What Is Integrated Online Marketing?
Integrated online marketing uses all of a business’s online marketing channels to engage with customers and prospects to generate more leads and sales. Some business owners may consider integrated marketing a specific channel or tactic. In actuality, integrated marketing is a way to combine your company’s digital communications to create a unified customer experience to help them convert from a prospect to a customer.
Sales Journey
A critical part of integrated online marketing is that your campaigns and efforts guide prospects along a sales process, culminating in them becoming customers. While each company may have its internal sales journeys, the process of a person becoming a customer generally goes along this path:
- Awareness: a person is becoming aware of a brand, website, or product
- Research: a person is learning about a brand or product or comparing multiple brands or products
- Purchase: a person buys a product or service
- Loyalty: a person becomes a recurring customer, purchasing additional products or retaining services
Guiding your leads along this path is crucial, as you can increase the chances of those leads converting into customers.
The Channels Included in Integrated Online Marketing
So now that you know what integrated marketing is, you are probably wondering what online marketing efforts are included in integrated campaigns. You should unify your digital marketing efforts and campaigns for their ultimate purpose: converting leads. Each of these campaigns may have specific goals or tactics, such as creating brand awareness or encouraging users to fill out a form, but the overarching goal is the same.
Below are examples of digital marketing channels.
Organic Search
Optimize your website’s content to address what your customer needs so that your site appears at the top of a search results page when people search for particular keywords.
Social Media
Posting content on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn—or other platforms like Snapchat or TikTok—helps you reach potential customers and build brand awareness. Viewers may then share your post with their friends, driving additional traffic to your site by passing along information about its usefulness.
Paid Advertising
Advertising can be done through Google Ads, social media advertising, or other paid placement networks. Paid ads have immediate visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), appearing right at the top before other results.
Other tactics include content marketing, email marketing, reputation management, and more.
A key takeaway is that when using integrated online marketing channel strategies like these, you should always ensure consistency with messaging across multiple platforms. So if people look up information about your brand via different channels simultaneously, potential customers are less likely to be confused by conflicting content or messages.
Example of Integrated Marketing
Here is an example of how you can use integrated online marketing. You might optimize your website for specific keywords or phrases if you have an eCommerce store. You can also use enticing Google Ads to lead people to a landing page on your site. A prospect clicks on the ad for your product and is taken directly to the page. On that page, prospects can read more in-depth content about your product, such as a description, reviews, or even videos of your product in action.
After a prospect purchases your product, you can put them into an email marketing campaign. Here, you can promote offers on similar products that address issues or problems that prospects may have based on data or knowledge of previous customers. If the emails have quality messages and speak to your customer’s needs, that customer will be more likely to purchase additional products and become a recurring customer.
In this example, each marketing channel targets customers at a different stage in their buying process. The Google Ads help increase awareness, and the landing page is focused on helping the prospect research and purchase the product. Finally, the email campaign helps drive previous customers to become repeat customers. In addition, each channel is unified in its messaging and focus: helping people with their needs. The result is that your marketing efforts are more likely to result in people filling out forms, purchasing a product, or other actions that generate leads for your business.
Contact VIEWS Digital Marketing to Help Create Your Integrated Marketing Strategy
If you need help developing your integrated online marketing strategy and generating more leads, reach out to VIEWS Digital Marketing. We have a team of digital marketing consultants with years of experience working with small to medium-sized businesses on their integrated digital marketing strategies. Our campaigns have proven results for our clients, resulting in increased website traffic, leads, and conversions. For more information about our services, contact VIEWS today.