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Integrated marketing is no longer a new term. In fact, most new-age marketers and business owners rely on it to reach their goals. But what does Integrated marketing really mean? Does your business really need it and how can you use integrated marketing strategies to achieve your business goals more efficiently?
This blog is for all of those that are still doubtful about the potential digital marketing has – if used right – to take their business to the next level. It’s also for the marketers to refuse to admit that the game is getting harder and more time consuming, but there are ways to eliminate the noise and focus on the things that matter.
Lastly, this blog is for all the content creators, aspiring entrepreneurs, and small business owners that are new to the game and need clarity about the complex intertwined world of digital media and how to invest in it more wisely.
What is Integrated Marketing?
Before we analyze the benefits of integrated marketing, let’s familiarize ourselves with its real meaning. Integrated marketing the activity of sharing unified and consistent messages with the (existing and potential) customers across different channels.
It turns out that people have to be exposed to a message a few times before they become aware of it. The general consensus in the marketing industry is that a person needs to see an ad at least 7 times in order to really “see it” and consider buying. According to recent research, the optimal number of exposures of a brand to a person is actually at least 10 to be convinced to take action!
The logical conclusion from this finding is that spamming our customers is the way to go. but we don’t need data to know why that’s not a good idea. So, how can we reach a customer over 10 times with a similar message without making him feel like we are flooding his feed?
The answer: Integrated Marketing.
The key however is to sync up the messages both verbally and visually and approach the potential customer in different ways to make him finally notice us, without him feeling bothered by us, but rather welcome our content and want to learn more.
To sum up, Integrated marketing boils down to the 3 following aspect:
- Marketing across multiple channels
- Synchronized business messages
- Targeted marketing efforts based on relevant data
For example, this means using the same keywords in your Facebook and Instagram, email newsletters, websites, and PPC advertising. This way, potential customers get exposed to the same message a few times and begin to recognize your brand in the crowded digital space.
The 4 main Integrated marketing strategies and how to use them to your advantage.
When people are creating marketing strategies, they are usually focused on specific forms of marketing. For instance, some of them want a strategy that can help them make their website more relevant and visible. Others are making a strategy for specific ad campaigns. On the other hand, with internet marketing strategies, you will cover all aspects of marketing. Every aspect of the business is covered in one unified plan.
As we said before, gathering data (data-based marketing) has become crucial for these integrated strategies too. We are talking about activities that include analysis of big data, gathered with the help of consumer engagements and interactions.
Based on these activities, marketers can create predictions about future moves made by these consumers. To make things clearer, let’s check a few actionable steps that will help you understand what makes a successful data-driven campaign in 2020.
A realistic and defined goal
Just like in the case of any other campaign, a data-driven campaign needs a realistic and defined goal. Do you want to increase the number of sales? Or maybe you want to increase your brand awareness? Sometimes business owners and marketers want to drive more traffic. Remember that some of these goals can be interconnected, but in the end, you have to set one primary goal and work towards its completion.
Know your potential customers
This is actually the basic advantage of data-based marketing. Back in the days, businesses had to market their products/services to almost everyone because all categories of people were listening to the radio, reading newspapers, or watching TV. Today, you can use data from the Internet to target specific categories of people.
Use collected data from your website to learn more about the location, gender, age, and other characteristics of your potential customers. You can also use this information to get familiar with their behavior and learn what drives them to stay on your site and take further actions.
While we are talking about data, we should mention that data related to sales histories, customer surveys, customer service communications and visitors’ journeys on your site are something that you should take into account and implement in your next integrated marketing campaign.
Choose the right marketing channels
The beauty of integrated marketing is in the opportunity to cover a few marketing channels at the same time. This doesn’t mean that your business has to be present on all these channels at once. As a matter of fact, you probably don’t need at least a few of these channels.
Yet, there are a few of them that can be helpful like TV ads (during specific shows or on specific channels), specialized magazine ads, as well as a plethora of online marketing channels like social media networks, your website, PPC ads on search engines as well as email campaigns.
Once again, you have to be more specific to witness success. When we say “social media networks” we don’t mean that all of them will work because these are dozens of networks like this and each of them has specific characteristics. For example, Pinterest is used mostly by women in their 40s and 50s. most Instagram users are young people in their 20s and 30s.
Analyze this data and take it into account when starting a campaign like this. Once you have this info, make sure to create content that will engage these categories of people and these channels.
Analyze your marketing campaigns
You can’t create a marketing campaign that will suit all your needs and use it forever even when we are talking about integrated marketing campaigns. That’s why it is important to analyze every campaign. Find the strengths and weaknesses, tweak different sections of the campaign, and work on its improvement. With the right data, this process shouldn’t be difficult.
