The Power of Integrated Marketing Strategies
You’ve got a marketer working on ad campaigns, another focusing on SEO, a social media manager on your LinkedIn presence, a graphic designer making everything look great. With all these people on board, your marketing strategy should be set, right??
Maybe not. While everyone may be doing great work, you might still have a problem if they aren’t all aligned and working towards your corporate goals.
Understanding What Integrated Really Means
Integrated marketing starts by understanding the overarching business goals then looking at how functional goals in areas like marketing and sales ladder up to help you achieve the corporate objectives. Without this top-down view, you’re just executing on a bunch of disparate tactics.
Let’s say you want to get in better shape. What would you do? Maybe you eat more vegetables, start an exercise class, or drink more water. Each of these things might help you get in better shape, but maybe not as fast or as effectively as you want.?
It’s when you come up with a plan to incorporate everything – dietary changes, more physical activity, better sleep, etc. – that you become significantly more likely to achieve your health and fitness goals.?
This is how integrated marketing works to achieve company goals. With an integrated approach, you’ll cover the full marketing and sales funnel – from brand awareness to lead generation and qualification to customer acquisition and retention – to ensure that each piece is working together to reach the same result.?
One key component of an integrated marketing approach is consistency and coherence across all channels. For example, a person who sees your company on social media should find similar messaging and branding when they get to your website. And if a website visitor asks a chatbot a question, they should get a similar answer to someone who asked a real person at your company that question.?
Now that we’re on the same page as to what an integrated marketing strategy is, let’s delve into why it works.?
Layer Your Strategies Over Time
Part of the power of an integrated marketing strategy comes from understanding that different strategies and tactics deliver results in different timelines. You’ll be working on the long-term goals at the same time that you’re filling out your sales funnel for next quarter. If you aren’t starting from your business goals and thinking about your entire funnel over time, your strategy isn’t going to deliver the results it might.
Here’s how different strategies deliver results in different timelines, and how covering them all simultaneously puts you in the strongest possible position:
Immediate (1-3 months): The focus is generating and qualifying bottom-of-funnel leads that are ready to buy, using tactics like paid media and sales outreach.?
This year (6-12 months): Here, the focus is on targeting and building trust with the right accounts for strategic growth. Strategies may include an ABM (account-based marketing) program to grow your pipeline as well as ongoing social media engagement to build a following.
Next year (18 months - 2 years): This is about building a foundation to identify and nurture the most qualified leads – organic ones – who will be ready to buy in the near future. This means a focus on SEO (search engine optimization), which takes time to build but has serious payoffs once the snowball effect kicks in.
Looking ahead (2-3 years): Here, you’re positioning your subject matter experts as thought leaders in your space. The conversation isn’t about sales or products or services. It’s about where the industry itself is headed and the role your organization will play in driving it forward. This is where speaking engagements, industry research reports, and contributed articles driven by a robust PR strategy come into play.
The future (5+ years): Five or more years might seem far away, but the focus here is about building what we call “market leadership” – going beyond individual thought leaders to position your company as a pioneer. Consistency in your thought leadership strategy over a number of years turns your company into an industry leader. There’s no way around it; this game takes time. That’s why it’s important to be thinking about this today to set your company up for success in the future.?
The Pitfalls of Siloed Marketing?
Siloed marketing may help you reach individual metrics but will likely miss the mark on those big goals. Common issues with siloed approaches include:
领英推荐
Let’s say you’re tackling paid media in a silo, separate from organic social, content, email, or other activities. You might get good clicks and even drive some conversions. But you’ll reduce the potential impact you could have had, resulting in lower quality leads, a longer sales cycle, or distractions in the form of vanity metrics.?
And how does working in silos impact your company resources? Are you creating new graphics for each ad, social post, and content piece? Does each team conduct its own market research when that research could be used in multiple ways? Are the same leads being touched too often because one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing? Silos are not conducive for either the team or customer experience.?
Benefits of Integrated Marketing Strategies
Unified Objectives
An integrated approach ensures that all marketing activities are aligned with the business objectives. This creates strategies that deliver a cohesive brand experience.?
A great example is the marketing for the Barbie movie . The goal was not only to promote the movie but to build brand awareness and cultural relevance. In addition to traditional tactics, Barbie was promoted across reality TV and through more than 100 brand partnerships. Pink was everywhere. And the campaign was successful: Barbie became the highest-grossing worldwide release for Warner Brothers and pulled Mattel out of a financial slump.
Increased Efficiency
Coordinated efforts reduce redundancy and ensure that resources are used effectively. With integrated approaches, work can be shared across your team and content can be adjusted to fit different goals and platforms, instead of starting from scratch for each activity.?
CenturyLink, a global telecommunication services provider, had eight separate organizations under their name, making it difficult to create coordinated marketing campaigns. They used marketing automation tools to create one central, shared marketing center . This helped create broad, multi-touch campaigns with consistent messaging. In just one year, this approach influenced about $2.6 million in revenue while saving over $1 million for its consumer and business segments.?
Improved Brand Recognition
Consistency reinforces a brand's identity and makes it more recognizable. While you can tweak the wording and design for different audience segments or platforms, the heart of the message should stay consistent.?
You may have heard of the Rule of 7 , a marketing principle that says customers need to see a brand at least seven times before making a purchase decision. But for this to be relevant, the audience needs to recognize that it's the same brand that they’re seeing seven times. And don’t be fooled into thinking this is a B2C issue – 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions and 2/3 of B2B buyers start the buying process with a web search.?
Better Customer Engagement
A unified approach to your marketing strategy enhances the customer experience and encourages greater engagement with the brand. Integrated marketing campaigns that have consistent branding can drive customer engagement across platforms.?
PFL, a provider of print sales-enablement services, had siloed marketing strategies which lead to discordant messaging across platforms. They implemented an integrated approach to make their messaging consistent, which translated into better engagement with their email campaigns, where they found a 204% increase in response rates.?
Stronger Performance Tracking
Another benefit of integrated marketing is holistic analytics. Integrating data from various channels provides a more comprehensive view of campaign performance and ROI. Research suggests that marketers with integrated analytics tools were more likely to outperform on revenue goals.
Let’s say you launched a campaign around a new service offering. When you look at the Instagram analytics, you see that the engagement is significantly lower than you were aiming for. If this is the only data you have, you may decide that you should change everything. However, a more comprehensive view might inform you that your overall strategy is working well, but you need to adjust your targeting on this channel (or perhaps this channel isn’t a fit for your audience at all).?
Conclusion
Integrated marketing leads to more efficient use of company resources and better customer engagement. Moving away from siloed work can be a challenge, but it’s very much worth the effort: an integrated approach will help your company reach both its long- and short-term goals quickly and more effectively.??
Looking for more? Check out the original in-depth guide on the Conveyor blog here: https://www.conveyormg.com/resources/blogs/what-is-integrated-marketing-strategy