Imagine you’re conducting a symphony orchestra. Each section — strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion — represents a different marketing channel in your omnichannel campaign.
Every instrument has its unique sound and role. Each marketing channel has its distinct characteristics and strengths.
As the conductor, you’re responsible for keeping all these diverse elements in harmony with one another. You can’t simply focus on one section and ignore the others. The violins might play beautifully on their own, but if they’re out of sync with the rest of the orchestra, the overall performance suffers.
Similarly, in omnichannel marketing, you can’t pour all your efforts into 1 channel while neglecting the others. Your social media strategy might be gaining engagement, but if it’s disconnected from your email marketing or in-store experience, the buyer journey becomes disjointed.
Just as musical harmony is the result of different instruments playing in sync, a successful omnichannel marketing campaign is the outcome of different channels achieving alignment at every stage of the buyer journey.
Therein lies the difficulty. More specifically, the challenge of omnichannel alignment can be separated into 3 key areas:
- Alignment between all channels, messaging, and buyer journey stages
- Alignment between tech, data, and campaigns
- Alignment between sales and marketing teams
In this article, we’ll explore each of these challenges, as well as their sub-challenges, along with the proven solutions we at Belkins employ for our clients.
Challenges aligning channels, messaging, and the buyer journey
Misalignment across different channels means using email, cold calling, social media, or ads in the wrong way at the wrong time, based on which stage of the buyer journey the prospect is in.
Lack of proper alignment leads to confusion and dilutes brand messaging, which causes potential customers to question the credibility and reliability of your brand.
Ultimately, misalignment results in lost trust and missed opportunities for engagement and conversion.
Consistent messaging is needed, but it must be carefully timed to avoid overwhelming potential customers. Too much information too quickly feels impersonal and irrelevant to the prospect.
To address these challenges, you need strategic planning that starts with in-depth user research. Understanding your audience’s preferences and behaviors lays the foundation for creating a cohesive marketing strategy that aligns channels and messaging with every stage of the buyer journey.
Inconsistent messaging and overwhelming prospects with simultaneous communications
Varied messages across channels confuse prospects about company offerings, causing a fragmented experience that undermines trust and clarity. As a result, engagement rates drop across all channels.
📌 Case in point:
A healthcare technology company runs a digital ad campaign promoting a new software solution. The solution is promoted for its ability to streamline patient management.
However, when potential clients visit the company’s website, they find outdated information that highlights an older version of the software with different features.
Next, after booking a demo call, a prospective client receives a confirmation email stating, “Thank you! Looking forward to seeing you!” Shortly after, they get an additional introductory email from their assigned sales executive. They also start to see ads on social media promoting entirely different services.
This kind of inconsistency makes prospects question which products are currently available and what benefits they can expect, leading to confusion and mistrust.
💡 Solution:
To address this challenge, implement a unified messaging strategy that ensures all communications are consistent and aligned with the user journey. This involves mapping out the entire customer experience from the ground up and coordinating messaging across all platforms to prevent overwhelming prospects.
For instance, if a prospect has booked a call, any nurture emails should be paused or tailored to reflect this engagement to avoid mixed signals.
We help our clients synchronize their messaging across all touchpoints so that every interaction reinforces the same core message and aligns with the prospect’s current stage in the buying process.
Only by carefully managing timing and content delivery for every channel will you create a cohesive experience that drives engagement and builds trust with potential clients.
Difficulty in mapping buyer journeys across different channels
Lack of understanding about ICP, industry, personas, and effective channels at different stages is the primary cause for misalignment with the user journey.
📌 Case in point:
A manufacturing company launches a new product but fails to identify which channels are most effective for different stages of the customer journey.
They send out emails to their entire database about the product launch, run ads on social media, and post updates on their website. But they don’t track how prospects interact with these channels. They don’t know which channels work best at different stages of the buyer journey.
