Many brands still feel reluctant to embrace integrated marketing. If your brand is not utilizing an integrated marketing approach, there’s a good chance it is largely due to selective marketing channels’ ineffectiveness. It is only a matter of time before you start to lose ROI.
Fortunately, the evolution and implementation of integrated marketing campaigns in the age of digitalization are more robust. In fact, brands have learned to identify specific channels that are suitable for their brand’s needs. It is a strategic move that allows you to render a positive impact.
Still, if your brand wants to execute an integrated marketing campaign successfully, you will need extensive knowledge and understanding of your brand’s historical performance on various marketing channels. The underlying goal of your brand should always be to strive for more expansion over time.
Research even highlights that people are exposed to more than 4000 ads each day. Therefore, you will have more than enough opportunities to form a strategic plan to accumulate critical information about your industry and competitive reports on marketing intelligence to test new innovative ideas.
Integrated Marketing: What Is It?
Integrated marketing refers to a dedicated and pre-planned approach that brands take to form a shared and consistent experience. The end-goal of the integrated marketing approach is to help customers interact better with a company or brand. It all comes down to the eternal question of how a brand can manage to entice its customers’ interest and convey specific messages for a prolonged period.
What Exactly Makes Up Integration Marketing?
Before you dive into the benefits and components of integrated marketing, it is better to clearly understand what exactly it is. Technically, it is a fragmented and complex marketing world. The term integrated marketing refers to the amalgamation of all your marketing endeavors in the past.
You can combine content marketing, email marketing, and social media to get the attention of more potential visitors. It’s an endless Mobius loop where you are not bound by growth limitations or how much critical information you can gather over time.
For an integrated marketing campaign, your first step is to get leads and use those leads throughout your digital marketing campaigns. It may sound all too straightforward, but there is more to it than meets the eye.
In fact, your consistent and combined brand message should be clear in each marketing channel to ensure an effective ROI. If you want to execute a strategic integrated marketing campaign successfully, you will have to utilize the right analytical tools to measure and track certain parameters that drive ROI.
Remember, the most defining component of any integrated marketing campaign is to figure out how you will achieve results or conversions through proper analytics in place. Currently, there are more than enough marketing analytical tools that allow brands to take their marketing campaigns to another level and monitor the performance of campaigns in real-time.
Difference between Integrated Marketing and Integrated Marketing Communication
Integrated marketing is a cost-effective, immersive, collective strategy that allows you to use your marketing budget to its full potential. However, it takes reputable brand identity and interesting storytelling to convey a singular and strong message across the board.
On the other hand, integrated marketing communication refers to multiple channels that brands use to communicate their core messages. The communication has to be continuous, consistent, cohesive, and complementary.
Integrated Marketing Trends that Deserve Your Attention
Technological advancements continue to present more engagement opportunities to marketers who want to create suitable integrated marketing campaigns.
Customer-focused Marketing
The customer-centric marketing approach has become a phenomenon over the past couple of years. However, the main driver today is to implement integrated marketing campaigns successfully. For instance, marketers use a distance approach to receive customer feedback through service chats.
Similarly, other brands purchase a vast amount of data to create appropriate campaigns. As a result, marketers utilizing smart insights will increase the lifecycle of its brand’s customers.
Social Media Platforms
These days an integrated marketing campaign cannot be executed without social channels. Social media has been a great ally of integrated marketing campaigns, and digital marketers understand this more than ever. It is another reason most brands use short videos and tailored ads on social media platforms to spark customers’ attention as soon as possible.
In fact, customers’ active presence on social media platforms will continue to create more opportunities for marketers. It is, however, a trend that requires heightened focus and a long-term approach from brands to see some results.
Integrated marketing will continue to work better when brands have the freedom to modify media messages. Furthermore, demographics and usage rates will become more useful to create effective integrated marketing campaigns.
Mobile and Smart Devices
As statistics show, social channels go hand-in-hand when it comes to mobile and other smart devices. Integrated marketing campaigns incorporating mobile and various smart devices will be able to gain more customer attention that enables spontaneous, direct, interactive and/or targeted communications, any time, any place.
The Relevance of Integrated Marketing Communications
An integrated marketing approach exists to get rid of disparities and irregularities in a marketing campaign. It also depends on how prospective customers interact or communicate with your brand. And this is where you should draw the thin red line with multi-channel marketing. Collectively, integrated marketing aligns your brand message that you share across the channels.
That said, the concept and relevance of integrated marketing is older than one might think. Integrated marketing communications or IMC is a holistic approach to traditional marketing. It means using a sequence of communication platforms, activities, and tactics to fulfill key marketing goals.
In fact, your brand even has to combine offline and online advertising, PR, sales promotions, and marketing to achieve flawless brand communication with targeted consumers. However, you can coordinate these communication patterns through different stages of your customer’s journey.
Remember, the planning and implementation of marketing activities have to be in tandem. Each marketing channel must be able to reinforce another marketing channel that allows you to deliver continuous and tailored communication to potential customers.
