You are looking for a strategy. But the industry is selling you a buzzword. Here is the reality of Omnichannel marketing and why it is likely failing your organization right now.
What is Omnichannel Marketing? Or, Why Your Customer Hates You.
There is a lie that has settled deep into the bones of the marketing industry.
It whispers that you need to be everywhere.
Open LinkedIn. Check Twitter. Look at the thousands of marketing newsletters hitting your inbox. The advice is redundant. It tells you to repurpose content. To take one video and turn it into three blogs, five tweets, and a TikTok dance.
We call this “being omnichannel.”
The customer calls it “noise.”
And this noise is expensive. It burns out your creative teams. It annoys your prospects. And worst of all, it creates a “fake pipeline” where metrics like impressions and clicks hide the fact that no one actually trusts you enough to buy.
So let us strip away the jargon.
Omnichannel marketing is not about distribution. It is about continuity.
It is understood that a human being does not live in a single channel. They move. They drift from a Google search to a Slack community. From a peer review site to your pricing page.
And if your brand treats them like a stranger at every new stop, you have already lost.
Omnichannel Marketing: The Entropy of Experience
We need to look at this through the lens of systems. Every system has an inherent complexity that cannot be removed. This is Tesler’s Law. In marketing, we try to hide this complexity from the customer. But usually, we fail.
We fail because of entropy.
Your organization is naturally disordered. The social media team does not talk to the email team. The sales team thinks marketing leads are trash. The product team is building features that marketing isn’t even talking about.
This internal chaos bleeds outward. When a customer interacts with your brand on Instagram, they get one version of you. When they talk to a sales rep, they get another.
This disconnection is what kills deals.
True omnichannel marketing is the fight against this entropy. It is the architectural effort to ensure that the “signal” remains clear as it moves through the noisy pipes of the internet.
It is not about blasting the same message on every platform. That is just “multichannel” marketing. And frankly, that is lazy.
Omnichannel is about context.
It is known that when the CFO reads your email, they are worried about the budget. And when the CTO reads your documentation, they are worried about security compliance and SBOMs.
Same product. Different context. Unified experience.
The Digital Supply Chain
If you want to understand why your omnichannel strategy is failing, stop looking at your content calendar.
Look at your supply chain.
We rarely think of marketing as having a supply chain. But it does. It has vendors, data sources, tools, and touchpoints.
If one vendor in your physical supply chain sends you bad raw materials, the final product breaks.
If one data source in your marketing stack is corrupt, say, a lead list that is 40% fake or outdated, your entire omnichannel strategy becomes poison.
You are feeding bad data into expensive tools.
This is why we argue that marketing is actually a “back of house” problem.
You can have the most beautiful, creative one in the world. You can have the sharpest copy. But if your internal data systems are siloed, you cannot execute omnichannel marketing.
You need a “semantic layer”.
This is a concept we see emerging in high-level tech discussions: the idea of a unified data layer that sits on top of your fragmented tools.
It translates the chaos of your CRM, your website analytics, and your customer support tickets into a single, coherent story. Without this, you are just guessing. And yes, it is a lot of work.
In a market where trust is at an all-time low, guessing is dangerous.
The Buying Committee is a Political Minefield
Let’s get practical.
In B2B, you are never selling to one person. You are selling to a committee.
And committees are messy. They are filled with human beings with conflicting views and goals. With agendas that only they can afford to have.
Think of this, Mason, the CEO wants a tool that saves executive time, too. Why? Because he wants to spend 3 days with his daughter and attend her baseball practice. He will push for a tool that has this function. How will you object to that before the first sales call?
Your omnichannel strategy has to account for this.
An example
Imagine you are selling a fintech solution.
The CEO wants growth. The CFO wants cost savings. But the CTO? The CTO is terrified that your tool is going to open a backdoor for hackers and get them fired.
If you retarget the CTO with the same “Growth at all costs!” ad you showed the CEO, you are not just wasting money. You are actively hurting your case. You are proving to the CTO that you do not understand their reality.
This is where the “omni” part matters.
You need to be in the channels where these people actually live.
- The Executive: Might be reading high-level industry reports or listening to podcasts.
- The Practitioner: Is likely in a “Dark Social” community. Think of a Discord server or a private Slack group asking their peers if your tool actually works.
You cannot track dark social. You cannot put a pixel in a private Slack DM. This terrifies marketers who are addicted to attribution.
But you have to accept it. You have to create content and experiences that are so good, so useful, and so “safe” that people share them in these private channels.
That is the only way to penetrate the committee.
The Role of AI in the omnichannel experience (And Why It Is Not What You Think)
We have to talk about AI.
Right now, marketing teams are using AI to generate “slop”. Endless articles. Generic social posts. And emails that sound like they were written by a vibe marketer with no experience. This is adding to the entropy. It is increasing the noise.
However, there is a better use case.
Use AI as a pattern recognition engine. Human beings are bad at seeing patterns in massive datasets. We have cognitive biases. We see what we want to see. AI does not care about your ego.
It can look at your customer data and tell you the truth. It can tell you, “Hey, every time a prospect reads this specific blog post about API security, they close 20% faster.”
That is an insight you can build a strategy around. It allows you to perform “Answer Engine Optimization“. As search evolves and people start asking ChatGPT for answers instead of Googling them, your brand needs to be part of that answer.
How?
By having high-quality, authoritative content that these models are trained on or can reference. Or by being mentioned by credible sources.
This is the new SEO: becoming the source of the “truth” that the machine references.
Chaos Engineering for Marketers- thinking of omnichannel differently
Here is a radical thought.
Software engineers have a practice called “Chaos Engineering”. They intentionally break things in their system to see what happens. They shut down a server to see if the backup kicks in.
Marketers need to do this. We need to pressure test our omnichannel strategies.
What happens if a customer complains on Twitter? Does the email automation stop? Or do they get a “Happy Monday!” newsletter five minutes later? That interaction creates cognitive dissonance. It destroys trust. You need to find these failure points before your customer does.
Because trust is the only currency that matters when it comes down to making the decision.
People do not trust businesses. They do not trust AI.
They barely trust each other. And stack the invasion of the omnichannel experience, and you have a recipe for disaster?
“How do they know this?”
And on the next call, they ask you: Where are you getting my data from? I need the sources.
But if you show up with the right message, at the right time, with the right context?
That feels like magic. It feels like you are reading their mind.
Omnichannel’s Future in 2026
So, what should you do?
First, stop trying to be everywhere. Pick the channels that actually matter to your buying committee.
Second, audit your supply chain. Look at your data. If it is fractured, fix the plumbing before you turn on the faucet.
Third, empower your teams to talk to each other. Break the silos. The social media manager needs to know what the sales VP is hearing on calls.
And finally, accept that you cannot measure everything.
You cannot measure the conversation two C-level executives have about your brand at a coffee shop. You cannot measure the screenshot of your blog post that gets shared in a private WhatsApp group.
But you can measure the result.
Are deals closing faster? Is the pipeline “real” or just filled with bloat? Are your customers staying longer?
That is the only ROI that counts.
Omnichannel marketing is not a tactic. It is a commitment to the reality of your customer’s life.
It is complex. It is messy.
But it is the only way to survive the noise.
