What is omnichannel and why should you care?

David Klement, Michael Andrews

4 minutes

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You need to reach your customers wherever they are and on whatever device they’re using. That’s hard to do with a website as the only communication channel. Discover how omnichannel publishing can help with that and how it influences your content strategy.

Why care about omnichannel?

Until a few years ago, it was fine for a company to have a website as the only content channel. But that’s not the case anymore. Customers moved from computer screens to mobile phones, voice assistants, or apps on their smart TVs. And they expect your content there. Going omnichannel means you can reach your customers where they are and on whatever device they’re using at the time. Watch the video below to see why it’s important to create an omnichannel user experience.

The benefit of Kontent.ai, and headless CMSs in general, is that you can easily repurpose your content for various channels. It’s not tied to websites as it usually was with legacy all-in-one digital experience platforms. Headless CMSs enable you to COPE – Create Once, Publish Everywhere. However, having a headless CMS and apps for all imaginable channels doesn’t magically solve everything. COPE is the starting point, not the finish line. You can’t use the same content for every channel because the channels differ in how people see and interact with your content. With these channel distinctions come different content expectations on different channels. To satisfy these expectations, you need a solid omnichannel content strategy.

Omnichannel vs. multichannel

You may have come across the term multichannel, and you may wonder what’s the difference between multichannel and omnichannel:

Multichannel publishing provides the same content to all touchpoints.
Omnichannel publishing tailors what content is delivered to each touchpoint depending on the touchpoint’s characteristics.

In other words, using a multichannel strategy means serving the same content to every channel. For instance, lengthy texts, long article titles, and large high-resolution images would go to both websites and smartwatches. That wouldn’t do, would it? This is the reason you want to go omnichannel. Detailed articles and high-resolution images are desirable for websites. But smartwatch users want brief info with reasonably-sized image sizes for fast load times and easy information lookup.

Omnichannel content strategy

The create once, publish everywhere (COPE) benefit of headless CMSs isn’t a magic CMS feature you switch on at will. It’s a deliberate approach to planning how to work with content. COPE doesn’t imply that a single version of content automatically works effectively on every channel all the time. You also need to consider the context in which the content will be used.In many cases, your content can work without changes on all channels. However, you should be mindful of the differences between the channels you use. When using a voice assistant, your customers expect a much shorter version of what you serve them on your website, for instance.

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