Integrated Marketing: What, Why, and How
Isn’t it nice when everything matches? We think so–and so do lots of other businesses that have discovered the perks of integrated marketing. Like a perfectly planned outfit, marketing plans with aligned messaging can capture more attention from your target audience.
But it’s not just about matching your messaging across channels. It’s about ensuring every ad, post, and offer enhances each other. Here’s how we build integrated digital marketing plans that complement your brand, your goals, and your capabilities.
What is Integrated Marketing?
As far as strategies go, integrated marketing is similar to multi-channel marketing. But there’s one key difference: an integrated marketing strategy ensures all messaging across those multiple channels–social media, paid ads, landing pages and more–aligns.
Integrated marketing is where our signature creative digital performance skills really shine. Unified messaging doesn’t necessarily mean identical messaging. (And it’s no fun to say the exact same thing, every time, on every channel you use.) At Noble, our integrated marketing approach involves flexing our creative muscles, whether that means creating a new brand strategy from the ground up or finding colorful new ways to get your message across.
Image: Samson
Benefits of an Integrated Marketing Strategy
It’s always the perfect time to launch an integrated marketing strategy. With so many benefits (fewer costs, more value–what’s not to love?) implementing your own is a no-brainer, especially with our team on the job.
Improved Efficiency
Pop quiz: is it more efficient to create several ads with different messages, or a set of ads with one unifying theme? The very nature of integrated marketing is streamlined: one message (with plenty of creative iterations, of course) across multiple channels means your business wastes less time on repetitive or confusing messages.
Greater Visibility
Expanding your messaging to multiple channels is the easiest way to reach more people. And with consistent messaging, you’re more likely to make an impact. For example, a strategy that combines paid media marketing and PPC can expose your target audience to the same message (again, with creative, memorable variations).
More Savings
Reduce, reuse, recycle–but make it marketing. Integrated marketing is an inherently lean content marketing strategy because it enables your business to reuse ad creative across channels, both on and offline. For example, the same photo you use for a magazine ad can become a catchy social media post with a little clever editing and a fresh headline. The possibilities are endless.
Consistent Narrative
Omnichannel marketing strategies use multiple channels to make repeat impressions. Prospective customers will see your message over and over again, so ensuring it’s a consistent message–wherever, whenever and however it appears–is essential. It also eliminates confusion. Think of it like studying for a test in school: you need to focus on one subject at a time. And the more you see something, the more likely you are to remember it.
Richer Experiences
Smooth customer experiences pave the way for conversions and brand loyalty. When your campaigns are easy to understand across every channel you use, customers will develop more consistent understandings and expectations every time they interact with your brand. The added familiarity is a bonus (and it makes your business feel like someone they know and trust).
Better Search Results
Search engine optimization and integrated marketing go hand in hand. Part of creating a unified message across multiple channels means using the same keywords in your paid ads, landing pages, and other places where SEO affects your brand’s visibility. Help prospective customers find what they’re looking for (your business) over and over again with consistent content.
Image: Heather Zabriskie
Challenges of an Integrated Marketing Strategy
Here at Noble, we love a good integrated marketing campaign. We also know that building and implementing one is a tall order, even for the most seasoned businesses. Here are a few of the most common challenges (and how our creative digital performance agency addresses them).
Timing
Many businesses have multiple teams in charge of different channels–social media, website management and PR, for example. Ensuring messaging aligns across all those teams simultaneously can be difficult, especially when your business needs to move quickly. (But for Noble, balancing creativity with production and quality is just another day. That’s agency life!)
Communication
Cross-channel campaigns require constant communication. (Say that five times fast.) The more elaborate your messaging gets, the more difficult it becomes to keep that message unified–especially across multiple channels. Partnering with an agency–and by extension, an existing team that works like a well-oiled machine–can solve that communication problem neatly.
Costs
The math doesn’t lie: more channels means more costs–at least, at first. Initial launch costs for integrated campaigns can admittedly be high. But once you’re up and running, and the more accustomed your business becomes to this strategy, the more likely you are to see long-term efficiencies where cost, time and resources are concerned.
Reach
Businesses that operate across multiple regions, whether it’s in different cities, states or even countries, need to carefully consider whether their messages are consistently received. What’s considered normal in America, for example–like young kids refusing to eat broccoli–may be incomprehensible in Japan, where kids tend to hate green peppers. We do our research and adjust messaging beforehand to ensure everything makes sense.
Metrics
Successful integrated marketing campaigns are sometimes difficult to measure. But that’s no surprise, given the sheer scale of some multi-channel strategies. Here at Noble we put special emphasis on testing and measuring outputs so we can give you the clearest snapshot of your campaign’s performance.
Grow Faster with an Integrated Marketing Approach
All things considered, we’re big fans of integrated marketing–and not just because it allows us to mix creativity with performance. (It’s kind of our thing.) We’ve built, launched and tested plenty of campaigns over the years, and we’ve repeatedly discovered that an integrated approach benefits everyone: your business and your customers.
Let us put our integrated marketing communications expertise to work for your business. Contact us to learn more about our services and how we work to unify your brand across multiple marketing channels.