Here are ten tips for aligning your marketing teams across channels to achieve omnichannel success.
The digital age has transformed the marketing space. Customers today engage with brands across multiple channels and expect seamless, personalised experiences at every touchpoint. To meet these rising expectations, marketers must embrace omnichannel strategies that integrate campaigns across channels to provide a unified brand experience.
However, executing effective omnichannel marketing requires overcoming organisational silos and misalignments that often exist between channel-specific marketing teams like social media, SEO, email marketing, and more. By aligning their vision, strategies, and tactics, brands can orchestrate impactful omnichannel campaigns that engage customers in a relevant, consistent way.
Here are ten tips for aligning your marketing teams across channels to achieve omnichannel success:
Rally your marketing teams around shared goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to your omnichannel strategy. These could include increasing brand awareness, driving conversions, boosting customer retention rates, etc. Ensure teams have clarity on how their channel-specific efforts relate to these overarching goals. Tracking unified KPIs also enables you to measure omnichannel performance and optimise accordingly.
Shift the focus from channels to customers. Orient your teams to craft cohesive experiences across channels based on customer needs and the buyer's journey, not marketing channels. Build customer personas that outline preferences and behaviours across touchpoints. Emphasise the value of understanding customers rather than platforms.
Dissolve organisational boundaries between channel-specific teams that limit collaboration and information sharing. Consider restructuring to assemble cross-functional “squads” with team members from different disciplines, such as social media, SEO, content, email, and analytics. Physical co-location also promotes better alignment.
Consolidate strategy planning and oversight into a centralised marketing team that develops foundational messaging, content frameworks, and brand guidelines. This group can govern omnichannel alignment while channel experts execute tailored tactics. Appoint “ambassadors” within each team to liaise on strategy.
Streamline workflows, systems, and tools across teams for content development, campaign management, and reporting. Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot enable process standardisation, cross-team visibility, and performance monitoring across channels in one centralised hub.
Break down silos by nurturing collaboration, not competition, between teams. Foster camaraderie through all-hands meetings, cross-functional brainstorms, informal “jam sessions,” and team-building activities. Share insights and best practices laterally. Celebrate joint wins.
Craft cohesive messaging and content that maintains brand consistency across channels while being tailored for platform-specific audiences. For example, leverage central social media and website profiles for big-picture messaging and channel-specific handles for tailored content.
Aggregate data and insights across channels through marketing automation and customer data platforms (CDPs). Enable all teams to access this unified view of the customer to gain cross-channel insights. This is invaluable for personalisation, optimisation, and impact measurement.
Provide training on omnichannel strategies, emerging digital behaviours, and channel integration best practices. Ensure teams gain cross-channel knowledge beyond their core area of focus. For example, email marketers should learn social and SEO strategies for alignment.
Adopt agile methodologies to continuously refine and optimise efforts through testing and feedback loops. Review omnichannel performance frequently. Identify process or alignment breakdowns. Course correct quickly across teams. Be flexible and adapt to ever-evolving digital behaviours.
The strategies above require both technological and cultural changes. However, they enable seamless orchestration of campaigns across channels that engage customers in truly omnichannel ways. From unified brand messaging to personalised recommendations, customers will enjoy tailored experiences tailored to their needs and preferences at every touchpoint along their journey.
Here are some examples of impactful tactics made possible by strong cross-channel alignment:
The path to omnichannel maturity requires evolving organisational processes, technology, and culture. However, the effort pays dividends in the form of winning customer experiences. By rallying their teams around a shared vision of customer-centricity, brands can orchestrate multichannel magic and unlock success.
