According to Digital Marketer, the success of this summer’s Barbie movie was driven by “captivating storytelling, stunning visuals…and positive messages promoting empowerment and self-expression.” Not to mention a winning marketing campaign.

Whether you liked the movie or not, it was a reminder of what good marketing looks like. For starters, the campaign played into the varied interests of the movie’s target audiences, using nostalgia to resonate with Baby Boomers and modern themes to appeal to younger audiences. To reinforce its brand message across diverse segments, Mattel (the toy company that makes the iconic doll) also employed omnichannel marketing in extraordinary ways.

After seeing Barbie campaign elements go viral all summer long, I got to thinking about the challenges of a modern channel strategy. Most marketers don’t have a budget the size of Mattel’s, which is why making the right channel decisions can be overwhelming, especially as 61% of companies have increased the number of channels they use, according to Harvard Business Review.

To optimize how you approach your omnichannel strategy, here are four Barbie-inspired moves – right out of our OMI playbook – that suit today’s complex omnichannel landscape:

• Analyze and plan: Choosing the right channels requires careful consideration, even when you have a large budget like Mattel. You need to know your audience and the channels where they prefer to engage. To do this, analyze past campaign performance and customer engagement metrics to identify high-performing channels. It’s also important to consider the customer journey: each channel should serve a specific purpose in the customer journey, whether it's creating awareness, nurturing leads, or driving conversions.

• Find rock-solid media activation expertise: Media activation is the process of executing and implementing a campaign across channels to reach your target audience effectively. It includes tactical and operational actions, such as selecting channels and then placing the display ads, making social media posts, running CTV, sending an email campaign, and using a programmatic platform for retargeting.

Other aspects of media activation involve tracking and analyzing the various ads. It takes specialized expertise to know which strategies deliver the best results for a campaign – such as the use of deterministic vs. probabilistic methodologies for targeting an individual (not a company or a household).

Because media activation is complex, many agencies and internal teams hire in-house or external experts to handle all of these activities. It’s critical to get good guidance from these experts because a lot is at stake. Costs are high and so is the risk for ad fraud and ad waste. Above all, marketers need media activators they can trust to ensure the right channels are selected, the right audiences are targeted, and that ROI is achieved.

Transparency in the media buying process also includes reliable performance measurement and reporting, which enables marketers to make data-driven decisions and optimize their campaigns for maximum ROI. You can read more about the challenges around measurement – as well as emerging solutions -- here.

•  Create a flow with triggered automation: When you use an omnichannel strategy, you’ll want to create multiple touchpoints for prospects across each channel, which will increase campaign stickiness. Automation is necessary to make this possible at scale. For example, when users engage with a display ad, you can create a sequence that triggers an email based on the ad they already engaged with. Timing is everything for this to be effective. If there are delays or misfires with the sequence, you may annoy or even lose your audience.

At OMI, we use automatic triggers that are sent within 24 hours of the first contact. As an example, we recently executed a two-pronged channel strategy for a client. It included sending emails and serving digital ads to the same targeted audiences. Users who engaged one channel were automatically "triggered" to get a follow-up message or ad on the other channel within 24 hours. This strategy is unique to OMI and was one of the most significant reasons behind the campaign's success. You can read more about it here.

• Test and change: If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Marketers need to continuously test and adapt a personalized marketing approach to better meet the needs of the audience. Compare results within a channel through A/B testing, as well as across channels to see where your audience is engaging, what they resonate with, and how you can optimize it all.

At OMI we have deep experience with omnichannel campaigns. We know how to identify the right prospects at scale and we have the media activation expertise to choose the best channels, optimize your sequencing, and more. Even Barbie would be impressed. J

Reach out to us today for more information.