A prospect who clicks on an ad for the new product receives an email about an unrelated service instead of follow-up information about the item they showed interest in. As a result, prospects fail to see the relevancy of the offers and the company experiences low conversation rates at every stage.
💡 Solution:
Knowing which channels and messaging to use at different stages of the buyer journey comes from user research. Because user behavior on different platforms is always changing, you can’t rely on past research.
You need to conduct and organize new research to map it to industry, ICP, personas, messaging, and each stage of the buyer journey.
📚 Relevant post: 13 sales follow-up email templates that generate replies
Challenges aligning tech and data with omnichannel campaigns
Tech integration is challenging because of the increasing number of available tools. The solution, while not much fun, is something you just have to buckle down and commit to.
Hiring a dedicated professional or outsourcing to a specialized team is ideal. Their added experience lets them handle unpredictable situations far more effectively, keeping operations running smoothly.
Moreover, integrating technology into a single “source of truth” (e.g., HubSpot) with data lakes for backup is necessary to keep your ever-growing body of data organized and safe.
Real-time data logging is another consideration if you want consistently formatted data. Retroactive logging, like manually entering booked appointments into HubSpot, proves insufficient for omnichannel campaigns for reasons that we explore in more depth below.
Siloed data and technical difficulties in synchronizing multiple tools
Lack of integration across marketing and sales tools brings incomplete insights and fragmented data. This leads to missed opportunities that would otherwise help you understand lead behavior and help tailor marketing efforts.
Additionally, without a cohesive view of interactions, triggers and historical data are overlooked, complicating customer journey management.
📌 Case in point:
A tech company uses multiple platforms, such as HubSpot for CRM and Google Analytics for website tracking.
However, these systems operate in silos. When a lead downloads a whitepaper, this action is recorded in Google Analytics but does not update HubSpot. As a result, the sales team is unaware of the lead’s interest during follow-up.
Similarly, if a BDR books an appointment through Woodpecker without integration into HubSpot, the sales manager lacks visibility into the lead’s full interaction history. The disconnect makes it so sales executives are limited in their ability to tailor relevant and effective pitches.
💡 Solution:
We address these challenges with a comprehensive integration strategy that connects all marketing platforms. For our clients, we set up automated workflows to ensure seamless synchronization of data — such as ad clicks, downloads, and appointment bookings — within HubSpot.
A dedicated specialist establishes this integration by working directly with the client’s systems for 3 to 6 months, ensuring accurate logging of interactions across systems.
By creating structured data flows that capture relevant information in real time, we maintain a reliable “source of truth” for accurate and clear monitoring for both clients and ourselves.
📚 Relevant post: How HubSpot & sales enablement drove Belkins' 15% closing rate of outbound leads and $5M in new revenue
Maintaining a “source of truth” for all marketing data
Maintaining a reliable “source of truth” for marketing data is not realistic when data is siloed across multiple platforms. Without proper integration, collecting, matching, and formatting data consistently becomes a huge headache, leading to incomplete insights and misaligned marketing efforts.
📌 Case in point:
A marketing agency uses HubSpot as its central CRM but also employs tools like Salesforce and Mailchimp. Each time a lead engages with one of these platforms—such as filling out a form on a landing page or clicking a link in an email—the data is not automatically transferred to HubSpot.
Consequently, if a lead books a demo through Salesforce after receiving an email from Mailchimp, the marketing team is unaware of this interaction, which means less personalized communication and a less effective nurture campaign.
💡 Solution:
In addition to HubSpot, we recommend establishing a centralized data lake that aggregates information from all marketing tools to maintain a reliable “source of truth.” This setup grants comprehensive tracking and analysis of user interactions while also formatting data so that it’s complete and structured.
Our specialists also work with our clients to integrate HubSpot into other systems, capturing every lead’s journey — from ad clicks to call bookings — in one cohesive database.
