads and learn about customers based on their geographical proximity to your locations.
Social listening can also help you identify where your target audience actually is online and how they’re spending their time on the internet. This can help your brand market products directly to your leads by focusing your attention on where they’re most likely to be.
There are plenty of social listening tools to aid your social listening strategy, and platforms like SparkToro, Sprout Social, and Mention can all help to identify audience trends and tap into the conversations surrounding your business online.
Mapping the consumer journey
Before any omnichannel campaign is launched, it’s essential that you’re aware of your consumer journey and can map it out in a coherent manner.
Build journey maps for each consumer segment. This helps to explore the steps your leads take from the moment they find your brand to when they make their first purchase.
By creating these maps, your brand can create more targeted omnichannel campaigns based on the interests and behaviors of your segments while matching their expectations and analyzing external factors that could interrupt their journey.
Naturally, crafting a flawless consumer journey map relies on utilizing the right information. To effectively mine the data you need, consider using your website analytics with the help of platforms like Google Analytics, utilizing more social listening, democratizing support logs, call center data, and available user feedback.
Multivariate testing can go a long way
For startups and SMEs, the emergence of generative AI has equipped decision makers with an unprecedented level of power in crafting content for audience segments. Because the technology acts fast in response to user prompts, it’s possible to autonomously create different omnichannel digital structures and page content based on different segments.
But how will you know which content to display to your target audience? Consumer insights can say a lot about the interests and behavior of your leads, but until your content is tested, it’s far less certain to resonate in the most effective way.
This is where multivariate testing comes in. Applicable to websites, apps, email content, and many other channels, multivariate testing presents users with a dynamic range of content that’s combined in different ways to measure which elements are the most effective.
Consider multivariate the next generation of A/B testing, and platforms like PostHog have been effective in providing solutions to help brands learn more about their best omnichannel structures.
Always remember to offer surveys
Secured a sale? Great. Now remember to offer your consumer a survey in their confirmation email to ask about their journey.
An often neglected approach to consumer insights, surveys can be an excellent way of understanding your omnichannel approach and refining it for a more frictionless buyer journey.
There are plenty of channels through which you can offer your surveys, including social media, emails, and in-app popups. This can help you gain more comprehensive insights into how consumers are actually interacting with your brand and how they’re inspired to make purchases.
However, it’s also worth noting that surveys are more likely to be skewed more favourably towards the business when offered solely to consumers who have recently made a purchase. It’s for this reason that offering survey participation across channels will be key to more focused insights.
Alternatively, remembering to regularly check your Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure your customer experience and cross-reference the results with your surveys can be a great way to keep your startup or SME grounded in the results you record.
Use termination rates to your advantage
There are plenty of internal metrics that can help inform your omnichannel targeting. One great way of quantifying the success of your current targeting approach is to measure your termination rate.
Your termination rate is the percentage of customers or subscribers who cancel or decide against renewing their subscription over a predetermined timeframe. Although it’s impossible to prevent everyone from terminating their contracts or services, learning from your rates can help minimize the volume of consumers deciding to leave you.
Here, the golden formula is:
Total Customers Acquired / Total Customers Terminated x 100 (the specified timeframe) = Termiation Rate
By measuring your termination rate against different channels, it’s possible to gain a stronger insight into your omnichannel approach and prevent customers from giving up on your brand no matter how they discover and interact with your business.
Harnessing the power of omnichannel
Omnichannel marketing has revolutionary potential for startups and SMEs, particularly when every conversion can be worth its weight in gold for your business.
By utilizing the wealth of insights at your disposal, it’s possible to offer your consumer segments a more personalized, frictionless, and consistent experience across your various channels. This can help drive brand recognition and loyalty, no matter how you were first discovered.
By embracing the tools available to help foster these insights, your brand stands a greater chance of finding resonance with your customers and driving conversions ahead of your rivals.
About the author:
Dmytro is a CEO at Solvid and founder of Pridicto. His work has been published in Entrepreneur, Creative
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