Signs your brand needs an omnichannel platform

An omnichannel platform is a customer experience software that helps companies provide a consistent customer experience across all channels. Omnichannel platforms provide the ability to:

• Access real-time customer data from any channel.
• Connect with customers on any channel through automation.
• Leverage CRM data to deliver personalized experiences on any channel along the customer journey.

Omnichannel platforms are the all-in-one solution for growing companies focused on elevating customer experiences across communication channels.

The most successful brands know how to interact with their customers no matter where they are. They don't depend on one-dimensional marketing strategies that simply rely on website interactions.

Interacting with prospects on desktop, mobile devices, and offline channels provides in-depth coverage to help convert potential buyers into loyal customers. This is where an omnichannel platform comes into play.

An omnichannel marketing platform allows companies to reach out to potential customers and promote their products and services on numerous platforms. Using an omnichannel media platform can help you:

• Expand your company's messaging and reach.
• Take advantage of increased profits.
• Improve your company's customer satisfaction.

As explained in previous chapters, the key difference between omnichannel and multichannel strategies is that omnichannel puts the customer at the center and orchestrates messaging across channels. The most common channels businesses use are email, social media, website, and direct mail. The goal of omnichannel marketing is to meet customers directly where they are and provide them with a consistent experience no matter which channel they’re using.

Omnichannel platforms have many benefits when it comes to content management:

Avoid duplicate content issues

With an omnichannel platform, you can manage your content in one central location and then publish it across all channels with the click of a button. This means you don’t have to worry about creating separate pieces of content for each channel or accidentally publishing duplicate content on multiple channels.

Reach more people in more places

An omnichannel platform lets you quickly and easily publish your content on multiple channels and reach a wider audience than you would if you were relying on a single channel.

Organize your content

A good omnichannel platform structures and organizes content so content is reusable across channels, easier to find and manage, and ready for integration with tools that increase efficiency and enhance the user experience.

Content that is structured and enriched with data provides better input into generative AI models, so you get better outputs in the form of content that is on brand, in your style and tone of voice.

Making content easily ingestible for AI applications allows you to make the most of generative AI integrations.

Maintain brand consistency

An omnichannel approach helps ensure that your content is consistent across all channels so you can build a strong and recognizable brand that customers trust.

Centralize your content architecture

With an omnichannel platform, you can unify and manage all of your content in one central location. This makes it easy to keep track of your content and improve its functionality by integrating content with the tools you need to build omnichannel experiences.

Now that you know what an omnichannel platform is and the advantages of an omnichannel approach, you might be wondering if your brand needs an omnichannel platform.

Here are a few signs that your brand could benefit from a content platform that’s designed for omnichannel marketing:

• You’re struggling to reach your target audience and want to improve customer engagement.
• It’s difficult to manage content and experiences across multiple channels.
• You want to improve brand consistency.
• You want to take advantage of cross-platform publishing.

If you can relate to any of the above signs, it might be time to consider using an omnichannel platform.

Omnichannel platforms work the same but look differently depending on a company's industry and target audience. Here are three of the most common omnichannel platforms to remember:

Marketing platform: Omnichannel marketing platforms help companies manage their marketing efforts across multiple channels and marketing campaigns. This might include email, social media, website, chatbots, and blog content.

Ecommerce platform: An omnichannel ecommerce platform is a type of software that helps companies manage their online sales and operations across multiple sales channels and digital touchpoints. This might include online stores like Amazon and eBay, as well as the company’s own website.

Personalization platform: An omnichannel personalization platform is a type of software that helps companies deliver personalized content and experiences to their customers across multiple channels. This also might include website content, email, and social media.

Regardless of the type of omnichannel platform you choose, content will be the heart of every experience you deliver. This is why top brands choose the Contentful Composable Content Platform to power their omnichannel strategies.

With Contentful you can:

• Revise, edit, and reuse content centrally through structured content and content modeling.

• Add in your favorite tools and services for translation, personalization, and analytics. The content platform is customizable and extensible with a huge Marketplace of apps and integrations, including AI tools.

• Give developers and marketers the tools they need. Contentful is developer- and practitioner-friendly which means non-technical employees can create, edit, and revise content without using engineering resources. For example, Contentful Studio gives marketers a visual canvas where they can drag and drop components to create new experiences in minutes, not months.

• Scale responsibly by always being prepared for the next channel or device. No need to add another CMS.

This is the last chapter of our Omnichannel guide, but we hope it’s just the start of your transition from multichannel to omnichannel marketing.

Contentful and its partners have helped many organizations build the foundation they need to make omnichannel marketing a success. We’d love to hear about your goals and to walk you through how an omnichannel-capable composable content platform, like Contentful, can get you there faster.