Marketing has changed tremendously in the past few years. Earlier, you had a few means of reaching your customers, but with rapid digitization marketing has now become more technology driven, fast paced and complex. Today, there are more ways to reach prospects than we could have imagined not so long ago. Mobile phone, e-mail, social media, website . . . the number of channels has continued to rise. With these changes, many of us have embraced a multi-channel marketing model and now even a new idea is floating for quite some time now: the omni-channel marketing. Is it of any use for SMEs?

So, what is omni-channel marketing? Just like the multi-channel model, it also emphasizes on using a combination of indirect and direct channels — physical store, telephone, mobile phone, direct mail, brochure, e-mail, social media, website, etc. — to enable customers to use the channel of their choice to buy product or service, but there is a big difference between the two: while the multi-channel model is all about multi-path experience, the omni-channel approach is about creating a cohesive experience for buyers by orchestrating all the marketing channels.

Simply put, omni-channel takes multichannel to the next level. Multichannel marketing is prone to inconsistencies. For example, your website may provide different product information than what your telemarketing executives are providing, or you may be investing a lot of money in on-line promotion, but your off-line customers are completely unaware of it. In contrast, the omni-channel model is about engaging the customers in a seamless experience. They start in any of the available channels in their purchasing journey and then can move to other channels one after another. All the channels are applied coherently to give a consistent portrayal of your business.

Is it affordable for SMEs to adopt the omni-channel marketing model? It is true that big businesses have more money to spend on. They may also have the upper hand when it comes to technology. But small businesses have some key advantages that their bigger counterparts don't, that make it easier to adopt this model. They are, for example, better positioned to know their customers. Similarly, providing excellent customer service is easier for them. These days, low-cost technologies are also available — website building, web application development and data analytic are possible at very low costs. In addition, being a small business, you will need to put less efforts than a large business to shift to the model.

Omni-channel marketing is all about creating a seamless buying experience and to start with what I think is more important is creating a consisting brand experience across all channels. Besides maintaining uniformity of information, it is equally important to make the tone and overall look and feel coherent across all channels. Whenever you create a new channel — be it a website, a social media page or a mobile platform — integrate it with your existing channels and engage customer regularly across all of them. Also, do some research on your own — a simple on-line search will fetch you a lot of information.

I invite your opinions. If you have some insights, please share with our readers.