Challenges aligning sales and marketing teams with company goals
With omnichannel campaigns, sales and marketing have to work together. It’s no longer optional. If they aren’t properly aligned on goals, the result is conflict, inefficiency, and plenty of lost revenue.
Establishing shared goals is the key. No longer can marketing be in charge of generating leads while sales only steps in for the close. Both teams need to work toward common objectives. In this environment, they can come up with creative methods of solving problems, streamlining processes, improving communication, and producing meaningful results for the company as a whole, not just their departments.
Divergent goals between sales and marketing departments
When sales and marketing teams pursue different objectives, it creates friction and gives no good reason to collaborate to achieve them. This comes from each department focusing solely on its own metrics rather than the overall success of the company.
📌 Case in point:
In a B2B tech company, the sales team prioritizes meeting quarterly revenue targets, pushing for quick closes on leads.
Meanwhile, the marketing team focuses on long-term brand-building initiatives and generating high-quality leads that may take longer to convert.
This disconnect causes the sales team to focus on leads that don’t match the ideal customer profile. At the same time, marketing’s efforts to nurture high-potential prospects are disrupted by overly aggressive sales tactics.
💡 Solution:
At Belkins, we solve this problem by creating long-term business goals that require collaboration between the sales and marketing departments.
Rather than maintaining separate metrics for leads or close rates, we help clients establish unified objectives, such as achieving $2 million in new revenue with a customer acquisition cost below $X or an ROI above 150%.
This approach motivates both teams to come together and achieve a common outcome. For our clients, we conduct workshops to help sales and marketing leaders collaborate to set these goals and develop strategies for achieving them.
Lack of joint responsibility for lead management
Traditional funnel models, where marketing manages the top of the funnel and sales handles the bottom, create gaps in lead management. Separation means leads fall through the cracks due to unclear responsibilities and a lack of accountability.
📌 Case in point:
A manufacturing company’s marketing team generates leads through a webinar series and passes them to sales after they download a certain number of resources.
However, sales finds many leads are not ready to buy and ignores them, while marketing assumes their job is complete and stops nurturing these leads.
As a result, valuable prospects are lost due to inadequate follow-up and ongoing engagement.
💡 Solution:
We advocate for a shift from the traditional funnel model to joint responsibility throughout the customer journey.
That does not mean responsibilities aren’t well-defined for sales and marketing departments. We work with clients to assign clear roles and accountability in the lead management process for both teams.
For example, marketing may be accountable for nurturing leads that aren’t yet sales-ready, while sales is responsible for providing feedback on lead quality and engaging with leads at specific trigger points.
We help negotiate and document these responsibilities, including details like who handles rebooking no-shows or reengaging closed-lost opportunities.
Misalignment in customer engagement strategies
Different approaches to engaging customers — between sales and marketing teams — is another source of inconsistency in the user experience, which damages brand trust.
📌 Case in point:
A logistics company’s marketing team focuses on thought leadership and consultative selling, producing whitepapers and case studies to position the company as an industry expert.
In contrast, the sales team, pressured to meet quotas, engages in frequent cold calls and time-limited discounts. This results in the prospects receiving conflicting messages about the company’s values and approach.
💡 Solution:
We emphasize the importance of a unified, customer-centric engagement strategy. We implement quarterly alignment checks to evaluate how well sales and marketing strategies contribute to overall business goals.
Additionally, here is where we rely on thorough user research and ICP analysis so that we can map a comprehensive buyer journey from the start. This map outlines how both teams should engage with prospects at each stage, allowing for consistent messaging.
Now, early-stage engagement can focus on educational content from marketing, while sales is gradually introduced for more personalized, consultative interactions as the prospect progresses.
Overcoming resistance to alignment within organizations
To successfully employ omnichannel marketing, organizations must embrace a culture of collaboration.
The primary alignment hurdle for most organizations is the presence of departmental silos. Teams within an organization often become hyper-focused on their specific responsibilities and are resistant to looking outside their normal scope of work. These invisible barriers between departments must be removed if employees are to understand how their work impacts other areas of the business.
