What is Integrated Marketing? (How to Build a Strategy)

Think about viewing a billboard for a car rental company. The billboard's color scheme is red and blue, and it has the slogan “Car Rentals Done Right!” “Integrated Marketing“.

When you come home and recall the brand name, you go to the rental car company's website. The website's color scheme is orange and yellow, and its tagline is “Do Your Car Renting Right!” Perhaps you're doubting if this is even the same company.

A fragmented brand experience is what you just had. On several marketing platforms, this fictitious car rental company presented you with a varied image and message.

Avoiding such customer misunderstandings is generally in your best interest as a small business owner. Employing a unified message across all of your marketing initiatives can help you achieve this. Integrating marketing communications is what this entails.

What is integrated marketing?

The idea behind integrated marketing is to use unified messaging across all of your marketing communication platforms.

Businesses using an integrated marketing strategy work to reach customers with the same visual style, slogans, promotions, and general tone across many platforms.

The appearance and feel of your product will be consistent whether customers interact with it via a digital advertisement, a billboard, or an in-store encounter.

Benefits of integrated marketing

Both small enterprises and major organizations may yield much from Successfully integrated marketing initiatives.

Increased brand awareness 

You want the customer to hear a consistent message from your brand so they can quickly link it with you as a marketer.

A prospective customer is more likely to remember a company's name and product if its advertising, product packaging, and social media pages all use the same colors, typefaces, and general design.

Multiple opportunities to connect

You have multiple opportunities to convey the same consistent message when your target audience interacts with your company via multiple channels.

Additionally, you may use several marketing techniques to reach your target market via each channel. For instance, you may employ search engine optimization (SEO) to raise the ranking of your website on Google or retarget ads to reach customers who visited your site previously.

Cost savings

Stretching your digital marketing budget is made easier by integrated marketing. It's like getting numerous campaigns for the price of one since you'll employ extremely identical creative across various marketing channels.

Additionally, you may gather customer information from all available channels and use this crucial data to guide your next marketing choices.

Improved brand loyalty

Using integrated marketing, you may establish a connection with your target market and develop enduring customer connections.

By distributing a consistent message via all channels, you can build trust with both present and future customers. Customers are more inclined to use and suggest your brand when they feel confident about it.

Streamlined management

Many marketing managers use omnichannel marketing, which entails an online presence across all platforms, including TV, social media, and Google Ads, to succeed in the digital commerce industry.

Since you'll be using the same tagline, color design, and sales promotions across all platforms, an integrated marketing strategy makes it easier for your marketing staff to handle all these platforms and channels.

How to create an integrated marketing campaign

Here’s how to build an integrated marketing plan for your next campaign:

1. Understand your campaign goals
2. Know your target audience
3. Select your marketing channels
4. Decide on creative direction
5. Create a plan to collect leads
6. Coordinate your launch
7. Analyze results
8. Adjust your campaign and repeat

1. Understand your campaign goals

Any marketing campaign should start by clearly defining its goals. Do you want to raise brand recognition? encourage internet sales? How can you increase foot traffic in your physical store?

Your marketing plan will be shaped by your campaign goals, so it's critical to set them up front and start with them.

2. Know your target audience

The next step is to understand your target audience. This step is essential because determining your target audience will help you decide which marketing channels to employ, what kind of creative to create, and what kind of message to convey.

For instance, you may develop a social media campaign using influencers if you want to target millennials. You might also spend money on some television advertising if you want to target baby boomers.

3. Select your marketing channels

You may choose several channels to contact your target audience if you have a better understanding of them. There are numerous alternatives available, but a few of the more well-liked are as follows:

• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• Referral marketing
• Content marketing
• Event marketing
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social media
• Display advertising

To do this, you must decide on particular creative executions for each channel as well as your plan for spreading the creative across channels.

• For example, your design team may develop a new landing page for your integrated campaign or work on the appearance of your corporate website.
• With a unique spin on the program or campaign, your social media team may develop materials for Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
• For Google ads, our performance marketing team could develop many ad text iterations.

Regardless of how many channels you use, each one must work toward the same result: expressing your brand identity consistently across all platforms.

4. Decide on creative direction

This is the aesthetic of your brand or the overarching concept of a certain campaign. It incorporates voice, color, and typography. Consider if each of these elements can sufficiently appear on all of your platforms when your marketing team chooses each one.

If you use a unique font to represent your brand name, make sure you have the plan to use the same font everywhere your brand appears. Make sure the font is accessible on all the platforms you use if you display it on a website using HTML5 code.

5. Create a plan to collect leads

Making a plan to gather leads is the next step. There are several methods to get leads, depending on your campaign goals and your chosen marketing channels.

For instance, you may direct prospective customers to a landing page where they can subscribe to your newsletter if you're running a Facebook ad campaign. Alternatively, you may direct prospective customers to a product page where they can purchase if you're running a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign.

