What is integrated marketing?

4 min read

More than just a buzzword, integrated marketing is aligning your marketing tactics across all of your channels to ensure that your customers receive a consistent experience. This means making sure that your brand has one clear voice that carries across all marketing channels, with a unified message. In this blog, we provide an answer to what is integrated marketing, and how much of a difference it can make. 

Why is integrated marketing so important?

When a customer is researching in preparation for a purchase, the Rule of 7 suggests that they need to interact with your brand a minimum of seven times before they trust you. Considering the rule was developed in the 1930s, nowadays it might take even more than seven interactions to make you stand out from the crowd of competitors that are just as easily accessible. This is a great example of how integrated marketing can benefit you.

By integrating your marketing across as many channels as you need, you’re not only providing a high frequency of touchpoints for your prospects, but you’re also making sure that the message they’re receiving is clear and cohesive. This familiarity forms the beginning of your relationship with the prospect, which will continue to evolve as they convert into a customer.

There are several other benefits to integrated marketing:

• Reduces costs and lessens ‘waste’ - allows you to use the same content on multiple channels, including photography and graphic design
• Improves visibility - cover a wide range of channels with the same high-quality content, giving potential customers more opportunities for interactions with your brand
• Provides more insight into your leads - by providing more familiar touchpoints for prospective customers to interact with, you are able to gain more information about their demographic and browsing habits
• Gives customers a better experience - provides potential customers with a consistent picture of your brand and gives them one unified message to remember

What can happen if you don’t integrate your marketing?

If your marketing isn’t integrated, you risk overwhelming your potential customers with so much information that they effectively tune you out. For example, if they encounter a different campaign on each platform where your ads appear, they may struggle to remember any key takeaways about your brand. 

Losing customers in this way can harm your profits - but attempting integrated marketing without a clear understanding of your brand’s personality and tone of voice can also do more harm than good. A poor campaign, designed without looking at data or without a clear goal in mind, is still a poor campaign no matter how many channels it’s put across. 

How to ensure you’re using an integrated marketing strategy

Make sure you’re mindful of the points below when creating an integrated marketing strategy.

Set a goal

Without a clear aim for your integrated marketing strategy there will be nothing to align your marketing efforts to. This goal can be to drive customer engagement or promote a new service or product. Whatever you choose, make sure it is measurable so you can track the success of your strategy.  

Be consistent

Ensure that there is consistency between all of your marketing channels - this includes any logos, graphics, language used, slogans, and tone of voice. Keeping these elements consistent means that your messaging is unified, even when your content has to be tweaked to suit different platforms.

Research your target audience

Collecting data on your ideal customers can tell you which platforms they interact with the most, how they prefer to be contacted, and what types of content they’re most drawn to. All of this information is key to designing an integrated marketing strategy,

Create a narrative and visualise the customer journey

A narrative doesn’t have to be a story in the traditional sense - it just means making sure that each interaction a customer has with your brand deepens their understanding of who you are and what you do. By putting yourself in the shoes of your customers you can search for gaps in the flow of your story. For example - if they find you through a tweet and want to learn more, following the tweet to your main website should show a clear path to the information they want to know. 

Encourage communication

The nature of integrated marketing means that it can often be cross-departmental. It’s important that teamwork and clear communication is encouraged across all teams that will play a part in executing the strategy. Miscommunication could result in a lack of cohesion, which can negatively impact your campaign. 

Learn from it 

Monitor the results and use the insights you gain from it to influence your next strategy. The data you collect will be invaluable for highlighting what worked well and what needs improvement before it can be tried again. 

Learn more about how Apteco can help your business

Marketing automation tools are an incredible resource when it comes to integrating your marketing. Apteco software is able to provide you with help through all stages of your marketing campaigns and across every channel. Whether you want to create an interactive dashboard to monitor and manage all of your campaigns or get more specific about your target audience and segmentations - we have a fully stocked marketing toolbox ready to share with you.

Our software integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and platforms, enhancing your control over campaigns by providing real-time data. We can also automate tedious tasks through our helpful templates, and our Apteco Intelligence (AI) can promote the content your customers want to see, right when they want to see it.