What Is Integrated Marketing and Why Does It Matter?

Online customers no longer use a single channel on their way through the sales funnel. Marketing today is done across dozens of channels for maximum reach and exposure. According to Forbes, 75% of online buyers use multiple channels to research products and make purchasing decisions.

Although the integrated approach to marketing opens up new lead generation opportunities, it can also make it challenging to stay consistent wherever your content gets posted. The 2018 Global Report by Kantar revealed that 89% of marketers think their strategies are integrated while only 58% of consumers feel the same. How do you make your ad campaign impactful on every platform without compromising the continuity of your brand messaging? That’s what integrated marketing is all about!

Continue reading to find out the benefit of successfully integrated marketing campaigns and how you can improve your approach. 

What Is an Integrated Marketing Campaign?

In the simplest of terms, integrated marketing is the art of presenting your brand messaging in a consistent way on every marketing channel. Whenever a lead or customer comes across your brand, they will recognize it and have the same experience on desktop and mobile regardless of the channel they use. 

If you haven’t historically focused on integrated marketing, you may be delivering a fragmented experience to your leads and clients through mismatched slogans, inconsistent messaging on your social media versus the website, indistinctive logo variations, and so forth. This can contribute to a negative perception and lack of trust in your brand, making it less likely for people to want to do business with you.

How Integrated Marketing Helps Your Brand

An integrated marketing campaign will do more than just set you apart from your competitors and expand your reach. Here are a few of the other ways you could potentially benefit from a unified voice and brand message.

Get the Best Use of Your Marketing Dollars

Think With Google discovered that those leading in their respective markets are usually those who use integrated marketing technology to determine the best direction for their campaigns. Unfocused marketing campaigns can pull you in a variety of different directions — not all of which will be beneficial. Instead of wasting your limited advertising budget, hone in on the overarching message you want to get out on every marketing channel. That way, you can repurpose content across all channels and get more bang for your marketing buck while preserving your brand consistency.

Increase Brand Awareness and Performance

Take McDonalds as a good integrated marketing campaign example. Without seeing the company name, you’d probably know their ads anywhere in the world just by the red and yellow color scheme or the golden arches logo. Leads are more likely to remember and recognize a brand that uses the same imagery, taglines, and other brand elements from platform to platform. The more they see these elements, the better your chances of reinforcing your brand identity in people over time, converting them into customers, and boosting your campaign performance.

Improve Customer Loyalty

If you provide a cohesive experience for online consumers, you’re more likely to stand out from your competition and be remembered by your target audience. The University of Southern California has confirmed this in studies on the psychology of brand loyalty, explaining that customers are more loyal to brands that provide them with a unified and seamless journey through the sales funnel. When people love your brand and trust you to be the same business they know and love wherever they go, you’ll have some customers for life.

How Is Integrated Marketing Different From Omnichannel Marketing?

If you’ve read our past blog on The 8 Pillars of Digital Marketing for an Omnichannel Approach, you may be wondering about the difference between omnichannel and integrated marketing. While both marketing concepts are centered around brand consistency, omnichannel marketing is more about using all available channels to reach a customer while integrated marketing is about honing into the message and ensuring its uniformity on platforms. The implementation may be different for each medium, but the main theme should remain consistent. 

Though omnichannel and integrated marketing are slightly different concepts, both are important for fully integrated, memorable, and uniform ad campaigns.

How to Ensure an Integrated Marketing Approach

Knowing how important consistency is to any marketing strategy, you now need to alter your current campaigns for uniformity and brand cohesion. But where do you even start? Here are some simple tips for hammering out your brand story and integrating your channels.

1. Find out what customers want

Brands should do more than explain what their business is all about; they should anticipate customer needs and craft a compelling story about how their product or service can meet those needs. This story should build on itself in every customer interaction. 

To do this successfully, it’s important to think about what you’d want to see from your brand if you were part of your own target audience. Whatever those needs might be, you should position yourself as the clear solution across platforms and mediums. This will make people want to continue to engage with your brand and learn more as they repeatedly encounter your business on various platforms. 

2. Build a campaign around a unique selling point — and make it interesting

What is your brand known for that differentiates it from competitors? This should be a central element of your brand message. 

For example, although there are dozens of mobile carriers these days, Verizon built a successful ad campaign years ago on the idea that its coverage is better than everyone else’s — and they reinforced it with humor and a memorable tagline. The popular Verizon commercials are remembered for the famous tagline: “Can you hear me now? Good.” The Verizon user was always standing in a place where other carriers would drop the signal. 

Your unique selling points should be equally central to your storytelling across platforms as Verizon’s and fit in seamlessly alongside your brand’s core values.

3. Make sure your internal teams are on the same page

A common reason for disjointed ad campaigns is various people acting on their own ideas about what the brand should be doing or saying. When one person goes rogue, it can alter your entire brand identity. Thus, one key of a successful integrated marketing campaign is making sure all teams and key players involved in an ad campaign follow the same brand standards and agree on central messaging. 

If you find this not to be the case, it may be time for a company-wide meeting to discuss brand guidelines to get everyone on the same page and working toward the same goals.

Start Using Our Integrated Marketing Services Today

No matter how experienced of a marketer you are, the practice of integrated marketing is a lot to take on yourself — especially if your brand is just getting off the ground. At Avalaunch Media, we have all the tools and expertise to help you fine-tune your messaging, unify your voice and visuals, and integrate your ad campaigns. 

Our integrated marketing agency is home to a number of expert teams who each excel in their own area of digital marketing, and we can eliminate the guesswork to help you grow your brand. Check out our case studies to see brands like yours we’ve successfully launched and learn more about our people to find out what makes us the best team for your full range of marketing needs.