Brick and mortar stores that are opening themselves to online commerce often find themselves guilty of running multiple marketing campaigns that are disjointed from one another. An integrated marketing campaign is one where there is seamless integration among the various facets of marketing – including advertising, sales promotion, public relations, social media, SEO and direct mail. This allows the target customer to be exposed to uniform messaging from across these multiple platforms.
Executing such an integrated campaign is not an easy task. One of the primary reasons for this is that these various facets of marketing are often handled by different departments within an organization.
Digital marketing is often outsourced to an external agency that may not necessarily deal with the advertising campaigns. Public Relations are often handled by a specialist staff on payroll while the offline strategies are handled by the in-house marketing team.
Synchronizing the efforts of these multiple teams can be overwhelming and chaotic.
Build a long-term plan
Before embarking on an integrated marketing campaign, marketers must create a long-term strategy plan for your organization. This is often holistic in nature and should include the vision and objectives of the business over the long term (often a year or more).
The objectives could include the target growth in traffic, customers and revenues over the year. Your objectives can also be subjective metrics like brand visibility or exposure.
Once this has been established, the next step is to identify the source of this growth and redistribute the targets in appropriate proportion among the various marketing channels.
Identify marketing channels
The marketing channels you pick for your business should be determined by your long term goals. For example, brand visibility can only be achieved through channels like advertising or PR while objectives involving customer acquisition are best addressed through PPC, SEO and direct mail marketing.
Crafting your campaigns
The next step is to craft your campaigns over these various channels that you have identified for your business. One of the key elements of an integrated marketing campaign is making sure that the messaging is consistent across all your channels. This should not really be difficult if you cater to a single target group. But if you have products and services that appeal to various audiences, then it could be a challenge communicating one message across various platforms and channels.
For instance, a business like Amazon could promote luxury chandeliers on Dolce Vita while promoting their cheap apparel on the website homepage. This creates dissonance among the luxury buyers who view the ads on Dolce Vita and land on the website.
An integrated campaign does not necessarily mean you should restrict your targeting to one demographic group. Rather, it refers to creating a consistent marketing message across the various platforms any particular demographic navigates through. In the above case, Amazon could streamline their campaigns so that the company only targets one group of customers at any point in time. This would mean promoting luxury products on its homepage during a campaign reaching out to the luxury buyers while advertising their used books section when reaching out to the frugal student community.
An alternative strategy is to create multiple gateways for various audiences. Using the above example, a campaign on Dolce Vita could promote a microsite like luxury.amazon.com. This would bring wealthy customers to a landing page targeting them specifically. The messaging thus remains integrated and consistent.
Conclusion
Integrated campaigns are an essential component of marketing at large enterprise businesses as well as those targeting multiple audience groups. Not deploying a consistent message across your various channels could not only confuse customers, but can also contribute towards a drop in conversions. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.