Creating exciting, compelling events is one thing. Turning that experience into a lasting, ongoing connection is something completely different. Today’s consumer demands more than just a one-off interaction—they want touchpoints that build on each other and create a seamless omnichannel brand narrative. So how do we make that happen? Let us count the ways:
1. Break down barriers to help your cause
There are a lot of different teams on a brand or project that work toward the same goal, but not in the same way. Get together with all the stakeholders and decide what you’re trying to accomplish, where your audience is, and how you’re going to get them to your goal. And not just your goal—their goals. Collaborating with multidisciplinary team partners helps everyone achieve their goals and contributes to broader success for clients: win-win! Breaking down barriers and silos allows you to create an omnichannel approach that considers all the facets of the engagement and reaches the right people at the right moment. When you talk to your audience, they’re getting a consistent message that builds on the conversations your partners are having in another channel. This clarifies your audience personas, gets you richer marketing data, and ultimately leads to better insights and increased ROI.
2. Enhance your capabilities by thinking bigger
Develop KPIs that go across the organization beyond event-specific measures. Work with your marketing ops team to assess your capabilities today and decide what you’re going to need to invest in to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Continuing the multidisciplinary conversation can help you collaborate on the big message, focus on producing better work, and create continuity across all the different touch points. It’s important to come to a consensus early, clearly define roles and responsibilities, and make sure everyone is bought into the shared business goals for the brand from the beginning.
3. Start with people, not platforms
Don’t let tech platform thinking overshadow the fact that your audience are individual humans, with varied motivations and preferences. The beauty of omnichannel is that it uses data to build a more complete customer picture in real-time — adapting messaging, imagery and timing to data inputs as they come in. However, starting your campaign with a strategic, focused, model of your audiences is up to you and your partners. How can you use this information to speak to different individuals in ways that engage them and create meaningful connections before, during, and after your event? Many tech platforms will identify and switch channels automatically, but having a clear strategic intent to begin with is key.
4. Creativity and relevance drive performance
You can have the most relevant message in the world, but if it’s not delivered in a fresh, differentiated way, it won’t trigger an action. Creativity, combined with relevance, is a powerful way to attract and retain audience attention. Use your customer insights and personas to dive deep into what makes them tick, then develop arresting visuals and compelling content built around them. For example, one brand determined that if sports fans are watching baseball on TV and also scrolling on their phone, putting baseball-oriented ads in their feed increased engagement by as much as 86%.
5. Make it matter with consistency
Think of all your working parts harmonizing like an orchestra. While each part is different, they blend seamlessly to create a cohesive experience. It’s the same when you’re trying to expand engagement beyond the show floor. While sub–messages may be diverse and individualized, everything you deliver across all the touchpoints should look the same and be identifiable to the audience so they have the right context and know what to do no matter what channel they happen to be using.
6. Real-world experiences are still your most powerful channel
Genuine human connection and immersive, authentic experiences are a massively effective channel when they’re designed around their audience. Spaces should be more than just a product showcase—products should live in environments that are relatable and focus on how the audience would use them in the real world. At CES, Amazon highlighted its diverse array of products by creating a space that showed audiences how they connected together to form a seamless ecosystem, using consistent forms and designs across the exhibit to tie together individual, tailored mini-experiences into a broad brand narrative.
You should also design your event so it creates an online ripple effect. You can combine live streaming, organic social content from influencers, and immersive experiences in ways that encourage digital sharing and show your audience why they should continue to interact with you.
7. Adapt the experience to the customer, not the customer to the experience
Every customer is on a different journey. Your design needs to recognize that and your messages need to be able to pivot to adjust to new channels or perspectives as they arise. While about 70% of your content should be planned and applicable to everybody, about 20% of the time you should be reacting to your audience, with flexible messaging that can evolve with the situation. This goes back to integrating your team, as the more in tune you are, the faster you can pivot. Things like modular design, prioritizing products, and strategic goal-setting can all make sure that if you need to shift your thinking, you can do so while still accomplishing your business objectives.
8. Think about next year now
Omnichannel delivers an incredibly rich data set for you to draw from. Use this year’s insights and experiences to build an even better audience interaction next year. Start almost as soon as the last person leaves your booth. Assess what worked and what didn’t, and take those learnings forward into planning for next year. Work with your partners to strengthen and deepen your relationships so you can be even better than you are today.
Need some omnichannel expertise? We’re ready when you are.
Stay up to date on insights like these and upcoming thought leadership from Impact XM—sign up for our newsletter today.
And if you’re looking for a partner who knows how to connect the dots and extend, expand, and excite audiences no matter where they are, let’s start that conversation.
