Marketers now face a complicated and fragmented environment. Consumers are growing desensitized to advertisements because of the inflow of new markets, channels, and items. So, how do businesses, especially direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, get through the clutter? How can they attract new clients while saving time and money? After all, not every company can afford to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on different marketing channels in order to reach their target market. Integrated marketing is the answer. Let's get deeper into what integrated marketing entails, why it's advantageous to your business, and a few examples of firms who are doing it right.
What is Integrated Marketing Communication?
Integrated marketing communications is the process of coordinating your marketing channels in order to advertise your products or services, usually through a coordinated campaign. Integrated marketing also ensures that your primary brand message is continuously communicated across all of your marketing channels and assets.
Consider finding a new brand on Instagram and going to their website to buy one of their products. You'd have a hard time comprehending the substance of the brand if their website supported a different message or campaign than their Instagram account, right?
Integrated marketing strives to close these gaps and disparities, regardless of how or when a customer interacts with your company. Integrated marketing is comparable to multi-channel marketing, except that it aligns the message you're communicating across all of those platforms.
What Makes Integrated Marketing Campaigns Successful?
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While the goals of integrated marketing campaigns can differ, they should all have one thing in common: they should all be working together to create a consistent marketing "front."
Consider your integrated marketing campaigns the coach in charge of running plays and ensuring that your marketing channels work together as a single system rather than as separate entities.
Running integrated marketing efforts is also more effective than running campaigns on individual platforms. For several reasons, integrated marketing efforts are effective:
1. Greater Brand Visibility
It's no surprise that getting potential buyers to notice your brand is one of the initial steps in most marketing initiatives. You can't start building a relationship with a potential consumer unless he or she has heard about your company. Search marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are effective techniques to increase consumer awareness. These integrated marketing tools can help you showcase critical messaging and owned assets, making it easier to create relationships with customers.
2. Increased Media Coverage
Data-driven PR has repeatedly proven to be one of the most effective ways for brands to get exposure. Reporters and editors are constantly on the lookout for recent stories to report on. Providing consumers with timely, evidence-based information will increase the number of articles in which your brand appears.
3. Industry Thought Leadership
Social media and other marketing technologies have made it easier than ever to build your business as a thought leader. Offering perspective on important trends and issues via social media, from Twitter to Facebook, may instantly place your company in the middle of timely debates.
Even better, social media may be utilized to connect with influencers on a more personal level. This immediate access opens the door to future engagement.
4. Messaging That is Clear and Consistent
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A unified plan and clear messaging standards are at the heart of every multi-faceted marketing effort. After all, you never know where a customer will come across your brand. An agency that collaborates with you to establish a strategy for each channel, as well as a compelling story, will shorten the time it takes for potential customers to become acquainted with your brand.
5. Improved Search Results
When your target audience searches for your brand, what do they see? If you're unsure, it's probably time to ramp up your search marketing efforts. Working with an SEO-savvy agency can help you get your brand in front of more customers than ever before. Investing in SEO is an efficient strategy to push mentions of your business to the top of the search rankings, from your corporate blog to recent media placements.
How Should an Effective Integrated Marketing Strategy Be Developed?
Before you adopt integrated marketing for your brand, you must first design a strategy. Certain components, such as getting to know your target and deciding which marketing channels to focus on, must be planned ahead of time. In five simple steps, here's how you can get started.
1. Identify Your Campaign's Goal
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You're probably looking for a fresh marketing plan right now for a reason. Perhaps you're launching a new product, rebranding, or trying to reach out to a new demographic. Whatever your motivation, you'll need to establish a goal in order to develop an effective integrated marketing plan.
This rationale will lead you to your objective. If you're launching a new product, for example, your goal can be to raise consumer awareness and increase conversions. Knowing what you want as a final product can help you more effectively construct your integrated marketing communications and influence each decision you make during the campaign design process.
2. Become Acquainted With Your Intended Audience
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To develop a plan centered on communication and creating a relationship with your audience, you must first get to know them. An excellent place to begin is to create a buyer persona that, when combined with your campaign goal, will point you in the proper route. Start by responding to a few of the following questions:
- What is the intended audience's demographic?
- What is vital to my target audience? (Be specific, look at facts like gender, age, geography, and interests)
- What is the problem they're seeking to solve?
- What platforms do they prefer to use?
- How do these individuals choose to interact with the brand?
Alter your buyer personas to be unique to each channel or build distinct ones entirely depending on the goal of your integrated marketing campaigns. You'll be able to narrow down your target audience even more as a result of this.
3. Create a Distinctive Selling Proposition For Your Company
What sets your company distinct from the competitors is your unique selling position. In creating a marketing integration strategy, knowing where your brand sits in the market can help you determine specific areas where your campaign should be focused.
Because you won't be the only company in your sector employing an integrated marketing approach, focusing your campaign on areas where your brand shines brightest rather than giving your audience more of the same is a wonderful method to ensure its success.
4. Make a List of Your Marketing Communication Strategies
How and where you distribute your campaign is determined by your marketing communication method. A common blunder is to begin by deciding which channels to concentrate on before moving on to the rest of the plan. However, prior to knowing why or learning about your audience, deciding where to spend your attention can be a waste of time and money.
This stage of your marketing strategy includes the following elements:
- Decide about how you wish to communicate
- Choose a tone that is appropriate for the situation
- Select a television channel
5. Define and Evaluate Metrics
The metrics you use throughout your campaign will be determined by the goals you established at the start. For instance, you may look at brand mentions on social media, website conversion rates, or an increase in interaction.
When employing many channels, you should look at the results from each one independently to get a clear view of how your campaign is doing across platforms. Because the measurements for each platform may differ, you'll almost certainly need to create various KPIs to accurately track the results of your integrated marketing communications.
This stage doesn't have to be completed after your integrated marketing campaigns go live; it may be done to test alternate messaging and identify areas for improvement. Analyzing the results of your campaign will not only help you improve it, but will also educate you on how to improve similar campaigns in the future.
Finally, you'll need a website builder like Strikingly to develop your web page after learning all the principles of integrated marketing. Content creation, an SEO checklist, audience or newsletter lists, and pop-ups are among the capabilities offered by Strikingly.
Conclusion
Internal platforms, such as a company website or social media profiles, may contain the majority of the material in some marketing campaigns. These campaigns may only use one or two external platforms sparingly and wisely. A billboard or a brief radio commercial are examples of external platforms. When an effective method pulls numerous eyes to internal platforms, the impact of money spent on external platforms can be amplified.
An integrated marketing approach, rather than depending on separate marketing activities, make the most of the numerous channels accessible to modern businesses. You can give clarity, consistency, and maximum communications effect by integrating methods like advertising, social media, and sales promotion.
