Omnichannel Media Planning

In today’s digital era, consumers expect personalized, seamless experiences across all touchpoints with a brand. Therefore, implementing an effective omnichannel media strategy is not just an option, it’s a necessity.

Omnichannel marketing dangles the allure of more effective advertising by delivering a unified experience across media channels. However, its siren song brings with it a new set of dangers related to breaking down entrenched siloes.

Fortunately, you can conquer these problems and unlock the potential of omnichannel marketing through a new breed of media planning tools.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a customer-centric approach to marketing and advertising that gained popularity in the 2010s. It involves coordinating and integrating across all media channels – online and offline – to deliver a consistent, seamless, and unified customer experience.

The goal of omnichannel marketing is to engage your audience effectively, regardless of the touchpoint or platform they use. It ensures a cohesive brand experience and drives better customer engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, better results.

What is Omnichannel Media Planning?

Omnichannel media planning is a new form of media planning that integrates all placements across all media channels into a single, cohesive media plan.

Omnichannel media planning requires a purpose-built media planning tool. Because legacy media planning tools segregate media plans by media channel, it’s difficult or impossible to harmonize and optimize across channels.

Understanding Omnichannel Media Planning

Unlike traditional marketing strategies, omnichannel media planning is not about spreading your message on as many channels as possible. It’s about creating a consistent experience across all channels. So, whether a customer interacts with your brand through television, radio, print, online, social media, email, or in-store, the customer experience should be cohesive.

Challenges in Omnichannel Media Planning

While this integrated approach can significantly enhance the customer experience and improve marketing outcomes, it brings with it myriad new challenges (as if we needed any more!).

Data Integration

Gathering, analyzing, and using data from different channels is crucial, but not easy. You’ll need to break down data silos and create a unified view of your advertising placements in a single media plan.

Technological Integration

Omnichannel marketing calls for a combination of ad servers, DSPs, direct placements, e-commerce, attribution, and other marketing technologies (thank you Scott Brinker!). You’ll need to gather and harmonize data across all these sources then feed back against the media plan to monitor your ad performance.

Consistent Messaging and Branding

Maintaining a unified brand voice across all channels is challenging because of the unique characteristics of each platform. You’ll need to gather and communicate the unique ad specifications for each of your ad placements.

Resource Allocation

Implementing an effective omnichannel strategy requires a significant investment. You’ll need to invest in technology, staff training, and process reengineering.

Attribution and Measurement

Accurately attributing results to specific placements in an omnichannel environment is… well, it’s complicated. Bottom line, you’ll need modern, multi-touch attribution (MTA) technology to have a fighting chance to untangle this spaghetti data. This won’t be easy.

Overcoming Challenges with Media Planning Tools

Fortunately, advanced media planning tools, such as Bionic for Agencies, can help you overcome these challenges and deliver a successful omnichannel advertising campaign.

Efficient, Effective Media Planning

Omnichannel media planning tools enable you to plan, execute, and track campaigns across multiple channels from one place. This ensures a unified customer experience.

Data Integration

Omnichannel media planning tools integrate data from all your marketing platforms. This gives you a comprehensive view of your customers’ journeys across different touchpoints.

Performance Tracking & Reporting

Omnichannel media planning tools enable you to track the performance of your campaigns across different channels, monitor KPIs, and identify areas for improvement.

Optimization & Attribution

Omnichannel media planning tools integrate with attribution technology providers. This helps you understand the impact of each channel on your campaign performance, to guide your optimization and maximize your marketing ROI.

Collaboration & Workflow Management

Media planning is a team sport. Omnichannel media planning tools enable cross-functional cooperation through real-time collaboration on unified media plans. This ensures everyone is literally on the same page, which is vital for an effective omnichannel ad campaign.

Scalability & Automation

Omnichannel media plans have lots of moving parts. Without good automation, they will drive you crazy and drain your payroll.

A good omnichannel media planning tool will automate your media planning process, save time, reduce errors, and accelerate your advertising velocity.

How to Get Started

Omnichannel media planning is a burgeoning field. As such, you won’t learn much from college textbooks. You should search online for recent articles to get up to speed.

But really, the best way to learn is to jump in and learn from experience. To gain access to an omnichannel media planning tool, start a trial on Bionic.

With the experience you gain, maybe you’ll be the one to write the first good textbook on omnichannel media planning!