Breaking down these silos requires a concerted effort, starting at the top with leadership, to promote cross-functional communication and shared goals.
Another obstacle is the inherent resistance to change that exists within most organizations. Aligning teams often requires big shifts in established processes, workflows, and company culture.
These changes are usually unsettling for employees who’ve grown accustomed to certain work routines and expectations. The fear of the unknown or the perceived threat to job security often creates reluctance and pushback from staff members.
Overcoming this resistance requires clear communication about the benefits of alignment, as well as support and training to help employees adapt.
Last, lack of leadership support is one of the most critical factors that influences alignment initiatives. Without a strong commitment from top-level executives and managers, efforts to align teams and departments will struggle to gain traction.
Leadership’s role is to set the tone for organizational change, allocating necessary resources, and demonstrating the importance of alignment through their actions.
Belkins approach: Aligning departments with business growth
- Company-wide commitment: Alignment efforts are driven at the company level, requiring total buy-in from C-level executives and founders.
- Shifting perspectives: We help teams get used to looking beyond their departmental boundaries, encouraging them to view challenges from a broader business perspective rather than just a sales or marketing standpoint.
- Gradual implementation: Recognizing that alignment is complex, we advocate for a step-by-step approach, starting by supporting what’s working, then continuously improving strategies and adding channels over time. This method allows for manageable changes that foster long-term alignment and growth.
Why a long-term commitment is necessary for successful omnichannel marketing
Alignment in omnichannel marketing is not a quick fix or a one-time project. It requires a sustained, long-term commitment for several important reasons.
First and foremost, implementing an omnichannel strategy is an iterative process. Much like fine-tuning an orchestra, it requires ongoing adjustments and optimizations to achieve harmony across all channels. This process involves continuous monitoring, analysis, and refinement of various elements such as messaging consistency, customer journey mapping, and cross-channel data integration.
Another factor is the time-lagged nature of results in omnichannel marketing. The full impact of your efforts typically becomes evident only after 6 to 9 months of consistent implementation. This delay occurs because it takes time for customers to experience and respond across so many touchpoints.
Moreover, the data collected over this period has to be analyzed to understand patterns, identify areas for improvement, and measure the ROI. Patience and persistence are therefore key to realizing the full benefits.
In short, your omnichannel campaign will be far from perfect on launch day. Aligning multiple channels, technologies, and teams is a multifaceted challenge that demands careful planning and consistent execution
Belkins approach: Patience and customer-centric iteration
- Gradual improvement: Some results will be apparent within the first few months. These come from our team integrating with yours to provide support and optimization for your current channels. However, significant increases in conversions, appointment bookings, and close rates generally begin to materialize at the 6-month mark.
- Continuous refinement: As the strategy develops, ongoing testing and adjustments are necessary to maximize effectiveness and adapt to changing conditions.
- Building momentum: Over time, aligned channels start to amplify each other’s effects, resulting in increased efficiency and a higher ROI.
Conclusion: Embracing alignment as a pathway to success
Alignment across channels, technology, teams, and goals is not just the secret ingredient for successful omnichannel marketing strategies; it’s a requirement.
Like a symphony orchestra, where every instrument must play in harmony with the others, omnichannel marketing requires aligning multiple elements:
- Coordinated channels: Channels must work together to provide a consistent user experience.
- Integrated technology: Systems need to be connected to ensure smooth data flow.
- Collaborative teams: Sales and marketing teams must work toward shared objectives.
- Alignment with business goals: All efforts should support overarching business objectives.
While the complexity and initial challenges of implementing an omnichannel strategy may seem daunting, the alternative is falling behind the competition and having to face a very painful truth later down the road.
By committing to alignment and partnering with experienced providers like Belkins, your organization can navigate this new paradigm shift in marketing.
