What are the key benefits of integrated marketing for your business?

Integrated marketing should provide a consistent voice which enhances brand awareness. However for it be effective it requires the marketing director to first identify the channels, mediums and tone of voice that will create the greatest traction. Once this is done then a marketing strategy can translate these into raising brand awareness as part of the overarching activities.

Integrated marketing will certainly help you grow brand awareness. You can use the principles of integrated marketing to develop that 'awareness' towards strong brand recognition and brand recall - you want your prospects to think of you when they are faced with a pain that you can solve. Here, consistent messaging and imagery that accompanies a prospect through their customer journey is key.

I would position it such that your integrated market strategy shouldn’t just aim to enhance brand awareness. It’s a two-way street where your brand strategy should also drive your integrated marketing strategy. To give a simple example, using marketing simply to enhance brand awareness could involve running campaigns across every platform. However, companies select their platforms and campaigns according to their brand. Consider how differently LinkedIn is used compared to Instagram or TikTok. As such, your brand should help shape your integrated marketing approach and vice versa.

The real benefit of integrated marketing on performance is the ability to minimise effort, resources and budget and maximise reach, usability, impact and occurance. While analytics may help provide KPIs to monitor performance the key element is to align activities to outputs to see how to get marketing to work smarter and not harder.

The ability to "mix and match" various types of content to different personas and meet them at their preferred interaction point is fairly critical; modern analytics packages help make that possible. To put it more simply- integrated campaigns allow you to more easily meet the audience (prospect) at their preferred watering hole.

There are often inter dependencies and relationships between different marketing activities, so looking at a cumulative integrated view may give you a more holistic view of performance, to ensure you are truly optimising at a macro level (sum of all activities rather than in isolation).

Effective integrated marketing starts with alignment and coordination across all marketing channels in order to deliver a cohesive and consistent message. Start by defining your objectives - brand awareness, lead gen and/or pipeline acceleartion. Next, understand define your key personas. What are their pain points, interests and characteristics. This is critical in order to tailor messaging across channels in order to drive engagement/action. Next, develop a unified theme/message that conveys a value prop for your product/service. Finally, choose your marketing channels based on objectives, audience, and budget. As your planning, be intentional about the customer journey, and plan to A/B test and refine messaging to maximize results.

While the theory sounds fine - a marketing director has a far more important role than simply exercising these elements. There is a real need for communication, interaction and reiteration throughout these to test, refine, test, refine. When I have looked at this with clients - there is far more data collection and validation so that all decisions and assumptions are data-driven rather than guesstimates.

In the real world the steps for implementing are rarely so linear. Yes you have to start with understanding the market and knowing your objectives. Then create a create a strategy (which is longer lasting than for a 1-off campaign), which includes insights, targeting, and positioning. Developing the marketing messages and channel mix can happen in parallel, and shouldn't be done in isolation to one another. There may also be learnings from past activity that could inform this, and always-on activity is being optimised rather than starting from a blank sheet of paper.

Integrated marketing helps build a strong and recognizable brand presence. Repetition is key. Studies have shown that a message needs to be repeated at least seven times for it to be acknowledged and recognized by the audience. Integrated marketing ensures this repetition by deploying a consistent message across various channels, such as social media, email marketing, advertising, ect. Consistency drives memorability, making it more likely for consumers to remember and engage with your brand. Through repetition and consistency, integrated marketing strategies not only boost brand awareness but also drive trust and loyalty among your target audience, ultimately leading to increasing the performance of your demand gen efforts.

You have to weigh up the pros and cons of integrated activity - sometimes existing activity is already 'on brand' and cohesive enough, even if it isn't identically 'matching luggage'. Prioritize the channels that have greatest impact from being integrated e.g. high-impact visuals, and the website experience in the call-to-action.