What Is the Value of Integrating Your Marketing Strategies?
What is an integrated marketing campaign and why is it important?
An integrated marketing campaign is a cross-channel marketing strategy that involves creating consistent campaigns across different platforms to provide a cohesive experience to the customer. Each brand experience should be consistent whether a customer experiences the brand through social media, direct marketing or another channel.
An integrated marketing campaign understands that customers are not confined to a single channel. Consumers today are encountering brands and advertisements everywhere they go, from the bus to their favorite websites to their email. For your brand to stand out to customers, you need to create campaigns that live on the platforms that customers frequent. Simultaneously, the campaigns must share similar features, so they stand out in customers’ minds.
When your campaign is fully integrated, customers will recognize your brand regardless of where they see it. This will help them remember what you had to say, thus beginning your relationship with them.
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What are the elements of an integrated marketing strategy?
A quality integrated marketing campaign will take on a few features. Visually and textually, they will provide consistent messaging regardless of the platform. The colors, layout and images should all be easily recognizable across the different formats.
Your campaign should also specifically target a variety of platforms that are regularly viewed by your target audience. Break down social media sites, email touch points, PPC keywords and any other features that will be included in the campaign to maximize exposure for this particular buyer persona.
You also want to make sure that the people behind the brand are informed about this campaign. If you have a physical store, make sure employees know how to redeem email coupons for online discounts.
How to build an integrated marketing campaign?
- Decide exactly who this campaign will target and how success will be determined.
- Identify where this targeted audience is most likely to interact with your content and make those channels the focus of the campaign.
- Bring together the marketing and sales teams that will participate in the campaign and have them set common goals.
- Have the teams outline how they will contribute to achieving the goals.
- Use your defined metrics to judge the success of your campaign and to understand which platforms are the most effective at bringing in these customers.
- Use this information to guide future campaigns to be more efficient and more productive.
Integrated marketing campaigns are an important part of reaching modern consumers. This type of campaign acknowledges that consumers do not interact with your brand on just one channel. Instead, they will be using a variety of different platforms, and they want to be able to interact with you regardless of where they are. An integrated campaign helps you effectively meet these people and bring them closer to your brand.