There’s lots of talk these days about the importance of marketing across channels. The idea is that marketing that’s run in tandem across social, search, and messaging can achieve “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” results. But the problem is that few companies, including SMBs, actually do it.

This was a central finding of a report published this week by MessageWhiz. Known as the State of Digital Customer Communication, it surveyed 300 senior marketing, product, and operational leaders. It found from these decision makers that there’s a sizable gap between omnichannel ambition and execution.

Specifically, 99 percent of respondents say omnichannel marketing is important to their growth strategy. However, only 11 percent fully implement it. This includes messaging channels, as only 43 percent of businesses have expanded beyond email and SMS to support real-time and conversational channels.

Those conversational channels include the likes of WhatsApp, RCS, Viber, and Telegram. SMBs especially have underutilized these channels as they’ve developed comfort levels with email and SMS. But the real opportunity is to integrate these messaging apps with CRM systems to cast a wider net.

“Local businesses often have valuable customer data but are unable to leverage it with real-time contextual messaging,” MessageWhiz CEO Arie Frenklakh told Localogy Insider.

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Missed Opportunity

Going deeper into the results, we’ve extracted some highlights for Localogy Insider readers:

• 99 percent of organizations use messaging for notifications, alerts, and customer service, while only 53% use messaging for growth activities like promotions and retention.
• Only 11 percent of organizations report full integration between messaging and CRM
• Almost all organizations report that their omnichannel program is missing messaging channels, most notably RCS (44 percent), WhatsApp (31 percent), and Telegram (26%).
• Among organizations that recently added a new messaging channel, 86% report increased customer engagement.
• Over the next six months, planned usage of individual promotional messaging is projected to increase by 158% and loyalty messaging by 96%.
• 42% say AI features are very or extremely important when selecting a customer communication solution.
• 98% of respondents plan to add new messaging channels in the next 12 months, 62% will increase messaging investment in 2026.

What these results boil down to is a missed opportunity for SMBs to expand their marketing surface area. Given the growing use of messaging apps globally, SMBs are only capturing a share of consumers by relying on traditional messaging channels, and by not syncing messaging apps with CRM systems.

“With only 11 percent of businesses fully integrating their CRM and business systems with their messaging,” said Frenklakh, “they can’t react at the required speed and scale to relevant customer-specific events.”

Header image credit: Samuel Angor on Unsplash