How to get started with B2B Omnichannel Campaigns

There is more to marketing than email campaigns. Building a marketing database requires you to reach out to contacts across social and advertising channels. Email alone will only touch a small proportion of your audience. Integrating those other channels allows you to get your message in front of far more people.

However, designing and managing a cross-channel campaign can be complicated. It requires developing and creating messages across different tools in a way that builds a consistent journey. Fortunately, by combining marketing automation with your website, the challenge of cross-channel can be simplified. This combination can be used to automate cross-channel campaigns, particularly when combined with social nurture campaigns.

Web First

The centrepiece of any marketing automation campaign needs to be the website. Make sure there is a content hub or a central web page for your campaign message. That doesn't have to be complicated. A single web page with access to all campaign content should be enough. Personalise that web experience as much as possible, so contacts are clearly guided to the most relevant content for their situation.

Ensure there is a contact form or a chatbot to capture leads. Chatbots can also be used to direct people to the right content for their immediate need. Finally, add an interactive experience, such as an assessment tool or a survey, to drive engagement and conversion. The use of interactive elements and personalisation allows your audience to guide themselves through the customer journey until they're ready to be passed to sales.

Inbound Acquisition

Your social and ad campaigns then become means to drive people to your campaign site. Promote the best top of funnel content through the best performing inbound channels. Focus each message on a specific piece of content. Link directly to that asset, rather than the page as whole. This ensures people actually watch or read the content rather than bouncing. Presenting ad or social clicks with multiple links can lead to confusion. Once the contact has consumed one asset, they will move naturally to the next one. Your most engaged contacts will binge consume multiple assets at one go. If they do that, push them through as leads to sales immediately.

Look at webinars or content syndication as an additional channel for acquiring new prospects to feed the campaign. It's common to immediately pass registrations from these channels to sales, but that's too soon. Send them a follow-up email promoting additional content instead. Contacts acquired through these tactics often have little exposure to your brand or familiarity with your services. They may not be ready to buy from you yet, so keep them engaged with additional content until a pattern of interest emerges

Outbound Retargeting

For contacts that don't convert straight away, use email nurture or social retargeting to drive return visits. On LinkedIn or Facebook, create a website audience of people that visited your campaign site. Then use retargeting campaigns to place an ad in their social feed promoting the next piece of content in your campaign. For contacts that have marketing consent, create an email nurture promoting that same content instead. You want to develop an outbound campaign containing 4 touches that directs people back to an asset on the main campaign site.

Make sure you don't send people content they've already consumed though. Always send people content they haven't seen before, and try to get more targeted as contacts progress through the campaign. Start with a general message, and narrow it down to a more targeted persona or interest based message in later touches. Then when a contact has engaged with enough content, pass them to sales for follow-up. Typically 3 to 5 touches should be enough, including engagements from other campaigns and events you may be running.

Evolution

Once you've built this framework once, it's easy to copy it and adjust it for future campaigns. That applies to both the web pages, the content and the email nurture stream. Evolve the journey or the layout for each campaign so that you're using data to identify the best ways to keep people engaged and eventually generate leads.