When you founded a business, you never thought you would discover so many nuances of marketing. You need to develop a well-planned strategy that enables you to use all kinds of platforms to connect with your target audience. If you disperse your energy on different strategies that are not seamlessly unified into a single plan, you won’t achieve the ultimate success.
Integrated marketing is an effective approach that sums all aspects of the marketing campaign into a single method that improves the impression and experience of the customers. When you combine a mix of methods, media, channels, activities, and tactics into a unified process that guides all these parts to a single goal, you’ll boost the overall success of your business.
Integrated marketing may seem simple on paper, but it’s more complex than most people assume. In the continuation, you will find out how a well-balanced combination of different marketing tactics and channels will help you achieve a single business objective.
1. Integrated Marketing Helps You Develop a Strategic Approach
When you identify your business objective, you will need an integrated marketing strategy that will guide you towards them. Businesses that use social media channels and blogging without proper plan usually leave the profiles unattended and fail to connect with the audience. If, on the other hand, you develop a strategy, you will be aware of the contributions that each activity makes towards the final goal.
For example, the internet marketing campaign of a business debit card service may start with paid advertisements on LinkedIn, and continue with intensive content marketing strategy across several platforms. Then, the campaign can be upgraded with email marketing as a valuable option for attracting the right type of audience. Facebook and Twitter are not the perfect platforms for attracting people from business, so this company might not focus too much energy on them. All efforts of the business will be targeted towards familiarizing the target customers with the service and attracting them to try it.
2. Build Reliability and Confidence through Integrated Marketing
When your target clients get used to a focused promotional approach, they will gain more trust in your brand. No matter how many media channels you use to promote your products or services, an integrated marketing approach will help you develop brand identity. They will recognize the style of the ads and articles you promote, the colors of your brand, and every other aspect related to your business.
3. You’ll Address Challenges More Effectively
Every marketing campaign comes with its challenges. Some people will leave negative reviews even if they haven’t tried your products and services. Others won’t like the service your business offers, so they will share their dissatisfaction across social media channels. If you’re focused on each network individually, you will fail to notice the general impressions of your customers through different phases of the campaign.
An integrated marketing approach gives you a hint of the whole picture, so you’ll be able to handle individual challenges and improve the overall impression much more easily. When you implement the right kind of strategy, you will incorporate the perspective of an individual customer into the general actions you take towards the growth of your business.
4. Multitasking Is Easy when You Have a Strategy
Let’s say your marketing campaign involves writing posts for LinkedIn and the business blog, connecting with the audience across several social media channels, identifying the needs of your audience, sending promotional emails, and responding to all online reviews you can locate. All these tasks consume a lot of time. Each social media profile demands daily maintenance.
Developing an integrated marketing approach means that you’ll know exactly when, why, and how to become active on different channels. You will organize your time in a way that enables you to catch the peak traffic hours on Facebook and Twitter, and you’ll know exactly what topic to choose for your next blog post. The main strategy will connect all these dots into a single, harmonious routine that will help you achieve measurable results.
5. An Integrated Marketing Approach Produces Results
Compare the Meerkat launched an exciting campaign that started with a TV commercial on Christmas Day 2013. In January 2014, the campaign was updated with a cute toy. The company continued updating the campaign with a fun blog in the form of Oleg’s baby book. Then, the baby meerkat’s journey got video presentations on YouTube. All these activities were heavily promoted and shared across social media channels. The continuous upgrades of the campaign gradually introduced the character and made the customers interested in Oleg’s adventures. This was a nice example of an integrated approach that produced the desired effect.
The Integrated Marketing Communications strategy implemented by Coca Cola also produced great results. During the year when the company combined several promotional components into a unified marketing strategy, the efforts resulted with a profit margin of 15.43%.
The Most Valuable Benefit is Brand Awareness
An integrated marketing approach is the crucial element of your attempts to build brand awareness. Your activities on each promotional channel should blend into the ultimate goal of building the reputation of your brand. A unified marketing campaign gives you a chance to gradually introduce your target audience to a new product or service. With time, your brand will become very familiar and the clients will feel the connection you want to build.
