Consumer-Centric marketing is an approach to media that allows marketers to create seamless experiences for customers across screens. Marketing is most effective when it is centered on the customer — understanding their behavior, relationship with the brand, and location in the buy cycle. This is extremely difficult to do well, particularly as customers begin interacting with brands on mobile devices, connected TVs, social media, and emerging touchpoints. In order to create customer-centric experiences, marketers need to purchase their media on all of these channels, as if they were a single channel, with a unified view of the customer and a coherent strategy about how to interact with them across devices.
Why is Consumer-Centric Marketing important?
Years ago when people just watched TV, read print and listened to radio, it made sense to execute one omnibus buy across channels and blast out a single message. In 2017, the average person uses 7.2 Internet-connected devices and that figure is likely to rise as the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes mainstream. In this environment, it’s important not to hit consumers with one message at too high a frequency or present them with inappropriate messages. The benefits of this approach include: 1) unified audience and media management 2) holistic machine-based learning and attribution across all channels and 3) a consolidated source of measurement aligned with marketers’ goals. By contrast, operating with point solutions or channel silos leads to a lack of cost transparency and a fragmented message, among other issues.
What is the difference between Multichannel and Omnichannel?
Just because you put the same creative on multiple channels does NOT mean you are omnichannel. Multichannel means that a marketer is using other channels through disconnected platforms that cannot fully share data. In order to get to omnichannel, marketers should be using a cross-device identity solution and a single DSP to sync their strategies, budgets, messaging, frequency, and measurement across those channels.
What are the problems with realizing Omnichannel?
For the most part today, omnichannel is more an ideal than a reality. Only 14% of marketers say they can track consumers across channels and act on the data they uncover from those interactions, according to L2. In practice, it can be difficult to establish a consumer’s single identity across various devices, synchronize marketing messages across platforms and attribute a sale to the right media and messages. Today, marketers should be laying the foundation of their omnichannel strategy by establishing cross-device solutions, implementing a data strategy to maximize your first party data, and organizing your marketing teams around shared goals and views of the customer