Understanding Integrated Marketing: An Essential Guide
Alongside multichannel and omnichannel marketing, integrated marketing has become a buzzword for most digital marketing services.
Understanding Integrated Marketing: An Essential Guide
Why is it important? And what separates it from omnichannel, multichannel and single-channel marketing?
We’ll talk you through the basics you need to know in this essential guide to understanding integrated marketing: An Essential Guide.
What are single channel campaigns?
A single-channel marketing campaign uses a single method of communication to connect your products with end-users. When using a single channel, all your marketing efforts are invested in a single approach.
What are the disadvantages of a single marketing campaign?
Although single channel marketing provides great focus and low cost, the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.
Too slow
With the increase of on-demand technology, customers have a greater expectancy for fast responses. Not adapting to this alienates customers.
A survey by Khoros reported that 65% of customers have changed brands over poor customer service. Offering service to meet customer expectations is crucial.
Too narrow
Single-channel marketing campaigns are too narrow. They ignore a wide range of their customer base by not connecting content to the channels they invest in.
The Types of Multichannel Campaigns
There are three main approaches to multichannel marketing campaigns: –
Pure multichannel marketing
This is where a business uses multiple channels, but there is no overarching strategy behind it. As there is no planning for this marketing method, the messaging can be chaotic and confusing to customers.
Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns
Omnichannel marketing campaigns focus on creating exceptional customer experiences by integrating the channels into one seamless buying experience. The goal of omnichannel marketing is to merge the channels into a single entity so that customers can move fluidly between channels without any frustrations.
Understanding Integrated Marketing: An Essential Guide
An integrated marketing campaign is all about presenting one consistent message through multiple channels and in various mediums. Integrated campaigns build a cohesive campaign that works toward a singular goal because every stage of the campaign works in harmony.
An example of a successful integrated campaign was Snicker’s You Are Not You When You Are Hungry. This campaign used television adverts, magazines, packaging, and social media posts to promote a consistent message that engaged people differently.
Use integrated campaigns to convey a message to your customers to create a brand-defining tone.
What are the advantages of an integrated marketing campaign?
Great for mapping a customer’s journey on the marketing funnel
Integrated campaigns allow you to pull apart the customers’ journey from awareness to aftercare and understand how they interact with your product or service. By segmenting the customers’ journey at specific points on the marketing funnel, you can focus on how to capture their attention at that point and how to drive them to the next part of the funnel.
Let’s use a financial company helping people in debt as an example. The customer will most likely begin their journey without knowing the specific industry terminology financial firms use, such as debt consolidation or settlement.
Knowing this, you can create articles focused on educating and informing the searchers of possible debt solutions and then driving on to product pages for these specific services. Integrating the campaign across awareness and consideration.
The real benefit of providing a consistent approach is brand recognition. Suppose the consumer takes a break between awareness and consideration. In that case, they’ll remember your brand favourably for the help you provided previously and be more likely to join your campaign at that stage.
At each stage, ask what the buyer’s intent is and what is the most likely channel or method they’ll use to satisfy this. And use lead generation in these channels to drive them to your main sales channel.
Excellent for building brand identity
The single tone and consistent messaging across every channel build a brand people can identify. Having this single message go out across multiple channels is also a great way to make your brand memorable and make people curious about you.
If you started seeing a brand pop up everywhere, wouldn’t you be curious about who they are, what they do and why you’re seeing them?
Reach a broader audience
Everybody has preferences regarding how they communicate, learn, or interact with the world. Integrated campaigns allow you to create eye-catching graphics for visual learners or exciting videos for those who don’t sit still long enough to read a whole sentence. It even lets you drop in-depth information and stats for those deep thinkers who love to pour over every detail before committing. Integrated campaigns position you better to create an inclusive brand.
Increase ROI
A consistent tone and brand image across channels increase the ROI on digital assets. As the style and message are harmonious across every channel, it is easier to reuse these assets at other campaign stages. This lowers your cost of content creation because you don’t have to rehire expert content creators.
Develop authority
Each time you deliver content tailored to satisfy a customer’s intent, you build trust and confidence in your brand. People will stop searching on Google and come directly to you for their answers. Suppose you want to become a though-leading authority in your industry. In that case, having an integrated marketing campaign is crucial in building that trust.
Gives cross-functional teams a unified vision
As integrated marketing extends across print media, content marketing, and website design, your whole business will be united by one core vision of the project. These campaigns don’t just build your brand perception in customers’ eyes; they’re also an opportunity to cultivate your internal culture. Forge bonds between teams by giving them a united vision.
How to build an integrated marketing campaign
A successful campaign needs to be carefully planned. A good campaign should incorporate these steps: –
Set your goals
There are two important goals to set. One is what you want to achieve from the campaign. Be clear and optimise for this throughout every channel.
Do you want to increase awareness by 20% or increase conversions by 10%? By setting the goal in real terms, it is easier to optimise as a whole and measure the success.
The second goal is to state what each integration is trying to achieve. Is it supposed to drive people from an education article written for awareness to a sales piece for people in the consideration phase? Or is it helping commercially interested people overcome objections? Knowing how these pieces fit, you can measure and optimise on a small scale.
Know your audience
Know who your audience is. Understanding your audience allows you to write empathetic content about their pain points and needs. Knowing the rough demographics and interests of the audience will also allow you to choose the best distribution methods.
Form content for the channel
Know the strengths and weaknesses of each channel that you are using. This way, you can change the content to fit that platform. Knowing what people use the platform for also helps you shape the content to create a good user experience that will warm them to your brand.
Create reusable content
Develop content you can repurpose and rescale. For example, convert a well-performing blog into a video format you can share via social media.
Measure and optimise
Measuring and optimising is the most crucial part of any campaign. It will tell you what is working and what needs work. Measuring traffic, where it flows from and to, and A/B testing will increase the returns of any campaign.
Conclusion for Understanding Integrated Marketing
Integrated campaigns are powerful tools for creating cohesive campaigns. They deliver a single, focused message across multiple channels and create a compelling brand tone customer trust. The interconnected nature also designs a customer journey plan empowered by metrics.
About Growthlabs
Growthlabs is a forward-thinking digital marketing service. Our experts listen to all the latest advice released by Google to ensure our customers not only have sites that incorporate current best practices but also the digital infrastructure to adapt to future changes like semantic search.
We have a diverse team of specialists who will help you at every stage of an integrated campaign. SEO keyword research to help connect people unaware of your services, educational content designed to drive people to conversion and help to capture your brand’s tones of voice.
Get in touch if you want research-driven advice on your next integrated digital campaign.