Marketing across different platforms can be tricky, bringing you different streams of data and offering your customers a range of different types of advertising. That is why integrating your marketing channels is important: bringing together all your different types of marketing and data into one place. If you are interested in the technical side, check out this article about cross-platform analytics.
Below, we are going to introduce you to the basics of how to integrate your marketing plan. We will cover all the different stages of integrated marketing channels and show you how to get started.
So why choose Integrated Marketing
Integrated marketing is a simpler way of delivering one message across all the marketing channels that you/your brand uses. You can provide consistency across all your customers who choose to interact with your company.
But all of this requires some sort of strategy because if there isn’t, you’ll end up giving all your clients mixed messages or communicating with them in a manner that they wouldn’t understand.
Once a strategy has been developed or formed, you can then use forms of marketing channels to tell your story or convey it.
Why is it important
- It helps build your brand so that your customers can be able to recognize it. Once your brand reaches your customers across various channels they start resonating as your audience
- It allows you to reach a much larger audience because once you start using the different channels you reach out to a much wider audience.
- Increase in revenue as you would’ve created a clear branded message on various channels to different types of audiences. A lot of companies are competitive, so different types of media are required to pull in your audience.
- It delivers a consistent message
- It builds your brands image
- Depending on the type of channels used, you can generate money but still save on costs
- Once you have a proper consumer experience, your customers will then decide on how your business image or message is delivered.
- It helps you focus on results and keeps your goals about your business crystal clear. When everyone is working together as a team that when proper campaigns are created
- If messaging is consistent across all channels it builds trust amongst your consumers and it’ll reach your relevant target audience.
Form a Plan
Before you think about which individual channels will be part of your new integrated marketing campaign, you should form a plan for the end goal of your whole campaign. Are you trying to sell a product? A service? Drive engagement for your brand? Think about what you are trying to do with your marketing campaign as a holistic, complete enterprise.
Choose your Channels and their Goals
Once you have got a long-term goal in place, it is time to choose which channels to leverage to achieve that goal. There are 10 main marketing channels that you can use, all of which are suited to different goals.
- Social media
- Events and sponsorships
- Packaging
- Advertising
- Direct marketing
- Sales promotions
- PR
- Personal selling
- Digital Marketing
- Email marketing
It is worth incorporating several different channels in your integrated marketing plan, allowing you to reach several different audiences in many different ways, enhancing the possible reach of your content.
The most common ones that are used are websites as they are a modern way of advertising, emails as they allow a more personalized way of marketing, and digital marketing even though it’s more expensive is a more effective channel of advertising the only issue is that it needs its target market an events as they offer a face to face interaction.
Define buyer personas by channel
Each channel targets its buyer persona. A buyer persona is a detailed description of the person that represents your dedicated target audience/market. This is not a real person but rather a fictional character that you’ve created based on your desired existing audience that you have.
This means you can’t use a single buyer persona for your entire integrated campaign and instead need to tailor personas to each channel. You will need to think about how each channel markets and which demographics you are trying to reach with each one.
Create Flexible Messaging
At this stage, you should have all of your prep sorted. That means it is time to start making marketing content. What is unique about marketing content for an integrated campaign is that you are trying to keep it consistent and manageable, so you should design your messaging so that you can reuse it across different channels with ease.
Integrated marketing is all about providing a consistent brand experience to your potential customers. Regardless of what channel your audience visits or sees, you want them to get the same experience and be instantly able to recognize your campaign.
Launch your campaign
Once you have got all your materials ready, it is time to launch your campaign and see how it goes. This is not the end of your work; however, there is plenty more work still to go once the campaign goes live.
When your campaign is live, it is time to track it. Watch all the metrics you can, and see how all your channels are performing. If one of them is massively underperforming, think about either changing your approach to that channel or simply abandoning it and spending its budget on a different channel that might be more successful for your purposes.
Conclusion
Choose the type of channel that’ll work for you. It can either make or break your brand because if the message is not consistent across the board, your consumers will not receive a clear message which will build trust and consumer confidence.
Integrating your marketing channels does not have to be difficult. Once you have run one integrated marketing campaign, you will find that the next one is much easier to set up, and you will learn more every time.
