Companies, both digital as well as brick and mortar, are acquiring digital contacts through various channels. These channels include social, enterprise, support, mobile, partners among others. Omni-channel digital strategy is the strategy that organizations need to connect with digital connections from multiple channels

1. OMNI-CHANNEL DIGITAL
STRATEGY
Tips and tools for an effective digital
strategy

2. What is Omni-channel digital
strategy
Acquiring digital users from many channels -
social, enterprise, support, mobile, partners.

3. How do you make sure they stay engaged
 Personalize content and increase
stickiness
 Strong forum with very little moderation
 Offline events to identify and engage -
coupons, events - touch points to drive
people offline and then come back and
contribute online
 Simple and unified messaging across all
channels - either quick response or
quality service along those lines
 Converge digital strategy to business
strategy - never let it run autonomously

4. Personalize content

5. Personalize Content
Thumb Rules:
 Make it current and relevant.
 Make it sticky for the user
 Get feedback and improve
When you , as a business, are
acquiring digital contacts from
multiple channels, there is no
way you could serve content
that could be relevant to every
one.
 Personalize the content based
on the user profile information.
 More information we have
regarding a digital contact,
more personalized the content
can be.

6. Personalize Content
 Make it current and relevant
 The content that we have should be personalized and current. For example, if I expect the media to be
connected with me and not share some of the recent information online, that becomes tough.
 The media expects any information that can be shared with the external world to be available to them - either
in terms of press releases or generic press kits.
 Make sure that the information is available to them easily when they try to connect with you
 Make it sticky for the user
 Help the user relate with the content. Organize the content based on what the digital contact would want to
do.
 For example, if I am a retailer and intend to connect with my customers by offering them recipes, i should
allow them to download recipes, share them and interact with the recipe
 Interacting with the content - sharing , rating, comments etc - helps the customer relate to the content and
helps us serve better content to the user
 Get feedback and improve
 This is something that all organizations need to do irrespective of whether we want to have a better digital
strategy
 Collecting feedback - or even listening to digital contacts - gives us better ways of connecting with them
 Make it easy for them to provide feedback and show them that you are listening. Show them progress on any
feedback that they might have given you

7. Have Strong Forums

8. Have Strong Forums
Key Practices:
 Have relevant content
 Have your customer care
interact with your digital
connections in the forums
 Keep it lightly moderated
 Encourage digital
connections to connect to
one another
 Identify and recognize most
active digital connections
 Run regular campaigns to
keep your digital connections
engaged
How do you know that your
digital connections are
engaged?
 One of the most effective and
popular ways it to have a forum. A
forum is a discussion board on
your website or a social site that
acts as your forum
 Organizations that have omni-
channel strategy make sure they
have internal forums and forums
on several social sites. They make
sure that the forums are inter-
operable

9. Have Strong Forums
 Have relevant
content
 Relevant content is what gets
the digital connections come to
the forums.
 To start with, organizations
would not know which content
is relevant
 Over a period of time, digital
connections would start
trending over content that is
 Customer care interact
with digital connections
 People like it when they get
responses from the customer
care of an organization
 It helps to have your customer
care respond to the queries
from digital connections

10. Have Strong Forums
 Keep it lightly
moderated
 Moderation helps. However,
sometimes it becomes
annoying when you see
multiple replies in forums
deleted
 The better way is to make sure
to keep it lightly moderated or
moderated with the users
themselves
 That way, it becomes easier for
the users to interact with each
other
 Customer care
interact with digital
connections
 There are digital connections
who would want to know
things that are either common
knowledge amongst your
existing users or things that
are frequently asked
questions
 It helps organizations since it
shows that the digital

11. Have Strong Forums
 Identify and recognize
most active digital
connections
 Always recognize your most
active digital connections
 Allow your partners to be
engaged with your customers.
It makes it easier for the
customers to understand your
support network and your
partners would also have more
increased traffic.
 Build it like a platform so that all
of the digital connections can
benefit
 Run regular campaigns
to engage connections
 Finally, this is the most
common practice
 Have regular campaigns to
keep the digital connections
engaged
 Keep things interesting and
active

12. Connect with online connections offline

13. Connect with online connections
offline
Benefits:
 An opportunity to understand
them better
 Meet-ups used as forums for
user research
 Offer something that is
exclusive and relevant. A ticket
to annual event or music event could
keep them engaged
 Market the events – to
engage online connections ,
drive any offline connections
online as well. This will become
self-reinforcing
Organizations cannot be run completely
online or offline. It has to be a hybrid.
 Digital strategy cannot be completely online.
It is not possible to have engaging digital
connections online
 Organizations have to create opportunities
to interact with their digital connections
offline. There are several ways in which you
can connect with digital connections offline
 Some of the examples are a retailer
organizing a specific wine tasting event just
for their online connections or an
organization giving passes to their annual
meet free or giving some of their
merchandise free. A few other organizations
have also thrown parties where they have
tried to make sure that they interact with
their digital connections

14. Have simple and clear messaging

15. Have Strong Forums
Few Reasons
 Omni-channel digital strategy ,
unlike marketing campaigns,
tend to be for long periods and
need a different level of focus.
This is not easy to attain with multiple
messaging for each segment
 Digital strategy tends to adapt
based on how the users change
and pull relevant content
 Digital strategy tends to dilute
the messaging. Subtle
messages or clues and
ambiguous statements do not
help. Neither do disclaimers.
Any organization that has ever run a
marketing campaign or has engaged
a marketing partner would know that
they need to have a clear and
directed messaging strategy when
targeting users through multiple
channels
However, this does not work well
when translated to obi-channel digital
strategy. There are a few reasons
why this does not work well for omni-
channel digital strategy

16. Have Strong Forums
Good Practices:
 Simple message that is more
relevant to the organization than the
user segment
 Messages that help send across a
single trait of the organization. This
helps it easier for connections across any
channel to connect to the organization
 The digital strategy can keep
changing . The message tends to
stay the same , helping digital
connections make sense of new
direction or action the organization is
taking.
What helps when you are looking at
omni-channel digital strategy -
specifically with respect to
messaging - is what feeling or image
does your organization evoke in your
digital connection’s minds.
This is the reason why digital
strategy is not something that can be
easily consulted on by external
agencies or a clear plan of action be
provided for the organization to be
put in motion.

17. Drive digital strategy based on business strategy

18. Drive digital strategy based on business
strategy
Reasons:
 Organizations that have not had an IT
department tend to invest more on
them to catchup with their competitors
 This leads to a more skewed digital
strategy
Omni-channel digital
strategy cannot be driven
in isolation.
This is one of the most
common practices that
organizations use.
However, the reasons
these happen is because
of the way most
organizations are

19. Drive digital strategy based on business
strategy
Practices to avoid:
 Having a silo-ed digital strategy -
disconnected from the business
strategy
 Having a digital strategy that fails to
relate to the digital connections - Most
of this series is related to that
 A digital strategy that tries to catch-up
to the competition
Best Practices:
 Digital strategy should always be in
tandem with the organization’s
business strategy.
 Digital strategy should be used as an
enabler
 A sound digital strategy includes
planning for pivots in your business
model based on your digital strategy.
For more information on pivots, refer
to this post here.

20. About the Author
The author is a lead consultant / agile coach at Thoughtworks and has 10
years of experience in software delivery – 5 of which has been with
enabling enterprise adapt agile.
The author regularly writes at www.madhavanwrites.blogspot.com