Deploying a wide array of integrated marketing communications is an excellent approach to gain a competitive advantage. Once you use a combination of interconnected communication activities throughout your marketing channels, you can increase your brand awareness and gain customer loyalty among the targeted audience.
Learn to Create and Execute an Integrated Marketing Campaign
Your brand needs to integrate and direct all marketing channels in the same direction. Furthermore, you have to be decisive about plotting specific customers’ touch points throughout each customer’s lifecycle.
Consequently, it will give you a definitive idea to combine a list of marketing channels that you will need to convey similar brand messages. You can, for instance, use a marketing matrix to view which type of content would be more suitable to draft.
The nature of your content should be reassuring and complementary for all marketing mediums. Align your marketable content in corporate communication, digital communications, public relations, search engine optimization, email marketing, and social media.
When it comes to implementing an integrated marketing campaign, it is vital to have a detailed marketing plan first. A marketing plan represents a valid document that digital marketers use to explain the current scenarios, challenges, and steps to achieve marketing goals.
Your tailored marketing plan for a successful integrated campaign should include:
Situational Analysis
Your first course of action should be to note comparative analysis between market situation, competitors, product or service, new market trends, etc.
Financial Forecasts
Include calculations of sales metrics, estimation of total sales, and total estimation of expenses. You need to analyze whether you would be able to break-even or not.
Marketing Activities
This involves key marketing activities that you intend to perform through the help of marketers. Also, highlight how soon you can complete your marketing objectives.
Monitoring
Monitoring revolves around getting a continuous loop of feedback that allows you to keep an eye on your marketing activities and make relevant corrections over different time intervals.
Once you have a clear-cut marketing plan in place, your next strategic move is to execute an integrated marketing campaign. It is imperative to understand that most of your integrated marketing approach revolves around your brand’s core marketing activities. Here’s how you can implement a step-by-step integrated marketing campaign:
Step #1
As a brand, your first need to create the behavioral and demographic parameters of your target consumers, aka customer persona.
Step #2
Once you understand your target consumers’ main demographic elements, determine the strengths and weaknesses of each marketing channel prior to media selection.
Step #3
The next stage of an integrated marketing campaign involves creating a unified and simpler aesthetics of your brand. From font to logos, ensure that every aspect is complementary.
Step #4
This is the phase where you make sure your design and content elements are adaptable to different marketing channels. Try to eliminate as much fragmentation as you can from different types of media.
Step #5
Thoroughly assess each element to drive more traffic successfully. Similarly, combine team objectives to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Step #6
The success of every integrated marketing campaign depends on robust metrics to monitor the performance of marketing activities.
Adoption of Integrated Marketing Communications: What Benefits You Can Expect?
Typically, integrated marketing communications is an omnichannel presence of a marketing campaign. Essentially, it provides the best way to fulfill short-term and long-term marketing objectives. Here are some of the benefits that come with the adoption of integrated marketing communications:
Cost-Effectiveness
When all aspects of your marketing activities come together to execute the best-integrated marketing campaign, you end up saving money. However, your marketing efforts have to pay close attention to avoid duplication of messages across channels and focus on completing the same goals. Similarly, you would notice a significant reduction in transactional costs. The cost-effectiveness occurs due to scalability throughout the promotion, print, and design costs.
Trust and Loyalty of Customers
When it comes to digital marketing, the trust and loyalty of customers is everything. In fact, almost 90% of people recommend a brand to others they trust. And the successful implementation of an integrated marketing campaign revolves around gaining more and more trust in your customers.
Once you generate consistent appreciation, your customers will start to rely upon you. What’s the secret? Just give your audience “what” and “when” they want the most.
Online users have a short attention span, which means all the more reason to convey concise messages that can build trust. Remember, a trusted brand that undertakes unified marketing activities serves as a reassurance to customers in an ocean of complex marketing clutter.
High Revenue Generation
For successful brands, a competitive edge translates into a high return on investment. In fact, you can even double your sales so long as you are aware of your customers’ needs. Mostly, customers become more responsive due to extended familiarity.
On the other hand, avoiding integrated marketing or an omnichannel presence can break your marketing budget and result in lower ROI. The idea behind any integrated marketing campaign is to ensure that your customers get the exact same brand message whenever and wherever.
Brand Recognition and Awareness
Brand recognition is a feat in itself that takes time and careful consideration of your marketing activities. So long as your brand identity is the focus of attention in an integrated marketing campaign, you will be able to garner continuous attention.
Also, integrated marketing can be experimental when it comes to sending messages that emotionally resonate with customers. The last thing you want to do is focus solely on pushing your products or services.
Examples: Practical Outlook of Integrated Marketing in the Digital World
Historically, there have been many exciting and interesting integrated marketing campaigns that your brand can use as inspiration.
There should be a focus on how successful integrated marketing campaigns combine digital marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, with conventional marketing practices such as PR. For example, you may remember Coca Cola’s famous integrated marketing campaign of “Share a Coke.” It is arguably the most popular and recognized integrated marketing campaign in marketing history.
