Integrated Channel Strategy – Niti Vaish of Slalom Consulting
Integrated Channel Strategy – Niti Vaish of Slalom Consulting

Integrated Channel Strategy – Niti Vaish of Slalom Consulting

Integrated Channel Strategy – Niti Vaish of Slalom Consulting

Posted on: January 26, 2011 – Filed under: Chicago

On January 24, 2011, Niti Vaish of Slalom Consulting delivered a very insightful discussion of how to go about creating an integrated multi-channel strategy. Niti discussed the maturity evolution that takes a brand from the place where they say to a consultant “I want an iPhone app” to the level where they have products and processes to extend their brand and extract positive ROI from those sources.
Multi channel Strategy MoMoChicago January 24, 2011

Highlights from the discussion

  • Multi-channel must be integrated, holistic & actionable.
    • This means, the strategist must look at the dependencies between mobile, social and digital channels.
    • Need a 360 degree view of the consumer
  • Clients who ask “Can you build me an iphone application?” are missing the point
  • “Let’s start a twitter account & a fb page.” are free steps that can be taken, but don’t deliver any value.
  • It’s easy to understand why they want to be in this space
    • 130 million iDevices
    • 300,000 iphone apps (in last year??)
    • > 10 billion downloads from app store
    • In terms of market share, iPhone is far beyond Android and Blackberry
    • Nielsen projects smartphone = 50% penetration
    • 650 million facebook users
    • 200 million twitter users

Nevertheless, creating an iPhone app without understanding an integrated strategy, with clear objectives is a waste.

IMC Strategy

  • Mobile channel
    • 2008 didn’t bring year of mobile
    • 2009 brought online site to mobile, without leveraging device level info
    • Most companies simply took online presence and transferred to the mobile presence.
  • Social Channel
    • Brands look at the channels in isolation without looking at the dependencies between the channels
  • Digital channel
    • BI & Web Analytics
      • Organizations must define the objectives of the channel
      • Must have processes in place to handle feedback
      • Else, they will miss out on the ROI for focusing on these channels
    • Extracting Insights
      • To do this, they must understand their customers. Who are they? What segments do they fall into?
      • Most of this data sits in a database, but in the social channel, it is unstructured – twitter feed, comments, etc. how do you leverage this for product innovation or process improvement?
    • Information Architecture & Search
      • Is the site well defined? Is IA well defined with easy to find information?
      • Are users pulled out of context?
      • Do you provide filter and sort functionality to drill down to the most important nuggets?
      • Keep user experience consistent with popups, hover data. This all goes back to design. How well is it defined?
    • Content Management
      • How well is your CMS integrated with your website?
      • Your content should created once and re-purposed across all your channels.
      • You do not want your content for the mobile site created specifically for that channel.
      • You want to re-purpose content and business rules, and the biggest bang for the buck.

      Developing a Multi-Channel Strategy

      • Listen to and engage with my customers
      • HD did a fantastic job with the goal of building a community around a cause of natural disaster
      • not pushing product, but showing another face
      • JetBlue is just promoting distressed inventory on twitter
      • Best Buy’s customer service supports through a whole network
    • Start to leverage that unstructured data in order to draw insights in order to make product improvements and process enhancements?
      • The conversation is happening – you might as well get involved
      • Be honest and take negativity head on
      • Forrester’s has coined a term of “multi-dimensional customer engagement” as this integrated multi-channel strategy. the “customer journey”.

    • Firms must a cultural shift to adopt social media and goals to be well defined

  • Aligning these goals within the organization and human resources against those goals is key.
    • One big problem is that these teams are split.
    • What’s under IT, marketing, or product facing? Social is typically under PR? Digital is under PR.
    • Important to align the cross functional teams. But it needs to be staffed by people who understand dependencies across the groups.
    • Channel strategist should be a cross-functional role