How to structure your content for omnichannel success

With today’s proliferation of digital devices and channels, customers often start, stop, and resume their buying journeys several times before purchase, and they expect this process to be seamless. Every brand’s goal is, or should be, to provide these customers with a consistent and seamless experience every step of the way.

Successful omnichannel experiences are the key.

An omnichannel content strategy is a comprehensive approach to delivering a seamless and cohesive brand experience across all communication channels and platforms. It involves streamlining and distributing content that is tailored to the unique characteristics and preferences of each channel while maintaining a consistent message and brand identity.

This omnichannel marketing strategy recognizes that consumers engage with brands through a multitude of touchpoints, such as websites, social media, email, mobile apps, in-store experiences, and more. By synchronizing content across these channels, the omnichannel strategy aims to provide a unified and personalized journey for customers, enhancing their overall engagement and satisfaction.

Ultimately, the goal is for the marketing team to break down silos between different marketing channels and create a holistic, customer-centric approach that fosters brand loyalty and drives business growth.

A successful omnichannel experience is one that delivers a consistent, uninterrupted customer experience across all channels — such as websites, email, and physical stores — and all devices from desktop to mobile and all the smart ones in between. If done well, experiences adjust to customers based on where they are in their journey and are consistent regardless of the point of engagement.

Marketers can and should lead the charge here.

Shifting strategy from single to multiple channels requires changing your relationship to content. This begins with a fundamental change in mindset — separating content from its presentation. You can then reorganize how your content is created and stored to increase the ease of reusing and repurposing. Structured content is one of the key methods for doing so, improving the quality of your final content while also saving time.

Organizing your content in a structured way also facilitates headless content publishing or distribution, where the architecture separates back-end content functions (like creation, management, and storage) from front-end functions (like presentation and delivery to any channel).

With a headless architecture and structured content, marketers can create content once while enabling their developers to display it anywhere. That means less time spent on administration and more time for building beautiful, cohesive experiences.

Let’s take a closer look at how to structure your content for omnichannel success.

1. Understand your audience across channels
   Before restructuring your content, it's crucial to understand your target audience’s behavior across different channels, taking different demographics and personas into consideration.
    
   Conduct in-depth research to identify where your audience spends their time, their preferences, and their pain points on each channel. This information will guide you in creating content marketing that resonates with them on every platform.
    
2. Set your goals
   Effective marketing starts with clear objectives, otherwise, you run the risk of creating content just for the sake of it. Goals serve as a roadmap for any digital marketing campaign, providing direction, focus, and a means to measure success.
    
   Are you looking to increase your sales? Build brand awareness? Generate more leads? Each goal requires different content management and different metrics, and by being clear you will find it easier to track your progress toward achieving your desired outcomes.
    
3. Develop a platform-specific content strategy
   A set-it-and-forget-it approach doesn't work in omnichannel marketing. Create content strategy that is optimized for each channel's format, audience, and objectives. For example:
    
   
   • Social Media: Craft visually engaging posts with concise messaging and hashtags.
   • Website: Provide comprehensive product information, educational content, and a seamless user experience.
   • Email: Personalize email campaigns based on customer behavior and preferences.
   • In-Store: Offer interactive displays and signage that mirror your online content.
    
4. Focus on reusable content
   For a successful omnichannel approach, you must think of structuring your content as establishing building blocks. Start with questions like these: Which of the pieces of your content can you re-use later? Can you identify parts of content that you can change for one channel to another? Or one audience to another?
    
   Repurposing content and identifying the variables per channel and audience requires a little more time upfront, but the ROI in terms of time saved is well worth it. You’ll spend much less time and resources compared to always creating net new content for each channel.
    
   Once you’ve created the content pieces it’s also important you have a content hub system that easily enables your teams to access all the available content, so you can optimize, reuse, and repurpose them with ease. This is often as simple as putting content together in different ways, such as in the case with modularizing content and template layouts.
    
   At times you may only need to simply create a new heading, for example, but even in the most extreme cases, such as having to create an entirely new section for a blog or guide, you still save tons of time and budget overall.
    
5. Create seamless experiences
   Modern consumers expect a consistent and cohesive experience when interacting with a brand across multiple digital channels. They want a seamless transition from one touchpoint to another, whether it's online, offline, through social media, email marketing, or via mobile apps.
    
   So you must ensure that your brand identity, tone of voice, and design are coherent and recognizable throughout your content on every channel. You’ll want a digital experience platform that enables your team to deliver a connected experience across channels. And it’s important to ensure that various organizations within your brand are aligned and have necessary access to key customer details, so customers feel remembered.
    
   Creating seamless experiences boost customer engagement and are essential for driving strong customer relationships, improving retention, enhancing customer loyalty, and staying competitive in a rapidly evolving market.
    
6. Leverage marketing automation
   Marketing automation plays a pivotal role in enhancing omnichannel campaigns. By adding automated tools and workflows to your tech stack, you can better orchestrate your marketing efforts across various channels, such as podcasts, social media, websites, and mobile apps. This will help your teams deliver consistent and personalized experiences to your audience at every touchpoint throughout the customer journey.
    
   With marketing automation, companies can set up audience segments, analyze their behavior, and deliver tailored content and offers accordingly, ensuring a cohesive and relevant brand experience. Additionally, automation can streamline the process of tracking and analyzing customer interactions, allowing for real-time adjustments to marketing strategies based on performance data.
    
7. Leverage data and analytics
   Customer data is your most valuable asset in restructuring omnichannel content — especially in e-commerce. Utilize analytics tools to track customer interactions, monitor conversions, and gain key data on what works for your brand experience and what doesn't. This data-driven approach will allow you to fine-tune your content strategy, optimizing for customer satisfaction.
    
8. Monitor and adapt
   The digital landscape is ever-evolving, and customer preferences change over time. To maintain omnichannel success, continually monitor your content performance, analyze consumer behavior patterns across your brand experience, and adapt your strategy as needed. Pay attention to customer feedback, industry trends, and emerging technologies that can enhance your omnichannel efforts.

 

When you structure your content wisely, you can reuse it with ease across sites, channels, and assets. Sitecore Content Hub ONE is designed to enable you to do this simply and with ease. Request a demo to see how you can start delivering uninterrupted experiences for your customers.