Working Out An Integrated Marketing Strategy

Integrated Marketing Strategy. Sounds fancy right? Yeah…. It’s not really. It’s simply a way of being present on all of the touchpoints that your target audience interacts with. You just make it easier for your consumers to interact and connect with your product & your brand, so that they can make the right buying decision (which basically means giving you their money).

The Core Elements

Any successful marketing strategy revolves around the same core elements. First, there is the CTA. What do you want the consumers to do exactly? Make a purchase? Download an e-book? Visit your store? Engage and interact with your brand? Listen to your stories? What is the end goal here??

Every campaign has a fixed goal. The whole campaign is supposed to be optimised around this goal. The more focused your campaign is, the better quality results you’ll get.?

It’s crucial to be extremely clear with your CTA. Let them know what you need them to do. A confused consumer is the worst kind of consumer, unless that’s your specific goal…. Which is kind of weird but cool.

The next thing here would be accessibility.?

How does your consumer actually get the product or the service? How do they access your product? Is it download only? Do they have to visit the store in order to see it physically? Would you or your team reach out to them in order to explain how it works? Do they have to subscribe?

It might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised to know how many companies actually get this one wrong.?

Also, since we’re talking about integrated campaigns here, it’s crucial to make it clear to your consumers on ALL of your chosen marketing channels.?

Consumers are attracted to ad campaigns that are easy to understand. So make your campaign quite relevant to your targeted niche. It’s important to sort these knots out BEFORE you launch your campaign, for obvious reasons.

Next, what channels will you be using?

Where? does your audience hang out? Where do they spend most of their time? Your choice of marketing channels will depend on where your audience is. For example, if you’re targeting a mostly younger demographic, then ideally you should be using social media platforms such as Instagram and Tik-Tok.?

The choice of channels is not however limited to just age groups. You can use any parameters that you think are relevant to your product.

For example, if you want to target investors and entrepreneurs, then you can include financial newspapers, business magazines & websites, LinkedIn influencers, pages & groups, billboards that are present in financial areas and other relevant channels in your campaign.

An important thing to think about is that your campaign strategy should ideally be designed around your channels.

Each channel should have a specific purpose. If you’re using billboards to display your ad near a highway, then most people are going to see your ad while driving or being driven to some destination. Many of them might not check out your product right away, and would probably check it out once they reach home or wherever they’re going.?

So the billboard ad could be designed to grab attention. It could be more focused on generating brand awareness. It might be used to inform the public about your offer, and then when they log in to their social media profiles, they’ll see the same offer, but this time with a CTA and a working link that takes them to a specially designed landing page.

So both these channels would work together in order to get that consumer to convert.?

Then of course we come to the consumers themselves

Who are you trying to target?

What do they do? Where do they live? How old are they? How much do they earn? Are they educated? What do they prefer? What devices do they use? How do they access content? Are they tech savvy?

These are some of the questions that you need to ask yourself before working out a strategy.?

We have to create what marketers call an ‘Ideal Buyer Persona’

What does your ideal consumer look like?

This is kind of the key to a successful marketing strategy. Ideal buyer personas help you in designing targeted strategies that are geared towards specific sets of audiences. The idea here is to target that one ideal consumer persona. Not only will this help in appealing to your target audience, but it might also attract people who are just outside that sphere but might still relate to that persona.?

Once you have your ideal buyer personas in place, you can then design a strategy that tries to get these ideal clients across multiple different platforms.

And then finally, how does it all come together?

How will your strategy play out across multiple platforms?

Each platform will have its own strengths and weaknesses. For example newspapers will give you very limited control over targeting. Of course. Different people will prefer different newspapers and you can still target geographic locations, but anyone can pick up a newspaper and see your ad.

You will also have quite limited control over interest based targeting. TV will give you even less control over the audiences.?

Also, both print media and TV will be quite expensive.?

What they’re good at is generating mass awareness. You can reach quite a broad audience across the nation. So your integrated strategy needs to consider this. Every channel's pros and cons need to be accounted for.?

It’s also quite important to keep your strategy flexible, adaptive & evolving. Markets are constantly changing. Things go wrong all the time. So it’s obvious that your strategy needs to change and grow and evolve as well.?

Final Words

So all the channels that will be included in your strategy will have a common goal. Each channel should push the consumer closer to that goal. As long as all the components are working in the same direction, you should be fine. As we discussed before, each channel will contribute differently to your strategy since they cannot replace each other.?

The end goal of any strategy is to get the message across. And you get to decide that message.

Abhishek Samant?

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