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The Strategic Path to Integrated Marketing

June 15, 2022

Integrated marketing engages customers through all of a business’s marketing efforts. By combining your marketing communications, you can guide leads to become customers. So how can companies integrate their marketing channels to get more engagement and sales? Follow this strategic path to integrated marketing for more traffic, leads, and conversions.

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Analyze & Define Your Goals & Customers

The first step in developing any strategy is to analyze the situation and define your goals. Goals should follow the S.M.A.R.T. template:

  • Specific – target a particular area for improvement.
  • Measurable – quantify indicators of progress.
  • Attainable – specify who will perform the tasks needed to meet the goal.
  • Relevant – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
  • Time-bound – determine when the result(s) can be achieved.
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Establishing your goals at the beginning will help you both create your new integrated marketing strategy and measure the strategy’s success so that you can learn and improve upon it in the future.

Another critical step in your initial analysis is to define your customers. You need to know who your target audience is to support all other areas of your marketing. Put yourself in their shoes and consider their needs, pain points, motivations, and more. A thorough understanding of your audience will help you create content that addresses their needs, which will be helpful when developing your content strategy.

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Outline Your Marketing Channels

After your analysis, the next step in the strategic path to integrated marketing is to outline your marketing channels. Taking inventory of your current online properties will help you figure out how to use them together. Some of the channels your business may have include the following:

  • Blogs, articles, other website content
  • Social media
  • Email
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Once you have the complete picture of your marketing channels, think about how you can and should use each in your strategy. The people who engage with your business on one channel vs. another may be at different stages of their buying journey. For example, someone reading your blogs may only be researching your services. Conversely, a prospect on social media may be a current customer sharing your content.

Review & Adjust Your Content Plan

A crucial part of integrated marketing is getting the right message to your prospects at the right time. Therefore, one of the most vital components of an integrated marketing plan is that your content has a consistent message. In addition, your tactics should work to pull prospects along your sales process to become customers, which requires a consistent brand message and experience. Conversely, inconsistent messaging can confuse prospects, reducing your team’s chances of converting them.

So review your content marketing strategies, campaigns, brand messaging, and content calendars. Then use inbound marketing best practices to improve your ability to deliver engaging content to potential customers and create a unified, consistent message. That message should focus on what you can provide to people and what action they need to take.

Rethink SEO & Social Media

SEO and social media are other essential steps in the strategic path to integrated marketing. Your business needs a comprehensive SEO and social media search strategy to build brand awareness and ensure prospects can find you easily. Your SEO strategy must also adapt and change according to new trends and shifts in customer search behavior.

Manage Your Database & Nurture Your Customers

Keeping track of your customers and nurturing them can be challenging. A customer relationship management (CRM) system keeps your leads centralized and segmented.

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Databases and marketing automation tools also enable you to nurture loyal customers. Loyal customers can provide repeat purchases, referrals, and valuable product feedback. Marketing automation tools give you a sense of your current customer loyalty through specific metrics and scores.

Track the Insights That Matter

The final step on the strategic path to integrated marketing is to track meaningful and actionable data. Tracking your customers’ metrics and campaigns will guide you in improving your process. Regularly check your analytics, and pivot accordingly based on what your key performance indicators (KPI) say.

Contact VIEWS Digital Marketing to Create Your Integrated Marketing Strategy

To help develop your strategic path to integrated digital marketing, reach out to VIEWS Digital Marketing. Our team of digital marketing consultants has years of experience creating digital marketing strategies for small to medium-sized businesses. We have proven results in implementing successful integrated marketing campaigns for our clients, resulting in increased website traffic, leads, and conversions. For more information about our services, contact VIEWS today.