Integrated marketing is the method by which all of your marketing activities are unified under a single message centered on the customer. This allows all of your marketing channels to reinforce and strengthen one another. The goal of your integrated marketing is to provide a seamless brand experience for prospects or customers - that is, no matter how your target audience decides to interact with you, from seeing a commercial to tweeting at you to buying and using your products or services, they need to feel like it’s a continuation of the same relationship.
While this may sound a bit scary, if you approach your integrated marketing campaign with a plan, you might be surprised at how well it works out for you. Here's how you can ensure the success of your integrated marketing push.
1) Understand your brand
In order for your integrated marketing to work, you'll have to start with the basics. Who are you as a company? Are you telling your brand story and telling it well?
The key here is consistency. Your visual identity, messaging, and voice should be the same across all of your marketing materials. Your newsletter should look and sound like your website, which should look and sound like your Twitter handle, which should look and sound like your email blasts...
You get the picture.
2) Know your target customer
Who's your target customer?
Here's a hint: it's not "everyone who will buy from me." In fact, this strategy will lose money - trying to be all things to all people will exhaust your resources and attract only low lifetime value customers. There are specific audiences that you reach with your products and services that provide you the highest value. Your business might have one or two target customers, or it might have many.
To learn who your target customer is, simply look at your current customers and break them into groups depending on what they represent. Do the same for your competition. Now you'll have a good idea of the people that you should be targeting (and the different marketing messages that might appeal to them).
3) Determine your marketing mix
We know who we're targeting with our campaign, so now it's time to determine how we're going to target them. Remember, the message of your integrated marketing campaign will be the same, but it will have to be delivered in a way that appeals to each unique audience that your brand is trying to reach.
The channels you choose will be heavily influenced by - you guessed it - your target market. What are their interests? Where are they likeliest to consume information? Do you have the opportunity to capture their attention at multiple touch-points? As you're coming up with the answers to these questions, think about the strengths and weaknesses of each channel and stick with the ones that you know have the best chance of success.
How do all of these tactics fit together? Strategy. Without a documented strategy, your marketing is just a wish, and you won’t be able to determine your return on investment.
4) Develop powerful, relevant messaging
This is the point in the process where you decide what message you want to convey across your marketing channels, and what kind of action you'll want it to take. Your messaging will be dictated in part by the action you want your target customer to take. Craft your message around the desires of your customer, and employ it consistently across all of the platforms that you're using to distribute it.
Remember the AIDA principle when you're crafting your message - attention, interest, desire, action.
Your goal is to move your target customer down the sales funnel. If you've accomplished the three prior steps - understanding your brand, really knowing your target customer, and determining the channels that would most appeal to them - your messaging may almost come as second nature!
5) Execute, track, evaluate
Now that your strategy is set, your tactics are fully integrated, and your message is solid, it's go time! However, you're not done yet. If you're not tracking your integrated marketing campaigns, then you won't be able to determine your return on investment. Tracking tools increase your odds of success exponentially, as you'll be able to tell both where your customers are coming from and what actions they took.
Call tracking, landing pages, trackable URLs, and custom phone numbers are just a few of the ways that you can comprehensively track and measure all of your integrated marketing results. Services like ActiveDEMAND can help you automate these tasks, making them much easier. Interpret and analyze the data you've collected so that you can adjust your campaign as needed moving forward.
A single marketing strategy or advertising push is no longer an effective way to reach the widest audience and get them to convert. When you invest in an integrated marketing strategy, you'll be able to optimize your message, allowing your campaign to provide a seamless experience for the people who want to buy from you.
As a marketing agency in Lancaster, we help small businesses craft integrated marketing campaigns that help separate them from their competition to increase sales.
