Utilizing a variety of advertising mediums, such as emails, flyers, social media, and direct mail, can create a multiplier effect on your marketing efforts, helping you to reach your businesses’ different audience segments. By applying an integrated marketing plan, companies are better able to create consistent and cohesive content across a mix of traditional digital marketing channels.
The integration of marketing channels amplifies your brand in a chaotic marketplace and allows a company to speak with a unified voice regardless of channel or device. With so many marketing platforms available, Safeguard knows it has never been more important to your business to ensure various tactics work together toward a common goal.
What can an integrated marketing plan accomplish for my business?
Customers expect a consistent experience across all their touch points with a company’s products and services. Integrated marketing strategies use communication tools and media to spread their message. By combining these tools, marketers can determine the best way to provide the marketing and service their customers expect.
4 Steps to Develop an Integrated Marketing Plan
Step #1: Identify Your Overarching Campaign Goals
Before you can start planning your integrated marketing plan, you need to identify your goals. If you are focused on a single campaign, your integrated marketing campaign should focus on a single goal, such as event registration or a free download.
An integrated marketing plan can also broadly focus on larger quarterly or annual marketing goals. These goals might include:
- increasing website visitors
- generating more leads
- growing your audience
- expanding into new sales channels
- increasing brand awareness
- improving conversion and retention rates
You must have well-defined, specific marketing goals to measure the success of your integrated marketing efforts. Part of having SMART goals, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound, is that they have clear parameters and timelines, making it easier to track their progress. Like any marketing campaign, your marketing goals should tie into your overall business goals.
Step #2: Select Your Marketing Channels
To reach the widest audience, your integrated marketing plan should include a variety of marketing channels. With many marketing channels available, including email, print, social media, and paid media, determining which channels you will use is an important step.
Selecting your ideal mix of marketing channels is a decision that should be based on your overarching integrated marketing campaign goal, your target market, and your marketing budget. Try asking yourself these two questions:
- What type of content does my audience want to consume?
- Where does my audience want to consume content?
Keep in mind, on average, a prospect needs to hear your message seven times before they will act on it. Integrated marketing allows you to spread your message over several mediums, increasing your chances of having it heard and acted upon.
Step #3: Produce Adaptable Creative Elements
A key point of an integrated marketing plan is maintaining consistency across channels. As you design your creative elements, remember you want to be able to repurpose any content on different channels. For example, one video could be repurposed into:
- Shorter video clips
- Still images
- Quotes
- Articles
As you develop and repurpose these creative assets, be sure your campaign assets reflect a consistent experience, regardless of what channel your audience visits. That means making sure you are maintaining the same message, theme, and tone across channels. You also want to be sure you pair your message format to match your audience and your selected marketing channel.
Step #4: Execute Your Campaign and Measure Your Results
It is important to remember your audience may see campaign messages in multiple places before taking action. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics across channels to see how prospects engage with campaign content. Depending on the length of your campaign, you might track those metrics each week, month, or quarter. Keep track of which channels worked best to help you determine if you chose the right balance of marketing channels. You’ll be able to take what you learn and incorporate this knowledge into future campaigns.
An integrated marketing plan is a strategy that works well for everyone, from small businesses to large corporations. You can seamlessly integrate everything from ads to social media to provide your audience with a cohesive experience to keep your brand memorable.
Safeguard can help you every step of the way with various marketing services, advice, and ideas. See how our marketing resources and services can build your integrated marketing plan to produce better results and impact your bottom line.
Key Takeaways
- The integration of marketing channels amplifies your brand in a chaotic marketplace.
- An integrated marketing plan allows a company to speak with a unified voice regardless of channel or device.
- Integrated marketing is a strategy that works well for everyone, from small businesses to large corporations.
- Safeguard Advisors can show you how integrated marketing can produce better results and impact your bottom line.