Reimagining Omnichannel Strategy for Brands

Today’s consumers have embraced the idea of omnichannel like never before. Their digital lifestyles span multiple platforms, and this has a definitive impact on their media consumption and shopping behaviors. Their brand discovery and purchase decisions now involve several touch points, often including both online and offline elements. They expect a contextual, consistent and personalized brand experience – when they are searching, scrolling or shopping.

The numbers are telling : According to Nielsen data, omnichannel shopping has grown by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic. A Google/Ipsos study revealed that people are actively shopping for 6.6 categories on average at any given time. eConsultancy found that 67% of shoppers start their journey on one device and complete purchases on another.

The response to this dramatic shift in consumer behavior impacts retailers and brands differently. While the focus for retailers would be to blur the lines between their online and offline channels, brands will need an integrated approach to advertising and commerce – a seamless curation of the consumer journey from interest to purchase on all digital channels.

Omni Channel Advertising – Shifting the focus from channel to consumer

While most brands have invested in building a presence on digital channels like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, paid media is still the mainstay for them to reach their audiences at scale. Their digital media mix is indeed multi-channel, and the best brands run their ad campaigns on all popular media platforms. However, activation of a multi-channel ad campaign is just a means to an end – the ultimate goal for brands is to meet consumers in moments that matter, wherever they are in their digital universe. This requires new thinking, and new tools for precision targeting, creative automation and data driven optimization.

With Shopalyst, brands can now focus on their messaging and targeting and use our universal ads manager to transform a single creative and ad copy into optimized ad units that help brands connect, engage and sell on all popular platforms.

Our omni-channel ad template is built for marketers and is a simple 3 step process to activate ads on all popular media platforms.

• Select creative and ad copy for your omni-channel campaign

• Select related products to automatically make these ads shoppable

• Select from a curated library of brand audiences to target (first party and third party)

Omni Channel Commerce – Show them a way and they will shop

Activation of a shopping moment for consumers is now largely on a digital platform, but the choice of a channel to complete a purchase is often contextual. If it is a product that one can buy as a stand-alone order (say a pair of sneakers from Nike) – then people prefer buying it from the brand’s official D2C store. On the other hand, if it is a product that is normally purchased as part of a larger shopping basket (for example, a bottle of shampoo) – consumers would find it convenient to compare prices and add-to-cart on an e-commerce site of their choice. If the product satisfies an instant need (for example ice-cream during mid-afternoon) – shoppers will find it super useful if they could find a retail store nearby to make the purchase.

Consumer brands should make it easy for consumers to discover products they love on all digital media – own, paid & earned – and offer a choice of shopping options i.e own D2C store, choice of partner e-commerce sites, or offline stores.

Shopalyst helps brands craft brilliant brand experiences using our no-code landing page builder. With ready to use widgets for D2C, comparison shopping and store locators – it literally takes minutes to activate an omni-channel path to purchase. And by using our optimized templates for search, social, display and video – it is easier than ever before to meet digital consumers in moments that matter and connect, engage and sell in one seamless journey.