Today, a trending hashtag may be common but it was Coca Cola’s brand that focused on trending a specific hashtag, #shareacoke, throughout the social media platforms. The effectiveness of the hashtag had a positive impact on all integrated marketing campaigns. It was a simple phrase that resonated with people because of its inclusivity and shared experience.
Another integrated marketing campaign that managed to garner years of attention was H&M’s ‘Come Together’ campaign that managed to highlight a sense of ownership and pride in personalized clothing. The campaign was more of a statement that the brand decided to make the most out of at the time, and which renowned Hollywood actors even endorsed.
Avoid the 4 Most Common Integrated Marketing Mistakes
Integrated marketing is the game of understanding your customer persona. It is a sequence of doing things or thinking things about your potential customers. Primarily, most integrated marketing campaigns fail due to a lack of understanding of the buyer’s persona.
Here are some common mistakes to avoid before implementing an integrated marketing campaign:
Confusion about the End-Goals
When it comes to an integrated marketing campaign, your teams should be aware of the big picture. If you don’t take other teams into confidence, your brand would not be able to achieve the level of consistency your customers expect. It is “the” reason that best-integrated marketing campaigns are unified and extend to multiple platforms, mediums, and channels.
False Presumption about Your Audience
Your customers would need more than just one marketing channel to engage; you cannot predict the content preferences of your target audience. Therefore, don’t expect to hear from your customers after the first communicated brand message. Instead, try to understand the unpredictable and vague content consumption patterns to find out what your customers want at a specific time.
Disconnected Marketing Goals
Non-aligned integrated marketing activities with confusing messages can turn your campaign into a disaster. In fact, you’d be surprised how many brands often don’t align their marketing messages, strategies, and channels together. The secret to an effective integrated marketing campaign depends on consistent messaging. Think of it as a holy grail that brings all your channels together.
Ignoring Collected Data
It is true – the success of your current integrated marketing campaign depends on your previous campaigns. Your integrated marketing efforts should focus on creative initiatives and established parameters of the past.
Integrated Marketing Translates into Result-Oriented Digital Marketing Strategy
Many companies don’t employ experts in every field to gain high attention in a specific field. Instead, a few specialized areas (i.e., video marketing, content marketing, or search engine optimization) must be valuable enough to complement the entire integrated marketing strategy.
Conversely, other brands hire third-party digital marketing specialists who know how to amplify customer experience across multiple marketing channels. Integrated marketing leads to a successful digital marketing strategy through:
Steady Customer Experience
Develop a consistent and seamless customer experience around your brand and company. Consistency in multiple marketing channels builds brand loyalty and awareness among customers. In fact, each interaction of a consumer should represent the values and cultural influences of your brand.
High Operational Efficiency
Optimize the operational efficiency of all marketing activities of your brand, and combine all activities into a single integrated campaign. You should consolidate individual campaigns into the main campaign that would have more meaningful impact than others.
Collective Collaboration
An integrated marketing approach should be influential and collaborative across different departments of your company. Ideally, everything should be open to discussion to make modifications and make more creative and informed decisions.
What’s Next for Integrated Marketing?
Today, brands need to move beyond learning about the fundamentals of integrated marketing. Besides, the digital marketplace will continue to change and evolve in the foreseeable future. It means you should design your integrated strategic marketing campaign to thwart potential challenges in the future.
Brands need to utilize a combination of analytics and marketing skills to execute a successful campaign. 2020 and beyond will be even more critical to embrace an integrated marketing approach for brands. In fact, the earlier the adoption, the more ROI you can expect.
As you face more complicated challenges in a layered marketing world, the solution lies in eliminating fragmentation through rigorous and coordinated efforts. For the sake of competitiveness, digital marketers continue to work and build a future-proof integrated marketing model.
Hive Art Media: Integrated Multi-channel Marketing to Achieve Success
At Hive Art Media, our approach has always been to devise the most effective and result-oriented integrated marketing strategy for our valued clients. Over the years, our team members have managed to help numerous businesses prepare and implement successful integrated marketing campaigns.
We can help you identify the intricate marketing details to execute a more strategic integrated marketing campaign. Our digital marketing efforts question and pinpoint the needs of a marketing campaign that ordinarily are invisible to brands.
Our years of proven record and experience allow us to develop a realistic integrated marketing approach suitable for business needs. We can help you integrate the right analytics and measure the results of a marketing campaign in real-time. If you’re ready to step up your multi-marketing efforts, you can count on our unbiased and unprejudiced evaluation to capture more prospective customers’ attention.
Conclusion
As a brand, you should view and use integrated marketing and integrated marketing communication interchangeably. It does, however, require subtlety to incorporate the right elements in each integrated marketing channel. The charm and effectiveness of integrated marketing lies in the consistent alignment of your brand, its vision and communication across different channels. All told, integrated marketing requires broadmindedness and a collective approach to merge all your marketing efforts.If you’re ready to implement a digital strategy that guarantees results, follow us and find out how we can help you plan an integrated marketing strategy that caters to your needs.