Most marketing teams want customers to move from website to app, email, store, search, and social without feeling a break. They want the brand to feel clear in every place. They want content to move fast. They want teams to spend less time rebuilding the same work for each channel.
The surprise is that almost everyone says this matters, but less than half are truly built for it. The report says 99% of marketing and customer experience leaders call omnichannel a high priority, but only 43% have the infrastructure to support it.1
That gap is the story. Omnichannel is no longer a nice idea on a strategy slide. It’s a test of whether a company’s content system can keep up with its ambition.
Why does everyone want omnichannel now?
Customers don’t think in channels. They think in needs. A person may see a product on social, check reviews, open an email offer, visit the website, ask a chatbot a question, and finish in an app. To them, this is one journey.
Marketing teams often see something very different. They see many tools, many teams, many formats, and many approvals. Each channel can become its own small project. The website team needs one version. The app team needs another. Email needs a shorter version. Social needs a different image. AI search may need clean, clear answers.
That is why omnichannel matters. It is the promise that the customer gets one clear experience, even when the work behind it is spread across many systems.
What does 99% really tell us?
The 99% number tells us that the debate is over. Leaders already believe omnichannel matters. The market has moved past the question of whether brands should connect customer touchpoints.
A better question is this: if almost every leader agrees, why is the work still so hard?
The answer is that agreement is easier than execution. A team can agree on omnichannel in a meeting. A team can add it to a plan. Delivery needs something deeper. It needs content that can be found, reused, changed, approved, sent, and measured across many places.
Why are only 43% built for it?
The 43% number shows the real problem. Many teams have the goal, but they don’t have the system. Their content lives in too many places. The report names the usual mix: the CMS, the digital asset manager, project tools, email approval chains, and many file versions.1
Each part may work alone. The trouble starts when the parts need to work together. A campaign idea may begin in one tool. Images may sit in another. Copy may move through email. Legal notes may live in a document. Performance data may sit somewhere else.
This slows people down. It also makes reuse harder. A team may rebuild content for each channel because finding and adapting the original takes too much time.
What does “built for omnichannel” actually mean?
Being built for omnichannel means content can move. It means a core message, product detail, image, offer, or story can be used in more than one place without starting from zero each time.
A strong content system helps teams know what exists, who owns it, where it can go, what has been approved, what needs to change, and how well it performed. It also helps AI and automation work with clean information.
The key idea is simple: content should be treated like infrastructure, not a one-time campaign item.
Why does more content make the problem worse?
Many teams react to pressure by making more. More posts. More pages. More emails. More videos. More tools. More meetings. At first, this feels like progress because the team is busy and output is rising.
The report makes a sharper point. More content can make the gap worse when the system underneath is weak.1
A messy system turns every new asset into future work. Someone has to find it later. Someone has to update it. Someone has to check if it’s approved. Someone has to resize it, rewrite it, translate it, or rebuild it for another place.
More content in a weak system can feel like filling a closet that already has no shelves. You can add more, but finding anything gets harder.
Why does reuse matter so much?
Reuse is where speed comes from. A team that can reuse content doesn’t need to rebuild every time. It can take one clear content object and adapt it for the website, app, AI search, email, and other channels.
This doesn’t make the work less creative. It gives creative people more room to do the work that needs judgment. The system can handle repeat tasks, such as formatting, tagging, routing, updating, and sending content to the right places.
A strong system helps people spend less time chasing files and more time shaping better ideas.
Why is this really an infrastructure problem?
Omnichannel often sounds like a marketing idea, but it depends on infrastructure. That word can sound heavy, so here is a simple way to think about it.
Infrastructure is the set of things that makes work possible. Roads help cars move. Pipes help water move. Content infrastructure helps messages, assets, data, and approvals move.
A team can have great people and still move slowly if the roads are broken. The report says speed to market is very important or critical to growth for 56% of marketing executives, yet only 36.5% believe leadership is doing enough to support it.1
That is a clear sign of strain. Leaders want speed, but the system may not support speed.
What does AI change about this gap?
AI makes this issue more urgent. Many leaders hope AI will speed up content work. That can happen, but AI needs something to work with.
The report says 61% of marketers have not embedded AI tools into their stack in a strategic way, and half still don’t understand how AI platforms surface or cite content.1 AI can’t create much value if it can’t find, understand, or trust the content inside the business.
AI is strongest when content is structured. It needs clear tags, clean metadata, approved source material, and workflows it can follow. A messy content system gives AI a messy starting point.
Why does AI reward organized teams?
AI can help with tagging, summaries, localization, search, and content adaptation. Those tasks work better when the source content is clean and connected.
A well-built team can ask AI to adapt an approved message for a new market or channel. A less organized team may first need to ask where the approved message is, which version is current, who signed it off, and whether it can be used.
That is the hidden lesson. AI doesn’t erase the need for content infrastructure. It makes the need easier to see.
What would a better content system look like?
A better system starts with one clear idea: create once, adapt many times. The report describes this as one content object that can be published across web, app, AI search, and beyond.1
That model changes the job. Content is no longer trapped inside one page or one campaign. It becomes something the business can use in many ways.
A product message can power a landing page, an app screen, a chatbot answer, a social post, and a sales email. A campaign story can move across markets with less manual rebuilding. An approved update can travel faster because the system knows where it needs to go.
What questions should leaders ask first?
Leaders can start with simple questions. Where does content slow down? Where does it get rebuilt? Where do approvals get lost? Where does performance data stop moving? Where is AI actually touching the workflow?
These questions matter because they show the real blockers. The blocker may not be talent. It may not be budget alone. It may be the way content is stored, governed, and moved.
A team that answers these questions clearly has a better chance of fixing the real problem.
What is the main takeaway?
The 99% versus 43% gap is powerful because it shows a simple truth. Most teams want omnichannel, but many are still built for single-channel work.
That gap will matter more as customers expect faster, clearer, and more connected experiences. It will also matter more as AI becomes part of search, service, and content delivery.
The winners won’t only be the teams that create the most content. The winners will move content with the least friction. They’ll reuse more, adapt faster, prove more, and turn content into a system that helps the whole business move.
Omnichannel ambition is already here. The next advantage belongs to the teams that build the infrastructure to match it.