In the Digital Age, it’s easy to be perplexed by the ever-growing array of digital marketing channels and mechanisms.
There’s social media marketing, content marketing, online promotions, reputation monitoring, reputation building using customer reviews, lead generation and prospect pipeline management, email marketing, SMS/text marketing, analytics and reporting, and more.
To exacerbate the situation, there no shortage of “digital marketing experts” and marketing platforms touting “point solutions” that “will grow your business” based on simply using SEO, or social media marketing, or email marketing. So it’s easy to be confused as to how best to engage existing and prospective customers, and what mechanisms will prove MOST EFFECTIVE FOR YOUR BUSINESS.
Unlike in the “old days” where a local newspaper ad or a local radio ad might prove effective, today, marketing has gotten MUCH MORE COMPLICATED (although some would say, sophisticated).
These days, the only real way to be successful in marketing your business is by using an INTEGRATED MARKETING APPROACH, much like a conductor making beautiful music leading a symphony orchestra vs using a single instrument.
Integrated Marketing is a holistic approach to marketing. It helps ensure that you LEARN QUICKLY AND INEXPENSIVELY what marketing mechanisms and channels are most effective for growing your business. When done right, Integrated Marketing ensures that you discover the most effective marketing approach to yield optimal sales results.
Integrated Marketing is a strategic marketing process specifically designed to ensure that all outbound marketing communications, messaging and promotional mechanisms are cohesively delivered across channels, and are focused on delivering a unified, differentiated message to your target customer.
There are numerous reasons why you should use Integrated Marketing to market your business in today’s digital age. Below are just a few of the reasons…
- Integrated Marketing is inherently cross-channel: Integrated Marketing uses a combination of communication tools and media channels to spread your message. By combining these various tools and strategies, integrated marketing ensures that the target audience is reached quickly and effectively. Integrated Marketing can draw upon the power of traditional media tactics, such as advertising and public relations, but also combines these with newer digital marketing tactics, such as social media, content marketing, and online promotions. Today, rather than relying on just one approach, astute companies use a combination of marketing mechanisms and channels to attain optimal results.
- Integrated Marketing focuses on the customer: Successful Integrated Marketing starts and ends with the customer. It starts with having a clear target customer, thoroughly understanding your customer and crafting your key messaging to your target audience.
- Integrated Marketing focuses both new and existing customers: While many businesses concentrate only on garnering new customers, the growth and longevity of a business depends on satisfied returning customers. Using integrated marketing ensures a pipeline of new prospects and customers, as well as ongoing interaction, engagement and optimizing the experience of existing customers.
- Integrated Marketing helps provide consistent messaging across customer touch points: A key marketing success factor is that your customers see and expect a consistent message and experience across all their touch points with the company’s products and services. This is where integrated marketing shines.
- Integrated Marketing has checks and balances: Each marketing channel has its strengths and weaknesses. Integrated marketing helps to leverage the strengths of one to offset the weaknesses of another, thereby improving overall marketing effectiveness and reducing costs.
- Integrated Marketing helps clarify and focus on key business objectives: Businesses can use integrated marketing to track and improve key business drivers such as reach, engagement, awareness, traffic, sales, customer satisfaction, and referrals. While businesses can and should track performance against all these key performance metrics, Integrated Marketing helps you focus on your primary objective for your business, that is, sales or leads or awareness.
- Integrated Marketing helps save you time and money: By using a good Integrated Marketing System, you can often get more done in an hour than many people accomplish in a day. Speeding up the learning process, and finding what works for your business, saves both time and money. If you choose to work with external communication suppliers, you can work with only one integrated marketing firm, rather than separate solution providers.
- Integrated Marketing provides creative and intellectual property consistency: With Integrated Marketing, a comprehensive, integrated toolset helps you leverage your creative treatment. You can maintain consistency of headlines, logo treatments, key phrases, and images in each communication, to ensure that prospects and customers receive consistent messages each and every time. You can also utilize the same images and the copy across different channels, media, and different marketing mechanisms. This reduces copywriting, design, and photography costs.
- Integrated Marketing provides tracking and reporting and helps ensure continuous improvement across channels: Integrated Marketing ensures that all marketing elements are monitored, tracked and reported across marketing channels and mechanisms. It ensures that the data meshes across marketing mechanisms, and is displayed in a centralized dashboard. This enables continuous business performance improvement.
So, now you know more a bit more about Integrated Marketing and how it can be critical to the success of your business. In the Digital Age, the need for Integrated Marketing and its many benefits is greater than ever before.
If you are a business owner, you already allocate a certain budget for marketing. In order to maximize your bang for your marketing buck, strongly consider utilizing Integrated Marketing!
For more information on how you can effectively use integrated marketing to promote your business, contact IntellaSphere at 425-283-9772 or at contact@intellasphere.com or on our website at www.IntellaSphere.com.
by Bruce Worrall, Mar-12-2018