Throughout a decade managing demand gen programs for our clients, we’ve executed thousands of campaigns while gaining a unique vantage point into B2B demand-gen practices.
A couple of items that have been true since our earliest days and remain true:
- Email is most often the primary channel in B2B demand gen.
- Many companies use additional channels, but their tactics and customer views don’t flow seamlessly channel-to-channel to ensure the best customer experience.
These are just a couple of the reasons I think omnichannel marketing – whereby allowing marketers to use multiple channels but having the data flow into a central system IS seamless – has so much potential for demand gen. In our experience, omnichannel drives awareness (and it has been quite successful).
The Promise of Omnichannel
While many marketers may think of their multichannel marketing initiatives as omnichannel, it’s important to distinguish between the two. Omnichannel promises to unify data on all of a customer’s or prospect’s actions in multiple channels and then bring that data to bear in the form of targeted, timely offers for a positive user experience. Multichannel lacks the cross-channel optimization of messages built on omnichannel’s integrated data model.
Imagine being able to engage a customer who recently attended your virtual event with a related content asset, delivered via email, that adds additional depth and insight a day after one of the sessions they were present for, furthering their knowledge as they move closer to purchase. And by the way, that all happens in an automated way.
That’s the type of user experience that omnichannel can bring to demand gen. HIPB2B has just put the finishing touches on a white paper outlining our point of view on omnichannel demand gen.
This white paper brings together lots of significant research on the value and benefits of omnichannel – for the marketer and their customers – while it also provides compelling examples of omnichannel campaigns that we’ve successfully tested.
What You Will Learn
We’ll share a few snippets from the white paper in the hopes that you’ll find the topic compelling:
- The Revenue Impact of Omnichannel: A Harvard Business Review study found that customers who engage in omnichannel spend 10% more online than customers who engage in a single channel. The average order value is 13% higher in omnichannel than in a single-channel engagement, according to Omnisend.
- Proven Benefits to Date: HIPB2B has successfully tested one omnichannel model – namely the use of email campaigns supplemented by LinkedIn ads – to give customers both leads and engagement data on an additive set of names that they can nurture or retarget. The white paper drills into the strategy, the performance, the benefits, and more.
- The Technical Underpinnings Required to Make it all Work: From databases to channel-specific platforms to a back-end marketing stack that ingests and integrates data from your diverse sources, we lay out the technology needed for omnichannel demand gen success, whether you build it in-house or work with tech-savvy partners. We also explain how/why marketers are willing to swap key technical platforms to make the functionality that typifies omnichannel work as it needs to.
The year 2022 should be a banner year for demand-gen marketers broadly, and we at HIPB2B are incredibly optimistic that omnichannel will emerge as a respected contributor to demand gen results. After reviewing our white paper and our customer successes, let us know if we can help by building an omnichannel strategy for your campaigns.
