Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing: Key Differences and Similarities

In this article, we chalk out the key comparisons between multichannel and omnichannel marketing in the areas of objectives, scope, strategy, data management, technological maturity and more.

Table of Contents

• • Defining Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing
  • The 4 Key Similarities
  • The 5 Key Differences

First, Defining Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing is defined as a marketing strategy used by brands to connect with customers or prospects across multiple channels. The goal is to ensure brand presence, discoverability and messaging on key platforms (like social media, Google search, Youtube etc) and utilizing mainstream channels (includes email marketing, tele-marketing etc) for reaching target audiences.

On the other hand, omnichannel marketingOpens a new window is defined as a marketing strategy that enables a brand to connect with a consumer or prospect across multiple channels as well – however, in this case the messaging is cohesive and consistent across channels and platforms, and above all – they is contextual the customer’s own buying journey.

The goal of omnichannel marketing is to not only ensure brand presence and channel utilization, but to also deliver a ‘good experience’ to customers and potential buyers. This is done through audience/ customer data collection, centralization and management practices, that are essential for contextual communication.

In that sense, multichannel marketing is channel and campaign focused; whereas omnichannel marketing is customer experienceOpens a new window focused.

However, before we dive deeper into the main distinctions, it is also important to note the similarities, for better clarity.

Multichannel Vs Omnichannel Marketing: Key Similarities

 Multichannel Vs Omnichannel Marketing: Key Similarities

There are 4 similarities between multichannel and omnichannel marketing strategies:

1. Multi-channel operation: The most prominent similarity between omnichannel and multichannel is that both these approaches recognize that prospective buyers and customers use multiple channels or platforms across their buying journey and beyond. This means that brands need to be present on each of these channels for customer acquisition, engagement and retention.
2. Consistency of messaging: Both marketing approaches strive to deliver consistent brand messaging across multiple channels.
3. Channel-specific content marketing:  Both recognize that each marketing platform has its own context and needs appropriate content that aligns with the platform/ channel’s requirements and best practices.
4. Channel-specific data: Both multichannel and omnichannel marketing depend on data from the respective channels for performance analysis and campaign improvements.

 Multichannel Vs Omnichannel Marketing: The 4 Key Differences

 Multichannel Vs Omnichannel Marketing: The 4 Key Differences

Here are the key differences between multichannel and omnichannel marketing:

1. Siloed Vs Centralized Data

Data centralization is key to orchestrate contextual and personalized customer experience journeys. If data remains siloed in individual channels or platforms, the final view of the customer’s context, background, experience, history – remain fragmented.

For example, customer X has interacted with your brand across channels, say, A, B, and C. In order to understand the customer’s real requirements and stage of buying journey, one needs to know their interactions across all these channels. Looking at them individually will always tell only a small part of the customer’s story. This means that marketing messaging aimed at this customer by looking at only fragmented, channel-specific data, will be far less accurate than a truly omnichannel marketing messaging that is contextual to the customer’s entire journey.

Omnichannel marketing aims to centralize data as much as possible. At the peak of tech maturity, an organization can opt for a data management (CDM)Opens a new window system like a DMPOpens a new window or CDPOpens a new window to centralize and activate personalized and orchestrated customer/audience engagement campaigns.

Multichannel marketing does not seek to centralize this data, and only works with channel-specific data.

In many ways, this one distinction tells the whole story. The remaining points are either causes or outcomes of data centralization, or the lack of it.

2. Channel-centric vs customer-centric approach

For organizations that put customer-centrism as a key business model, omnichannel marketing is the natural aim. The extent to which their existing tools and tech-investments allow this will vary based on available resources, but the aim certainly remains to have a unified, contextual view of the customer.

However, for businesses that are not very tech-dependent for marketing and sales, especially in the B2C industry, and only aim to spread mass brand awareness, then for such buisnesses only a multi-channel approach will suffice.

3. Core objectives

Multi-channel marketers main objective is reach (as wide as possible across all channels), frequency of touch (be visible on all the channels and platforms where customers are) and conversion (as defined by the campaign and its goals); whereas omnichannel marketing is focused on optimizing engagement and delivering a seamless customer experience, wherever the customer chooses to interact or transact (irrespective of the channels). The focus is not conversion as much as providing an effortless experience where whatever the customer wants to do (interact, engage, transact) is enabled and facilitated as smoothly as possible across all relevant channels.

For example, in the multichannel approach, a brand would produce and release a campaign  across all channels -its website, social media channels or display ads – with some modifications to suit the medium. The campaign would be executed  on all the channels, and any response of the customer to the campaign on any channel would be recorded as a conversion and attributed to that specific channel. In spite of the response, the campaign would continue to run on other channels (which is of course not an optimal use of marketing budgets) because the customer would still be seen as a prospect  by audience managers of the other channels.

In an omnichannel approach, on the other hand, the marketing team would aim to customize content and campaigns as per the channel, and also connect these channels in a way that the customer would have a progressive interaction with the brand, and as soon as conversion occurs on any channel, the communication would change to the next best action, using dynamic content assets as per each customer’s stage in the buying journey.

4. Scope of work

Like we said at the start, choosing a multichannel or omnichannel approach is a function of many considerations, from the business stage, model and priorities, to the budgets, skills and technology available. When the goal and priority is acquisition, for example, a multichannel approach may serve the purpose, whereas for an enterprise that wants to retain its customers or a subscription-model marketer may see value in investing in an omnichannel approach to win their retention goals.

The technology aspect is also worth elaborating on, before we end. An omnichannel approach first and foremost requires a strong customer data management capability, including identity resolution and data unification, analytics and activation capability. A customer data platform may be the right choice here. Second, it needs a strong link between the unified data and the activation of that data to run orchestrated campaigns, ultimately delivering a seamless customer experience that can stand the test of time and competition.