In today’s digital world, customers expect brands to be accessible and available at the touch of a button. To meet their high expectations, businesses are integrating their online and offline strategies to create an omnichannel lead generation strategy. This is where they blend multiple channels, like in-person events, websites, newsletters, digital advertisements, webinars, and more, to generate leads that convert into sales. 

With Omnichannel marketing, you want to take a consumer-centric approach with your prospecting and lead generation tactics. This omnichannel approach ensures the consumer has a consistent experience across every channel.  Make sure you’re doing the following:

1. Keep a consistent and identifiable brand tone.
2. Personalize messaging based on specific customer interests  
3. Create content based on past interactions as well as the current stage of the customer’s journey 

As you begin implementing your omnichannel strategy, there are many ways you can ramp up your efforts. Here are five tips to increase your successful implementation of an omnichannel strategy for lead generation:

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Define your core customer and lead generation goals

Before you dive into specific tactics for your omnichannel strategy, you should start off with a clear understanding of who your core customer is and what their needs are. This will help you define your goals for a lead generation campaign. For example, let’s say you’re a real estate agent, and your core customer base is homeowners. Your lead generation goal would be to homeowners interested in selling a home or buyers interested in purchasing a new home. With this information, you will be able to determine which channels you’ll use to generate business leads and how you’ll tailor your messaging to those channels.

Developing a view of your ideal customer: 

1. Who does your product or service appeal to? 
2. Who are your top customers? 
3. Who uses your product or services the most?

It is then valuable to segment your customer by attributes:

1. Their geographic location
2. The industry they are in
3. Buying attitudes (especially if D2C)
4. Miscellaneous attributes that are unique to your product or service. 

Integrate your online and offline strategies

When it comes to integrating your digital and offline strategies, you can do this in a couple of different ways. First, you can integrate your online and offline marketing efforts by hosting events at a physical location to drive online leads to them. If you’re using online channels to generate leads, you can host virtual events to enable remote leads to participate. 

Tips for integrating online and offline strategies:

1. Use one to promote the other.
2. Reward in-person customers to go online (e.q. leave a review)
3. Keep your brand identity across all platforms
4. Use Incentives such as discounts
5. Use a mobile app to deliver incentives and track performance. 
6. Keeping landing pages and KPIs consistent

By integrating your strategies you can create a personalized, cross-channel experience for your customers at every touch point. For example, when you greet someone in-person, offer them a digital welcome gift, like a coupon for 10% off their next purchase. Or when someone completes a web form to request more information, send them an automated follow-up email with the requested information.  COSLR’s email marketing solution provides personalized imagery that can be put into email marketing campaigns.  

Utilize multiple ad types to increase awareness

In an effort to target as many potential leads as possible in one campaign, many marketers will create a single ad that runs across multiple channels. Although this approach will expose your brand to more people, it will also create a more general ad that may not resonate with your audience, plus it will be harder to track performance. 

Instead, to create more targeted ads and increase the effectiveness of your omnichannel strategy, you can utilize multiple ad types. For example, if you’re a real estate agent and you want to target homeowners interested in purchasing a new home, you might create a video ad using a real homeowner. Another ad might include a listing of homes for sale in a specific neighborhood.  Plus, by creating multiple ad types you can deliver your ad on more than one platform reaching even more customers. 

Finally, make sure you’re leveraging ad targeting to ensure your ads are reaching the right audience, location, and segment of users.  Being able to retarget users with digital ads who previously visited your website has a very high return on ad spend. 

Leverage email and lead nurturing strategies

Utilizing email and lead nurturing strategies can help you extend your reach beyond those who click on your ads. It can also help you engage those leads and educate them about your products or services. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to lead nurturing email marketing.  Here you can find The 4 Email Marketing Tips You Should Be Using for Your SaaS Product

As an example, you can create a series of educational emails that walk leads through the buying process, from identifying what they’re looking for to purchasing the item. Or you can send automated, triggered emails to people who have shown interest in your products or services.

Incorporate live events for authentic interactions with leads

Either in-person or digital live events are a great way to not only drive leads but also interact with them face-to-face to build trust and establish your authority over competitors. For example, if you’re a financial advisor, you could host a financial education event, where you share your knowledge and answer questions that attendees may have on the topic. Another example could be a webinar that provides an overview of the product or service and then leaves a long period of time after the webinar for a Q&A session.

The ability for customers to interact and engage with the business is important.  It enables you to build a rapport with the prospect and generate interest from leads that are more likely to buy.

Some of the best Webinar platforms are:

1. Livestorm
2. Demio
3. Zoho Meeting
4. WebinarJam
5. WebinarNinja

Conclusion

As the world continues to shift towards a more digital landscape, marketers will continue to find new and innovative ways to integrate their digital and offline strategies to create an omnichannel lead generation strategy. With these five tips, you can begin to integrate your strategies to increase your lead generation and prospecting efforts.