Integrated marketing: What is it and why it matters

As more businesses, products, and marketing channels enter the market, consumers are becoming numb to the relentless barrage of advertisements. To stand out from the crowd and avoid confusion, your products and services should be easily identifiable through whichever advertisement outlet you use, which is why you need to incorporate integrated marketing into your marketing strategy. 

Because you’re providing a single message across several channels, integrated marketing communications campaigns are successful regardless of your goal—whether it’s to drive conversions or develop brand recognition. You’re using several marketing channels to reach a larger audience rather than depending only on one.

Additionally, by repeating the same message across a variety of platforms, you raise the possibility that visitors will see your brand and message more than once, placing your company front and centre.

Let’s take a closer look at integrated marketing, including what it is, the benefits of using it, and how to use it. 

What is integrated marketing?

The practice of combining all facets of marketing communication, including PR, social media, and advertising, and using each one’s unique combination of channels, media, and techniques to provide a smooth and customer-focused experience is known as integrated marketing. In practical terms, this implies that your message should have the same appearance, feel, and tone across all of your media. 

Integrated marketing vs omnichannel marketing 

Because of their close relationship, it might be difficult for the ordinary internet user to distinguish between the two but there are some differences between them.

It can be argued that the degree of personalization is what separates the two marketing terms, with integrated marketing only concentrating on ensuring that all marketing channels are generally related to each other and omnichannel marketing ensuring that all preferences are streamlined for a specific customer across all platforms.

It’s crucial to remember that integrated marketing and omnichannel marketing complement one another rather than working alone. To concentrate just on a customer’s multifaceted brand experience and ignore their buying experience, or the other way around, would be a missed opportunity.

Advantages of integrated marketing 

There are many reasons why integrated marketing is beneficial, and they include:

1. Harmonized perception and recognition of brands: When different channels routinely and consistently communicate the brand concept and message to customers, their perception is unified. Your brand has a point of reference and is more likely to be recognized and trusted by customers and your target audience.
2. You save marketing costs: By using an integrated marketing approach, you may adopt a single core brand message across all of your marketing channels, saving time and money over the process of distributing and customizing content for each channel. Additionally, you have the option to reuse your materials for usage across all of your other marketing platforms. 
3. Increased productivity: You may simplify internal resources and communications, as well as your procedures, by using integrated marketing. As a result, you may develop more focused campaigns that support your overarching corporate goals. Additionally, it encourages improved departmental cooperation, ranging from customer service to marketing. 
4. Greater scope: By using several communication methods, you may expand your audience. Additionally, putting an integrated marketing plan into practice increases your chances of connecting with and drawing in the ideal audience for your business. But the most important thing is to use all of your platforms with the same targeting and core brand messaging. 

How to formulate a comprehensive integrated marketing plan?

Understanding how integrated marketing works enables you to customize your marketing initiatives to take advantage of its many advantages and achieve superior outcomes. Here are some useful ideas to get you started on developing your integrated marketing plan.

1. Recognize your target market

Identifying your target audience is the first step in creating an integrated marketing strategy. You will need to take into account things like their hobbies, preferences, habits, and demographics. For a particular campaign, you must have a comprehensive grasp of your clientele. By doing this, you may develop a customized communications plan approach.

Put yourself in the position of your clients. EQ is superior to IQ in the corporate world. You must first respond to the question, “What’s important to my customers?” before creating any campaigns. Consider how you may ease their lives and alleviate their difficulties.

2. Determine your goals

It is easier to execute an integrated marketing communications plan effectively if you know why you want to. A broad target may be outlined first, and it can subsequently be more specifically defined into SMART marketing objectives.

If this phase is skipped, your integrated marketing campaign will not offer the necessary consistency with all of your campaign aspects. The first thing you should specify when developing an integrated marketing campaign is the objective you want to accomplish.

It is not difficult to develop an integrated marketing objective; it mostly relies on your company’s current state and the information you would want your target audience to know about it.

This makes goal-setting for your integrated marketing campaign easy, but there is a catch: when you map out a goal to be reached, think about the degree of control you get to have over it, and make sure that data can be gathered to analyze and enhance the campaign as a whole.

3. Create a thought-provoking concept

It’s time to brainstorm a catchy and innovative concept that will captivate your target audience and stick to their thoughts. One characteristic of effective integrated marketing initiatives is that they are built on captivating concepts. 

First, determine what makes you unique from the competitors. After that, you may start thinking of creative methods to center your main differentiators around a tale that is funny, emotional, thrilling, etc.

Your brand value, or what your brand stands for, is another crucial factor to take into account when brainstorming ideas. You don’t want to come up with an idea that is inconsistent with your brand value, especially in light of integrated marketing’s objective of consistency across all marketing campaigns.

4. Choose your marketing channels 

Rather than depending just on one marketing channel, integrated marketing makes use of numerous channels. This indicates that it’s time to acknowledge the need for many marketing channels.

Multiple marketing channels are more powerful than one. For this reason, combining channels like social media, advertising, and sales promotion, among many others, into a cohesive and well-defined marketing plan ensures that you get the most impact possible.

5. Create a marketing strategy

To create a comprehensive marketing strategy, you should concentrate on three main areas: 

• Your target audience: For every marketing strategy, develop a unique customer persona. Consider using social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to interact with Millennials and Gen Zs, for instance, if they are your main target demographic.
• Your content: Determine the kind of material that appeals to and is pertinent to your intended audience. For instance, you may supply them with guidelines, case studies, and other useful materials together with strong calls to action if you want to turn your leads into paying clients.
• Frequency: This implies that you must provide the appropriate material to the appropriate audience at the appropriate time. But you don’t want to overburden your intended audience with data. Use marketing automation tools, which can assist you in figuring out when and how customers interact with your content and brand across all of your channels, to steer clear of this.

6. Construct and execute your campaign

The marketing assets needed to support your campaigns must be developed now that you have identified your target market, chosen marketing channels, and campaign aim.

Marketing assets include a variety of material and campaign pieces that are disseminated via various marketing channels, such as blog posts, static photos, quotations, GIFs, videos, and more.

To fully picture your concept and engage your audience, this stage involves a lot of creative procedures such as copywriting and graphics designing. 

First and foremost, ensure that your material can be quickly modified to match various marketing channels. One of the goals of integrated marketing is consistency across all platforms. This can be achieved more simply by producing content that can be readily formatted for various channels.

7. Choose a lead acquisition strategy

The quantity of leads that a marketing campaign generates is a good indicator of its performance.

First, think about the ways in which your visitors might become leads. Next, think about the ways in which these leads are engaged with once they arrive. Naturally, this means that your marketing team and your sales operations must collaborate. Your primary objective should be to make sure that leads are appropriately nurtured and maintained in interest until they become sales.

8. Assess the outcomes

Integrated marketing is an ongoing process that will never come to a conclusion as long as your company is in operation. You will need to monitor your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and make adjustments as needed. Once adjustments are made, the whole marketing campaign is continually monitored, and more improvements are performed down the road.

KPIs also make it simple to determine the best course of action for enhancing the marketing campaign as a whole. With this, you can determine if investing more money in the campaign is a wise decision or whether there are still gaps and underperforming channels.

Conclusion 

It might be difficult to implement an integrated marketing communications strategy. On the other hand, done correctly, it may help your firm expand. You may connect with a larger audience, increase brand recognition, and win over customers by using a consistent message throughout all of your marketing and communication platforms.