About six years ago, our industry was subjected to yet another buzzword: omnichannel. Specific to marketing, the term caused more confusion than clarity. What did, and does, it really mean? No one really knew or knows. But of course, everyone threw the term around anyway.
The way I saw it, omnichannel was a way to look at marketing spend across multiple channels like digital, outdoor, TV, in-store, print, radio and more, with the ability to fine-tune budgeting across all of them to make it more effective and efficient. Of course, measuring all of that proved to be very difficult beyond a dashboard of spend.
Even more challenging was determining what drove action for which shoppers and when. If you’re marketing across all those channels, how can you accurately tell which touch point, on which channel, had a greater impact on its own or in combination with any others? You really couldn’t, and you still can’t.
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