With so many ideas, outlets, voices and strategies floating around these days, marketing can feel fragmented, disparate and, at times, really overwhelming. It is important to create a unified and seamless experience for consumers to interact with your brand on all platforms. Weaving one narrative through all touch points and ensuring they are all working together is key to breaking through the noise.
What is Integrated Marketing?
Simply put, Integrated Marketing is talking to the consumer everywhere they consume information, with one clear and defined voice. The aim is to provide a clear message and call to action at all the touch points where consumers might engage with a brand message, and position yourself to be seen more frequently. This strategy can be applied to your overarching branding strategy or to a very specific campaign around a product or service. It’s often said that a consumer needs to have 7 interactions with a company’s message before they’ll buy, so integrated marketing provides you the opportunity to be seen more often, resulting in more conversions, more quickly.
Why use an Integrated Marketing approach?
This type of approach not only helps to clarify your goals and objectives through engaging in an intentional, thoughtful customer journey discussion, it also allows consumers the opportunity to recognize your brand and begin to internalize your messaging. When consumers are able to recognize you from your logo or specific imagery it helps to spark brand affinity and loyalty. And a loyal customer becomes an authentic brand advocate which is the best marketing of all!
Who should Implement an Integrated Marketing strategy?
Everyone. Even if you don’t think you have a large enough budget, or the resources to utilize every method of outreach, these principles can be applied to where you can focus your dollars and energy. If your current avenues for communication are your website, email database, and social channels you can easily adjust your branding and messaging so that it’s mirrored across each channel, giving your customers a more seamless experience. Additionally with just those three channels you can cost effectively implement specific landing pages with key messaging, a social media advertising campaign, a retargeting campaign, and an email outreach campaign in order to nurture your customers through the sales funnel and drive more conversions.
What’s the first step in developing an Integrated Marketing Plan?
Before you start anything, you should ensure that each stakeholder is clear on the brand’s vision, voice, and persona; ensuring buy in on these pillars of your business is paramount to the success of any initiative, and more importantly, any business. Once you’re confident in who you are as a brand, the first step to your marketing plan is to define your goals and key performance indicators (KPI’s). Without these integral steps guiding your plan, you will have no way of understanding if your campaigns are working or how to optimize key pieces of your work.
Integrated marketing strategies take on all shapes and sizes, and will look different for every brand - this is just one example. The key is that each piece of the puzzle is utilized to support or enhance the other pieces, creating a cohesive narrative.
And while an integrated approach to your marketing strategy isn't without a lot of work, it is the key to ensuring you maximize each of your marketing initiatives. Creating a single narrative and nurturing consumers through the customer journey positions your brand best to capture the most conversions possible and build a loyal following.