A recent article [‘Is Your Marketing Strategy Based on the Right Data?’ by Gregg Johnson] of Harvard Business Review points out that marketers must make quick decisions that are nonetheless anchored in data.

Hence, companies are pouring more and more money into marketing analytics. However, even as marketers bury themselves in data, they get an incomplete picture of performance and their customers.

It is important to make decisions grounded in facts and connected to revenue; hence, effectively using data and analytics is necessary for marketers to understand their customers’ changing reality.

The expectation to deliver timely, relevant, and connected customer engagements across multiple devices and channels remains a critical priority among marketers. omni-channel solutions help digital marketing leaders unify customer data and deepen audience insights, but they do not necessarily offer those features as a stand-alone Data cloud.

Omni-channe lenables digital marketing leaders to deliver personalized campaigns at a scale that is aligned with customer, channel, timing, and content preferences. Thus, when an enterprise already has its own Data cloud, Omni-channel organizes and delivers the marketing campaigns by picking up where the Data cloud leaves off.

Omni-channel vendors deliver predictive decision-making capabilities designed to optimize engagements and offer delivery.

Predictive analytics infuse every omni-channel use case, from campaign creation to impact measurement.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are used to support segment discovery, guiding marketers toward interested customers, campaign and journey path generation based on business goals, channel propensity models driven by customer profiles, behaviour and preferences, predictive content and offer recommendations, and autonomous campaign optimization capabilities.

However, as it is evident, omni-channel vendors and platforms are not alike, but they most often vary their approaches to power marketing campaigns.

They also differ in the breadth of their surrounding ecosystems for additional functionality, implementation support, and service offerings.

Four primary use cases that the organizations must utilize to determine if the products satisfy their omni-channel requirements are as follows:

• Campaign creation helps the marketing leader set goals and apply relevant customer insights for audience segmentation and content creation for a multichannel marketing campaign.
• Campaign orchestration, in which the marketing teams plan the channels through which their campaign will be delivered. The timing and sequencing of the campaign are also determined as a part of this step.
• Campaign execution manages the overall process of multichannel marketing campaigns, including systematically choreographing essential elements like content, tasks, and people.
• Campaign measurement helps the marketing teams track the performance of their campaigns and apply insights for the optimization of such campaigns.

It is critical for the marketing leaders to identify omni-channel  vendors that closely match the use case capabilities with the use case priorities of the organization.

There are tools available to rank the vendors in the context of the prevailing market dynamics, which the marketing team leaders can deploy to determine the omni-channel vendor best suited for their organizational needs.