6. Coordinate your launch

It's time to begin your campaign now that all teams are in place and working together under a single integrated marketing plan. Your website, social channel accounts, and ads all feature your new creative. Although launching is more complicated than simply turning a switch, it should appear that way to your customers.

You can start implementing your campaign once your creation is finished. This could entail starting a social media campaign, creating a Google Ads account, or sending out promotional emails, depending on your budget and the marketing channels you've chosen.

7. Analyze results

It's critical to evaluate your campaign's performance after a period of operation by looking at the results. There are numerous metrics you can monitor, but a few of the most significant ones are:

• Reach: How many people have seen your campaign?
• Engagement: How many people have interacted with your campaign?
• Conversion rate: How many people have taken the desired action?
• ROI: How much revenue have you generated from your campaign?

8. Adjust your campaign and repeat

You may need to make your campaign the result of your study. For instance, you can think about adding extra marketing channels if your reach is minimal. Alternatively, you could want to think about switching up your creative if engagement is poor.

After making your corrections, you may start the procedure once again. The benefit of an integrated marketing strategy is that it is adaptable and can be changed in response to your outcomes.

Types of integrated marketing communications

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is a marketing strategy that reaches the target audience across all of the available channels. Advertising, public relations, direct marketing, social media, SEO, sponsored search, emails, and landing pages may all fall under this category.

• Paid advertising is compensated communication, often delivered via print, broadcast media, radio, applications, or banner advertisements. A brand message that is consistent throughout all advertising may reach a large audience.
• Public relations Include digital media relations, crisis communications, and problem management when talking about how you interact with the public. Building ties with critical audiences may help public relations improve an organization's reputation.
• In direct marketing, you speak with prospective customers directly over the phone or via mail. It's a successful technique to deliver a customized message to them.
• Social media marketing This is a fantastic approach to attracting new customers and creating a community around your brand. You may engage with customers by using social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and others.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) raises a website's ranking in search engine results. It enables prospective customers to locate your website and discover the products and services you provide.
• Businesses can use paid search to place bids on terms that prospective customers are searching for. By doing this, they may connect with customers who are actively seeking your items.
• Email is a type of direct marketing that enables businesses to communicate with customers, both past and present, directly. Staying in contact with customers and introducing new products or services may both be accomplished via email.
• A landing page is a website that turns visitors into leads or customers It often has a form where users may enter their contact details. Landing pages may have a significant positive impact on your organization since they can raise conversion rates.

Integrated marketing examples

1. Mack Weldon

Starting in 2011, the men's essentials brand Mack Weldon has expanded its product offering to include sweatpants, t-shirts, socks, and underwear. The brand used a 360-degree integrated marketing strategy during the epidemic under the direction of CMO Talia Handler, a former ecommerce strategy consultant at TikTok.

The company's Daily Wear System and the phrase “Buy some time” were the focal points of the brand's most recent TV-focused campaign. But Handler isn't just interested in television. The company considers every touchpoint, including TV, social media, and its customer loyalty program, along the whole funnel.

The company wants everyone to understand who Mack Weldon is. “Over time, we'll start to see how those integrated marketing initiatives are boosting our revenue in the near term and encouraging customers to stay involved and discover more about us.” In a recent interview with Glossy, Handler remarked, “And we can start to monitor that over time, to prove and react to that long-term shift in customer perception.”

With our new integrated campaign and our more integrated go-to-market strategy, it has been great to watch that increase over the last few months.

2. Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola launched integrated marketing strategies to introduce its Diet Coke Plus product in the early 2000s. These strategies included print advertisements, web banner advertising, and television commercials, all of which featured the phrase “Now you can enjoy Diet Coke even more.”

Coca-Cola was able to successfully explain the advantages of its new product to customers by coordinating its numerous marketing channels.

3. Nike

Another company that successfully uses integrated marketing is Nike. The industry behemoth in sports clothing has a long history of executing multichannel marketing initiatives that are effective.

For instance, Nike's “Just Do It” campaign, which launched in 1988, featured billboards, print advertisements, and television commercials all bearing the same tagline. As with its Nike+ line of fitness items, Nike has also employed integrated marketing to accompany the release of new products.

Final thoughts: Consistency rules

Very few customers actively evaluate a company based on how consistently it executes its marketing strategies. However, your audience receives various subtextual cues from your marketing coordination—or lack thereof.

You probably wouldn't trust your business to a bank or a wireless company whose advertisements all appeared unique, featured several slogans, and used various color schemes.

Why would a customer have that much faith in you if your advertising campaigns were equally disjointed? Small business owners nowadays cannot afford to take such a risk. Customers are given implicit consent to trust them and do business with them when they build integrated marketing campaigns with a consistent brand image.