This integrated marketing strategy 101 was created specifically with with the focus on startups who want to scale.
The world that today’s marketers must navigate is one that is both complex and fragmented. Consumers are growing desensitised to the frequent exposure of advertisements as a result of the proliferation of numerous markets, platforms, and items in the marketplace. How, therefore, can businesses, and especially direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, differentiate themselves from the rest of the crowd? How can businesses attract new consumers while simultaneously reducing their costs and maximising their efficiency? After all, not every company is in a position to invest tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars across a variety of marketing channels in order to communicate with their ideal customers. Integrated marketing is the way to go to solve this problem.
Let’s first explore what integrated marketing is, why it’s advantageous for businesses like yours, and a few examples of companies who are doing an excellent job at it.
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What exactly does Integrated Marketing mean?
The process of integrating all aspects of marketing communication, such as SEO advertising, Content marketing, public relations, and social media, and making use of each of those areas’ unique combination of media, channels, and strategies in order to provide a unified and customer-focused experience is referred to as integrated marketing. In the real world, this involves ensuring that the appearance, feel, and tone of your message are consistent across all of the channels that you employ.
Integrated Marketing vs. Omnichannel Marketing
It’s possible that you’re curious about the distinction between integrated marketing and omnichannel marketing. Both of these things aim to provide consistency, don’t they? The answer to both questions is yes, but in their own unique ways.
This is probably the best way to explain omnichannel.
The customer experience is given a greater priority in omnichannel marketing, which integrates several channels of communication to create a streamlined experience for a consumer while interacting with a business. This may mean using an app while you’re waiting in line at Nando’s to buy your extra hot chicken burger or taking advantage of Nike‘s in-store fitness classes if you’re looking to improve your appearance.
One of the key challnges of omnichannel is of course the provision of customer support. Here, a similar level of omnichannel focus is needed.
Integrated marketing places a greater emphasis on the communication of the intended message; more specifically, it seeks to integrate in a seamless manner everything from advertisements and sales promotions to public relations and social media in order to reach the intended customers. For example, the the Old Spice, Smell like a man campaign for was launched in 2010 and is still active across several platforms, including social media, television, retail, and print media.
The core idea, which is that when you’re hungry, your mood transforms you into a different person – literally — remains the same, even though the manner in which it is communicated varies from medium to medium and market to market.
It is essential to keep in mind that omnichannel marketing and integrated marketing are two distinct types of marketing operations; nonetheless, they should cooperate with one another. It would be a shame to miss out on a golden chance by concentrating entirely on the multi-dimensional brand experience of a consumer rather than their buying experience, or vice versa.
Why Is It Necessary For Your Company to Employ Integrated Marketing?
The power of integrated marketing cannot be equaled by any other method. Research has demonstrated that integrated marketing efforts that include more than four channels may get results that are staggeringly better than single- or dual-channel marketing initiatives. The following are some of the reasons why:
The outcomes are improved for you. The efficiency of marketing is improved when communication tools and messaging are used in conjunction with one another. The more coherent, purposeful, and focused a customer’s journey is, the higher the possibility that a sale will be made and that the consumer will remain loyal to the company.
You leave your mark. When you maintain uniformity in the visuals, headlines, and key words that you use across a variety of platforms and mediums, you may strengthen consumers’ associations with your brand. Maintaining a consistent creative vision throughout a campaign helps to drive home key messages by maximising the number of times potential customers are exposed to the same information.
You save money. When you concentrate on only one message, you not only reduce the amount of money spent on the creation of campaigns, but you also eliminate the waste of funds that results from having campaigns that are inconsistent.
How to Get Started With Your Fully Integrated Marketing Strategy 101
When we talk about integrated marketing, we’re not merely referring to the practise of broadcasting identical commercials across many media. Your level of success is directly proportional to how well you connect with your target demographic and how effectively you modify your message to fit across all of your different marketing channels. To evoke feelings from your target audience, you need to present a tale that is consistent throughout.
The question now is, how can you get started in constructing an effective integrated marketing campaign? How are you able to maintain the status quo without your clients being dissatisfied with the status quo? Here are a few strategies to jumpstart your integrated marketing strategy:
Put yourself in the position of one of your consumers. Emotional intelligence is more important than intellectual capacity in the economic world. You need to first answer the question, “What is vital to my customers?” before you can move on with building any advertising. Consider the ways in which you might help them by resolving their issues and making their lives simpler.
Find a way to make your concept interesting. One thing that all successful integrated marketing strategies have in common is that they are centred around some unique ideas. Determine what it is that sets you different from the other contenders in the market. After that, you may begin to think of alternative ways to weave a (funny, touching, or exciting?) tale around your core differentiators by doing some brainstorming.
Bring your intriguing concept in line with the ideals of your business. Your alluring concept need to coexist with the core ideals of your brand; what is it that you want to accomplish in the end? Is it to supply pricing that are affordable? Exceptional design? Is it a case of having elements of both?
Utilize the benefits that are offered by a variety of platforms. Make use of material that makes the most of the benefits offered by many channels, all of which should be connected by a compelling overarching notion.
Beginning Your Adventures In Integrated Marketing
In the event that you are prepared to put your integrated marketing plan into action, the following tools and strategies should be kept in mind:
1. The process of targeting and segmenting an audience. Customers that are in various stages of their customer journey want different types of marketing materials in order to go farther down the marketing funnel. With audience targeting and retargeting solutions by companies like Hubspot and Mailchimp, you can define and target your audience based on lookalike algorithms, their demographics and interests, or the context of the websites they visit, all while ensuring that they are receiving consistent integrated marketing messages. This is where smart segmentation comes into play.
2. Cross-channel campaign management. Integrated marketing may become a time-consuming process if you have a dozen subscription accounts that each focus on a separate channel, such as email, advertisements, or social media. That may be remedied, though, by utilising an integrated marketing system such as Marketing 360. has the right features to help you save time by guiding you through the steps necessary to reach your audience through cross-channel campaigns.
3. Monitoring of performance over many channels In a similar vein, it may be next to impossible to follow your success across channels using the analytics dashboards provided by those channels alone in a manner that appropriately takes into account overlap. After all, consumers go through hundreds of different touchpoints before making a purchase nowadays!
An integrated marketing strategy, as opposed to depending on separate marketing activities, makes simultaneous use of the various channels that are accessible to modern firms, therefore optimising the use of all of these channels. You are able to give clarity, consistency, and the maximum possible impact on communications by combining methods like as advertising, social media, and sales promotion.
For support with your integrated marketing, omnichannel campaigns or anything else related to marketing, get in touch for a free conversation.
