Multichannel Marketing < Cross Channel Marketing < Omni Channel Marketing
We in the marketing tech business need to make up new buzzwords periodically, so that we can ensure ourselves the enviable position of describing what we do to civilians (non marketing tech types) at parties and getting that blank stare back and nod back (body signal begging you to not try to explain what you just said). When buzzwords start to get stale, the litany of thought leaders, bloggers, analysts and marketing tech marketers have little to expound upon, upcoming marketing campaigns start to look a little old, and everyone in the marketing tech world gets a bit antsy.
Everyone should be prepared for the latest in marketing tech buzz – Omni Channel Marketing. Our friends at Gleanster Research (always a great resource for interesting thinking about business tech) have recently posted as good of an explanation of how the concepts of marketing across multiply channels have evolved over the past few years with their recent blog post: Buzzword Du Jour: Omni-Channel Marketing 
Essentially, Omni channel marketing (to hyphen or not to hyphen, that is the question) tweaks the Multi channel marketing concept to include in its meaning that brands ought to be engaging with customers & prospects in the channel(s) that the customer prefers to engage in, when they prefer to engage in those channels, and that all channel content creation, management and measurement ought to be driven from a planned, centralized repository. As online channels continue to proliferate (now we need to be on Pinterest? Vine? What next?), it isn’t hard to see how branding & campaign management can become siloed, non integrated and isolated. Hardly the vision of “any channel any time” that most marketers are dreaming of.
Boingnet has long held the belief that consumers, prospects and customers only want to interact with brands on a holistic, integrated basis. If a prospect sees a marketing piece (regardless of channel) and then visits a corporate website (designed by all of the stakeholders of a company), he or she is probably lost. Campaigns are efforts designed to accomplish something within a specific timeframe. Why shouldn’t campaign specific websites be quickly and easily deployed to support the objectives of the campaign, and then taken down when the campaign is complete? Websites don’t have to be massive, expensive and difficult projects. With Boingnet v2, we’ll be making the idea of “Omni Channel marketing” a lot closer to reality for marketers.