Understanding Integrated Marketing Strategies

Over the years, marketing has evolved from regular newspaper and radio ads to an art form of elaborate and heavily-intertwined sets of experiences that the target audience goes through on their journey. Integrated marketing communication strategies ensure the various parts of your marketing plan build on each other.

Instead of having separate teams for different marketing efforts, integrated marketing focuses, and creating a seamless experience for the consumer while making the most of your available resources. Understanding and implementing integrated marketing strategies is your first step towards a highly-converting marketing plan that keeps giving.

What is the Purpose of Integrated Marketing?

The main benefit of using integrated marketing instead of separate marketing streams is forming and maintaining a consistent brand voice. A consistent brand voice is how your consumers can identify your company by your advertisement model or copy tone. Not to mention, it helps deliver your brand’s primary message without speaking a word.

Multi-channel marketing often has a detached effect, with each marketing model stretched thin to encompass an entire marketing funnel instead of only a part. Integrated marketing creates a storyline over multiple ads and marketing campaigns that drives your audience down the sales funnel.

Why is Integrated Marketing Effective?

Because integrated marketing allows you to combine various marketing efforts into a cohesive plan, it reaches a much wider audience. The different types of marketing efforts that follow the same tone but differ in delivery can interest a segment of your audience without sacrificing the remaining. 

Integrated marketing also increases people’s trust in your brand. After all, consistency in your campaigns and brand voice makes your brand closer to a trusted individual with a cause and a purpose rather than a corporation.

While integrated marketing campaigns can be demanding to make, launch, and maintain, they can save you a fortune in the long run. That’s because you can easily repurpose most of it across marketing channels and mediums. Still, integrated marketing is a complex plan and can easily get out of hand. 

It may be beneficial to seek the help of an experienced team rather than take the campaign on yourself. Manhattan is one of the biggest marketing agency hubs in the U.S. Working with an NYC advertising agency can help you launch a successful integrated marketing campaign with reduced risk and hassle. A few other cities that offer great creative marketing success are Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin.

Tips for Building a Successful Integrated Marketing Strategy

Integrated marketing isn’t an entirely new or alien concept. It’s built on years of trial and error in the multi-channel marketing world. And with a humble background in marketing, you can create an operational integrated marketing strategy.

• Establish and Define Overarching Goal – All marketing strategies need an end goal. From generating more leads or views to closing more sales, setting the right goals is the first step to creating a roadmap.
• Select Marketing Channels and Set Goals on Each – There are countless marketing channels, and you don’t have to use all of them to succeed. Choose the ones you’re most experienced in and set achievable but challenging goals for each.
• Identify and Define Customer Personas – A customer persona is a visualization of your ideal client. It includes their age, gender, education, social status, occupation, etc. Note that while you can reasonably target multiple customer personas, they each need their own marketing strategy.
• Identify Channel Managers – Every marketing channel needs a person or software to manage its operations. Identifying your staff, hardware, and software requirements early on is essential to stay on track in the long run.
• Create Easily Adaptable Marketing Assets and Brand Messaging – Your marketing materials need to be easily adaptable. That lets you repurpose them into different marketing channels without having to come up with new ideas every time. For example, turning video commercials into trailers or repurposing older ones into infographics and distributing them printed or on social media.
• Establish a Solid Plan for Lead Generation – Turning a customer from an ideal client to a hot or cold lead is one of the first and hardest layers of a sales funnel. Your lead generation plan needs solid planning and implementation to work.
• Launch the Campaign – Launching your campaign isn’t the last step. It’s the beginning of a whole marketing journey, where you’d need to gather and analyze feedback and implement changes whenever necessary.

One example of a marketing campaign that checked all the boxes of integrated marketing is Volkswagen’s 1960s “Think Small” newspaper ad. It set the new golden standard of integrated marketing by focusing on their cars’ uniqueness—which is their small size. They managed to drive up their sales for years to come in the US market, which, at the time, valued items—especially cars—for their size.

Going and Growing Steady

What makes integrated marketing campaigns unique is that you can scale them as you grow. You don’t have to start big or start from scratch when your business grows. Building a strong foundation for your strategy and scaling it to suit your needs is easier and cheaper than ever.