How integrated marketing strategies grow businesses by maximising engagement across the media mix

As the numbers of channels that consumers interact with increases, brands must continually adapt if want to maximise engagement with their customers. Truly integrated marketing has been at the heart of our marketing agency since we started in 1993, so in this blog we look at how marketers can ensure that their marketing strategies are fully connected across all channels, not only for the benefit of customers, but also to generate commercial returns that can help their brand grow.

Let’s look at the key reasons why an integrated marketing strategy can grow your brand:

1.     Creates a strong brand identity

When you create a campaign that has a cohesive strategy and consistency, and is aligned with the business’s overall brand message, it builds trust and credibility with customers and creates a strong brand identity. When consumers see the same message across all the channels they interact with, it increases brand recall, ensuring that your brand is kept front of mind with your target market and their lifetime value increases.

2.     Makes your brand accessible to larger audiences

By leveraging a variety of channels and tactics you widen your reach and engagement, which allows your brand to access a larger audience. This means there is a higher probability of reaching your target audience and it also enables you to get your brand in front of new consumers, increasing your market share or leading to diversification into other adjacent markets.

3.     Enables your business to improve efficiency

Creating an integrated strategy means that you can coordinate marketing efforts across all marketing channels. An integrated marketing strategy removes the need for replication of content, which saves you time by adopting the same themes, copy and images, helping businesses save time and resources.

4.     Cost-effective

As well as saving time, an integrated approach saves your business money and ensures that brands are making the most of their marketing budget. Creating one campaign and adapting to various media channels can lead to economies and if you’re buying media across multiple channels you might be able to get a package from your media agency.

So, it’s clear that an integrated strategy can help grow your brand, but how easy it is to implement? The success of any integrated marketing strategy will depend on a few important things:

A 360-view of the customer

The consumer really is king, and their expectations are high. They expect brands to connect all their channels to provide a seamless experience for them. That requires businesses to have a 360-view of the customer, their transactional history, and their propensity to repurchase.

For your integrated marketing strategy to work you need to rely on quality data. You need to know which is your customer’s preferred channel and ensure that you are communicating with them via that channel It’s vital that you keep these up to date and regularly give consumers the opportunity to update their channel of choice, as this may change.

To ensure you get this right, when developing personalised messages, marketers need to create a single customer view, with information from multiple channels combined in one place.

Investment in technology

To build a true single customer view requires the right technology, and that’s why technology is playing an increasingly important role in businesses ability to multi-channel market. So, any integrated marketing strategy can’t be built in isolation, it requires data and technology to be at the heart of it and marketers need to ensure that they stay up to date on the latest tech, such as Bluetoothing push notifications to alert customers to in-store special offers.

A consistent customer experience

To ensure that consumers receive a frictionless experience across all channels they choose to interact with an omnichannel approach is needed, rather than multichannel. But a truly connected omnichannel experience needs strong and integrated logistical back-end processes. This may seem easy, but the reality is that many businesses have separate back-end processes, with legacy systems trying to integrate with newer CRM systems and building new systems is costly and takes time.

Importance of attribution

As customers are interacting with several channels, determining which channel impacted on a conversion and learning which touchpoints had the strongest impact on a sale could help marketers to become more efficient in their campaigns, but this can be difficult to determine. To ensure you know which channel is delivering the most impact there are different attribution models that can be used such as first or last interaction, time decay, linear interaction and position based.

These days the consumer really is king – their expectations are high, and they expect every brand to align all their channels all the time. So, understanding the right type of channels, the benefits of media mix and your customers has never been more important. If you would like some ideas for your brand’s integrated marketing strategy, get in touch.