Picture this: On a rare Friday evening at home, you visit Disney’s travel website to start your vacation planning. You discover a magical online world that doesn’t feel anything like “research.” Fast forward two weeks: You got paid and are ready to book your vacation. This time, you’re in the midst of a busy Friday afternoon at work, but really need to get this done before getting home. You grab your cell, log on to the Disney travel app, find your saved trip and start the check-out process. Within two minutes, it’s booked! In the weeks to come, you receive email reminders, customized notifications and surprise packages from Disney. So far, this experience is like a dream-come-true, and you haven’t even boarded the plane. Now, upon entering the Disney Park with your branded wristbands and personalized Mickey ears, the enchantment continues! From the moment you started planning, you have felt more like a guest than a tourist.
This seamless continuity of the Disney brand across websites, emails, social media, apps, packages and in the park is just the beginning of how Disney meets and exceeds the omni-channel approach to marketing.
Often confused with multi-channel marketing, omni-channel will use multiple channels, but multi-channel is not always an omni-channel approach. Confused yet? Let’s explore the details.
The main difference between multi-channel and omni-channel marketing is really about how deep the marketing messages penetrate across channels and devices. A multi-channel marketing plan might be what you have now—a consistently branded website, Facebook page, business cards, trade show booth, etc. An omni-channel approach will include those branded channels in addition to a strategy for branding every other touchpoint of your company whether it be a channel, a device, an employee or your retail space. Producing a continuous and universal user experience is the ultimate goal of omni-channel marketing.
Business leaders are buying into this evolutional approach to experiential marketing not only because it is a total alignment of everything they want their customers to experience, they’re making the commitment and investment because it works!
Building an omni-channel marketing strategy can feel daunting. It involves so many more people and a meticulous planning process. You’ll need to talk with company executives, customer service, IT, shipping and any other staff that directly interact with your customers. You may even need to plan and execute some level of training for these employees to help them fully understand the strategy goals.
If you are interested in evaluating your current customer experiences, the Webolutions team can help. Call us at 303-300-2640 when you’re ready to explore an omni-channel marketing strategy for your business.
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