An integrated digital marketing campaign is based on the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts!
Technology is evolving at a faster pace and has not only connected the world but also transformed how businesses are conducted.
Consumers are constantly plugged into this technology, especially mobile technology, and expect to be able to access a suitable brand wherever they go.
Even when consumers are inside a shop, up to 82% of shoppers use smartphones when making purchase decisions.
This necessitates the need for savvy brands to develop digital marketing campaigns in multiple media channels that complement rather than compete with one another.
Most companies that know the efficacy of digital marketing may have an agency handling social media posts and ads, another agency creating video ads, and yet another working on PPC and search engine ads.
They don’t really have the idea of how much time and money are being wasted, let alone the contribution of each campaign to their business’ success, which makes them set the campaigns competing against one another.
This is where integrated digital marketing comes in, and why most digital marketing tips focus on this approach.
An integrated digital marketing campaign is an approach that streamlines all of your inbound marketing strategies such that the strategies are building up each other’s efforts, and not competing with each other.
An integrated digital marketing campaign also produces data that allows you to understand how effective your digital marketing campaign is. Hence, an integrated digital marketing campaign is strategic, collective, integrated, and most of all, a successful form of digital advertising.
As a success-driven business owner, you need to combine all your separate digital strategies into an integrated digital marketing campaign to achieve your desired business success.
This guide is therefore created to give you a better insight into what integrated digital marketing campaign is and how you can use it to enhance your current digital marketing efforts.
What is Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign?
Just as it sounds, an integrated digital marketing campaign is simply the integration of several marketing strategies to form a unified digital marketing approach for your business.
An integrated digital marketing campaign usually involves a combination of the following strategies:
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Content marketing
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Local listings management
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Paid advertising (CPC or PPC) campaigns
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Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM)
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Social media optimization and social media marketing
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Web development and design (including landing pages)
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Conversion Optimization
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Display advertising, etc.
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Email marketing
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Affiliate marketing
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Online public relations
An integrated digital marketing campaign is based on the idea that, while each digital marketing strategy may not have a huge impact on its own, combining the strategies as one can create a more influential online presence.
Akamai was a very good example of a savvy business that utilized an integrated digital marketing campaign for its business success.
Akamai unified all its digital marketing efforts so that various components worked together at all prospects’ touchpoints.
After a few months, Akamai did not only experience significant improvement in the performance of their digital lead generation programs but also recorded appreciable success.
You must understand that your prospects and customers are now in charge. Yes! They control how, when, and where to access information about your business, products, and services.
Therefore, you need to integrate all your digital marketing channels to share a common goal, information, and tell the same story about your business. In short, you need an integrated digital marketing campaign strategy more than ever.
According to Lisa Alloca, “Consumers no longer learn about products and services through a single channel or follow a defined path through the sales funnel.”
Consumers have become so adept at creating their path across digital marketing platforms to find what they’re looking for.
Therefore, you need to create an all-encompassing strategy that amplifies your business across all digital marketing platforms to ensure that your prospects and customers receive a consistent message about your brand wherever they encounter it.
Imagine this scenario, I saw a PPC ad on Google search engine for a set of wireless mouse and keyboard that I’d wanted for a while. I clicked on the ad and found out that the product was out of stock.
I was on Skype the following day and was retargeted by the same business advertising the same product, but this time, at a “different price.”
I clicked the ad again and landed on the same page I landed the previous day – same old price and yet out of stock.
It’s not actually my first time seeing ads that I like and I believe you may have too. While the business was smart enough to adopt an integrated digital marketing campaign, it’s unfortunate that the business ran its campaign in silos.
So essentially, an integrated digital marketing campaign ensures that your business message remains consistent across various digital marketing platforms, as documented by Forbes Agency Council.
However, being consistent in an integrated digital marketing campaign shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of creativity.
So, using the same tagline on all ads or splashing a single color palette across all platforms isn’t synonymous with an integrated campaign.
Who Needs an Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign?
In today’s ever-shifting marketing and advertising world, an integrated digital marketing campaign should be considered by companies that:
- Advertise across multiple platforms.
- Advertise to consumers (B2C business execs) or other businesses (B2B business execs).
- Care about the accountability and data behind their marketing campaigns
- Target specific audiences.
However, top multi-billion-dollar firms are in the post position to adopt and implement an integrated digital marketing campaign, since their online campaigns reach the largest number of audience.
Nevertheless, smaller companies can also use this strategy, since an integrated digital marketing campaign boosts sales and creates competitive advantages.
Even already-successful companies can benefit from an integrated digital marketing campaign. For instance, IKEA furniture, years ago, got frustrated by their loyal customers who always purchase throw pillows and kitchenware alone.
The company decided to launch an integrated digital marketing campaign, which aimed at getting old and new customers to make larger and better purchases from them.
