One of the keys to a successful marketing campaign is to promote your brand where your consumers are, but what if they’re on multiple media channels? Having multiple marketing campaigns on multiple platforms can help you reach your target market and improve your brand’s exposure, but true success can only happen through integration. You need to make sure all your campaigns communicate the same message, provide the same information, and work together to achieve common business goals. This makes it easier for you to build working relationships with your consumers no matter where they interact with your brand.
Following these steps can help you weave different strategies and media together to create an integrated digital marketing campaign.
Define Your Brand
You can’t market something effectively if you don’t know much about it. Good marketing begins with a solid brand identity. Who are you and what do you do? What makes you stand out from the competition? What’s your brand’s story? Answering these questions can give you better foundations to build your marketing plan on.
Develop Your Marketing Plan
The planning phase is where everyone involved in your campaigns together to determine what they need to do and what they can accomplish within the next 12 months. Set common goals for your campaigns. Do you want to gain more leads and conversions through online marketing, or simply increase brand awareness? Defining these common goals helps you steer all your campaigns in the right direction.
You should also set your budget and choose which mediums to use for your marketing campaigns. You don’t have to stretch your budget too thin to be everywhere at once. Use analytics and data to determine the medium that’s most appealing to your prospects. This allows you to set your priorities and divide your marketing budget wisely.
Find the Intersections
It’s fairly easy to see where your online marketing campaigns can support one another if you know exactly what you want them to achieve. SEO and PPC, which involves extensive keyword research, both drive traffic to your website and help prospects discover you through search. Social is there to improve your relationships with these consumers through interaction and communication. Social media can also drive traffic to your website through shares and links, but can only happen if your website has content that’s worth sharing. Mobile marketing through useful apps provides additional brand value, and places your brand right in front of your target market no matter where they are and what device they use.
Even print or broadcast media can be integrated into your digital marketing campaign. Many print advertisements and TV commercials include calls-to-action that encourage people to visit a company website, Like a company’s Facebook page, or Follow a company’s Twitter account.
Finding these intersections and using them to connect all your campaigns seamlessly is what integrated marketing is all about.
There is no such thing as a perfect, universal marketing strategy. You need to know your brand and audience well, and develop an integrated marketing campaign geared toward defined business goals.