addressingWhether desktop, tablet, mobile phone, smart TV, web page, newsletter, social media profile, hotline, printed catalog or live in your store, companies must address their customers personally and competently on all channels. So, it comes in handy that e-Spirit provides us with some useful tips on how customer experiences can be improved in multiple channels and what marketers should consider when doing so.

1. Time and cost advantage due to content control center for all touchpoints

The creation of high-quality and personalized content, the immediate publication in various channels, a consistent presentation on all corporate, country and product sites is needed – be it via social media channels or mobile apps, newsletters, or shop displays: Business that want to provide customers the best user experience, are confronted with numerous digital challenges today and need a central content management system (CMS) for all digital communication channels as the basis to facilitate consistently good work.

When setting up a content center for omnichannel marketing, user-friendliness, flexibility, and time to market are essential aspects every company must be aware of to be able to act quickly. Hence, it is important that marketing teams are allowed to act independently, without having to ask the IT in business operations for support.

A central CMS also has the advantage that content - once applied and refined - can repeatedly be used for the various channels. This saves additional time and ensures – besides higher internal efficiency - for external consistency at every touch point the potential customer has with the company.

2. Addressing customers is becoming easier and more personal

The web is becoming more and more customer-centric. When in the past it was all about presenting products and services, it is today about the right approach and how to address the customer in a personal and individual way with relevant content and offers.

To achieve this, the CMS needs to be able to consider customer data and information on the behavior of the website users. For starters, it's easiest to contact authenticated users – customers known by name - and to show them e.g. relevant content and offers that fit to a completed purchases or demographic data, such as geo-targeted location-based content for behavioral targeting. To do so, marketers should define personas and scoring models to offer website visitors that are not "personally" known, relevant information in real time based on their behavior on the website.

3. Scoring with images and videos

In order to provide videos, illustrations, pictures and other audiovisual elements in the various channels available, companies should also link their CMS with their existing "media silos" such as databases, digital media asset management, product information management and video management systems.

Even web offers like online image databases, or image editing tools can be used in the CMS, for example, with the FirstSpirit AppCenter. That way, multimedia content or product information can be used efficiently for the omnichannel communication - always automatically in the optimum resolution for each channel and without duplication of data or time-consuming manual grooming.

4. Locating the content and paying attention to global consistency of the brand

For companies that are internationally active or in the middle of expansion, it is important to set guidelines and procedures to ensure a globally consistent omnichannel performance and address simultaneously local peculiarities. However, manual implementation and control is costly. It is more efficient going for a centralized CMS that not only meets omnichannel demands, but also multi-site and multi-language requirements. By means of the CMS, users should be able to control, analyze and improve the overall customer response worldwide: Corporate communications could specify uniform content and roll it out globally, but at the same time the teams in the country offices can adapt to local needs in a given context or create new content - depending on the needs.

5. Using the potential of social networks

Still today, many companies don’t have a comprehensive social media strategy in place and that’s a big neglect. The use of company-owned Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts should be well planned and orchestrated. At best, they can be seamlessly integrated into the CMS and centrally publish content in the various social channels. In addition, there are social media opportunities, such as blogs or surveys among users or followers, which provide marketing experts with new information and enrich the websites with relevant content. But perhaps the most important tip for the use of social media in the omnichannel marketing is to stay flexible.

At the current pace of the digital transformation process, companies have to factor in changes and new challenges and be able to react quickly. The underlying IT should be easy to expand, therefore, best-of-breed strategies and strong integration systems have to be more future-proof. Unfortunately, all-in-one suite solutions from a single vendor often cannot follow the developments in the market fast enough.

Thus, the CMS is the linchpin to solve the growing challenges in the omnichannel marketing, although many companies still underestimate its importance.

They have to change the way they deal with content to survive the digital transformation.

By Daniela La Marca