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What is Integrated Marketing and How to Get Started
Integrated marketing can support businesses to improve their campaign performance and reduce time spent creating assets.
With the sheer number of marketing channels out there, creating content as a marketer can feel a little daunting. We found that marketers use as many as 13 channels to disseminate their content.
We also learned that 22% of marketers found creating a high quantity of content one of their biggest challenges.
Implementing an integrated marketing campaign could be the solution to reducing this stress. And the need for this strategy goes beyond content creation.
Matt Lally, Founder of MattyAds, summed up the need for integrated marketing as, “Brands are connecting with customers on more channels than ever, at a velocity faster than ever. Crafting a message and brand ethos that waterfalls from the top down are table stakes for maintaining a consistent customer experience.”
In this blog, we’ll run through:
So, let’s get stuck in.
Integrated marketing is a strategic approach that is used to deliver unified messaging across marketing channels. It provides a seamless experience for leads and customers so that they meet the same brand no matter if they engage via social, paid, direct marketing or organic search.
Ryan Rottman, Co-Founder and CEO at OSDB Sports added, “Not only does it help build your brand awareness and recognisability, but the effects are also realised in the success of your campaigns. One of the top ways this happens is by crafting a consistent customer experience. The customer should be able to see this consistency in a visible, apparent manner, which can also be a huge factor in building and retaining brand trust.”
There are many benefits of integrated marketing, some of which include:
We asked marketing professionals for their thoughts when it came to ranking why they use integrated marketing within their strategy.
We found the below:
It’s no surprise that integrated marketing is mainly used to create cohesion across marketing channels and campaigns. This is especially important for larger companies that have bigger teams creating more content. Having a clearly defined sense of brand for campaigns allows them to work together to present a unified approach.
A more obvious benefit of integrated marketing is the reduced time and cost spent on creating marketing assets. Creating set templates and pre-created assets to repurpose across channels is a great way to do this.
57% of marketers stated they used integrated marketing to improve campaign performance.
And the marketers we spoke to had some great results when it came to proving exactly how integrated marketing impacted results.
Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner and Founder of Prism Global Marketing said, “One of our clients saw a 63% increase in website sessions, a 223% increase in new leads, and a 20% increase in revenue just in 3 months.”
Meanwhile, Alex Bryce, Co-Founder of WeInvoice found, “Our customer interactions increased at a staggering pace by 300 times. With consistency in headlines, graphics and keywords, we have also been able to create brand awareness across diverse platforms.”
Dean Kaplan, CEO of Kaplan Collection Agency added, “Our integrated marketing helped us to increase traffic to our website by 257%, increase our sales qualified leads by 181% and increase our conversion rate by 107%.”
As you can see, there are some amazing results to be gained by implementing integrated marketing.
Now you know a little more about the basics of integrated marketing, you’re probably wondering what it looks like in practice? Here are a few examples:
Think of this brand, and chances are you’re already thinking about Alexsander, Sergei and baby Oleg. Compare the Market started these characters on TV but it quickly covered the entirety of their marketing, from OOH, the website, social and more.
“The Best Men Can Be” campaign caused a bit of a stir on social media. The 2019 campaign came as a response to the #MeToo campaign and sat across TV, social media and their website. This unified approach allowed users to easily identify campaign content. Given its controversial nature, it likely also impacted engagement giving it one clear style.
So, what do you need to get started with integrated marketing? Usually, a campaign is the best starting point. Once you have your idea ready, you can build your integrated marketing campaign.
The steps to do this, usually look a little like this:
Let’s break them down one by one.
Just like any marketing campaign, you need to set clear objectives for your integrated marketing campaign.
If you’ve launched a new product, then maybe your goals will centre around brand awareness.
Or, maybe you’ve pivoted an existing product that you want to boost due to seasonality or something similar.
Related: How to measure your marketing success
Whatever goals you select, make sure they’re SMART. It’ll help you quantify your success and give you context to use to tweak your campaign ahead.
Once you have your SMART goals set, the next step is to select which channels you want to push your campaign to.
Depending on what your goals are, and what your campaign is pushing will dictate which channels you might want to use.
For example, if you’ve got a new product, you’ll likely use very different channels than if you want to push a new logo or slogan.
To be successful, you want to choose a range of channels to ensure maximum reach and potential.
⚡️ Pro Tip
We ran a study to see which marketing sources drove the most traffic and conversions across 14 industries. Check out the full conversion benchmark guide and use it to help you choose your marketing channels.
The key to integrated marketing campaigns is their adaptability. When you create a 3-minute video for an integrated marketing campaign, you should be able to tweak that into social videos, stills, GIFs and more.
By maximising the output of one piece of key content, you can create more, for less.
Ensure you have set guidelines for your campaign so that any new assets keep the same font, colours and stylistic themes.
Since integrated marketing is all about consistency, this is the most vital part of creating your campaign.
Not every campaign you create will be built to drive new leads. But you never know…
Tracking leads and ensuring you know that your marketing campaign influenced them is the first thing to check off before you go live.
Related: How to track marketing leads
By ensuring that any potential leads have a clear route through which to convert, you can be assured that your hard work, and budget, is being best utilised.
✏️ Note
Tools like Ruler can help you track your full customer journey. You can link all of your marketing touchpoints to one single user to help get visitor-level analytics.
As always, make sure you keep sales in the loop so they know what you’re planning and to expect any uplift in lead generation.
Before you go live, make sure you have at least a month’s worth of data of all the KPIs you outlined in the first step. This will help you see what change your marketing campaign has once it goes live.
Then, you’re ready to launch.
Remember, always keep an ear to the ground when launching a new campaign. Make small tweaks as you need and track your performance so you can optimise it.
⚡️ Pro Tip
Optimising your marketing is made easy when you use a marketing attribution tool.
It gives you clear data on how many leads and sales each channel, campaign and keyword is generating leaving you with the insight you need to turn off what’s not working and maximise what is.
Learn more about optimising your marketing with Ruler Analytics.
Ready to jump into integrated marketing? Hopefully, this guide has helped you kickstart that process.
Remember, the key to integrated marketing is consistency. With people engaging online via different mediums and touchpoints, ensuring you’re present in the right place at the right time is vital.
Better understand how to track marketing touchpoints here. Implement the above, and you’ll be on your way to generating a successful integrated marketing campaign.
