As marketers had to double-down on creative solutions during the pandemic, change has been happening behind the scenes. Whether it’s doing away with cookies or the recent news that Nielsen’s audience measurement tools are being applied to Twitter’s video content, data use is shifting, always.

Marketers use many different channels to reach customers, and they’re increasingly building omnichannel strategies that can follow and engage an audience on multiple different platforms. But when it comes to the marketing tools they use, too often these solutions are siloed from one another.

It’s always shocking to find that a major retail brand doesn’t have a mobile app. Meanwhile, it’s equally stunning when a small business has built a killer mobile experience for its customers.

But when you understand the role omnichannel plays for retail and other major industries, the shortcomings of the big-box retailer are much more confounding than the smaller company’s assertiveness in building a better mobile presence.

Marketing technology providers talk a big game about integration but few live up to the hype. More often than not, the addition of a new marketing technology to an existing program creates a new silo – a repository of data that does not flow freely within an organization but remains stagnant within a single piece of technology. But, much like kindergarteners, marketing technologies need to be taught to play well together and to share.

The customer journey is made up of the stages of interactions between your brand and the customer. Increasingly, the customer journey has become omnichannel, with customers moving between devices as they research products and services.

The rise of mobile has changed the face of marketing. Consumers increasingly use mobile to evaluate products and services and make purchasing decisions. An additional challenge has emerged to complicate the marketing landscape. Customers aren’t just using one type of device to make transactions.

The biggest problem with omnichannel marketing is the gulf between how many marketers think they’re doing it and the number of consumers experiencing it. As consumer expectations continue to increase around the integration of technology in the shopping experience, is your omnichannel strategy getting attention for the right reasons?

We live in a multi-channel world. Consumers not only use more than one channel to make a purchase, they often use those channels simultaneously (checking online prices in stores, watching TV while browsing on their laptops) There are many factors that affect the quality of the cross channel experience. Externally, messaging, visuals, and functionality are all critical while internally marketers need to button up things like offer optimization, attribution modeling, and analytics.