Aside from print and TV ads, IKEA combined several digital strategies to show customers how they could use their products to build their dream rooms. Remarketing was an integral part of the brand’s integrated digital marketing strategy.
Guess what? IKEA witnessed over 9% growth in sales for living rooms products and over 12% for kitchen products – thanks to their integrated digital marketing campaign efforts.
Why You Need An Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign?
The business world is highly integrated and digital. So any company that who wants to succeed with his or her brand, products, or services in this highly competitive business world needs to adopt a similar integrated and digital strategy.
Times are drastically changing and sticking to a single digital marketing channel might not have as much effectiveness and impact as it used to.
Digital advertising already surpasses traditional advertising but that’s just the beginning. Every competitive brand must consider a more effective digital advertising method that delivers better results – faster ROI and higher revenues.
But you know sticking to a single digital marketing channel wouldn’t achieve this.
A report showed that over 70% of consumers prefer to connect with business brands through an integrated digital marketing campaign, and yet many companies are still slow to adopt this marketing campaign.
Adopting an integrated digital marketing campaign may not be as complicated as you think.
Here are 6 reasons why you need to consider it if you want your business to thrive:
1. Prospects Need Multiple Touch points Before They Decide to Buy
You have many competitors and this leaves your potential consumers with a variety of options to choose from.
To stand out from your competitors and be the chosen one, you have to target your prospects across all channels to convince them to buy from you.
That means, as your prospects move across multiple channels, you have to implement multiple touchpoints through an integrated digital marketing strategy to reach out to them and reiterate your business information.
This will help you to generate profitable results for your business.
With more than 57% of people using the internet already, some if not most of these people are consumers who are online every day to research brands, products, and services, according to a study by HootSuite and We Are Social.
And according to Harvard Business, these consumers would go through an average of six touch points or online channels before they finalize their purchasing decision.
Meeting with your business ads on these touch points is enough to entice or convince your prospect to consider your business over your competitors. To win consumers as well as their favorable purchasing responses, brands should take as much as 12 touch points.
In summary, you need to have an online presence in multiple digital channels to connect, convince, and engage your target customers and prospects that are present in these channels.
2. Consumers Are Always Looking For Fresh Content
Remember, your prospects and customers control how, when, and where to access business information. They want to get answers and solutions to what they need as fresh as they could get it.
Even if the consumers have consumed similar content on the previous channel, they appreciate fresh content on the present channel.
Targeting your prospects with content about your business on each channel they find themselves will go a long way in convincing your prospects and increasing your click-through rate.
3. Online Traffic Comes From Diverse Sources
Studies show that over 70% of online traffic comes from search engines and other organic sources. That’s approximately 3.5 billion searches per day from your target audience.
Why don’t you tap into this great opportunity to generate highly targeted traffic to your business from search engines and other traffic sources?
4. Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign Generates Higher Conversion Rates
There is a high probability that more target customers will notice your ad campaign if they encounter them on multiple channels.
Hence, the possibility of generating a higher conversion rate is high, enabling you to generate as high as 24% conversion rates.
Bright Oak is a perfect case study. The company integrated PPC and SEO campaigns, which yielded over a 24% increase in conversion rates.
5. Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign Generates Delivers Better ROI
The integrated digital marketing campaign adopted by Bright Oak didn’t only increase its conversion rate but also increased its revenues by over 26%.
This is proof that an integrated digital marketing campaign can give your business its ultimate benefits, which are higher revenues and improves ROI.
6. Your Competitors are Implementing Integrated Digital Marketing Campaigns
Remember, you aren’t only the one who knows about an integrated digital marketing campaign and your competitors aren’t folding their arms either.
Chances are your competitors are currently implementing or embarking on implementing their digital campaigns, which possibly include the integrated digital marketing campaign, way ahead of you.
If you fold your arms and allow your competitors to integrate multiple channels way ahead of you, you’re doing your business great harm.
The best you can do for your business is to also implement an integrated digital marketing campaign.
In summary, an integrated digital marketing campaign can help you to maximize the possibilities inherent in multiple channels, providing you with bigger and better results than you would get from a single channel.
Benefits of Adopting Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign
You’ve seen convincing reasons why you should implement integrated digital marketing campaign but what benefits would adopting this campaign bring to your business:
Here are a few benefits that adopting an integrated digital marketing campaign hold for your business:
1) Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign Creates a Consistent Message
An important benefit of an integrated digital marketing campaign is creating a consistent message across multiple channels
A common problem with most big companies is creating a series of scattershot messages that don’t unify with the companies’ vision, what the companies do, and what they produce.
By adopting an integrated digital marketing strategy, you’re passing across the same message and targeting your audience with it through different channels and different formats.
Whether your content is a social post, tweet, blog post, or video, it will communicate the same thing.
Doing this would not only stop your marketing team from confusing customers and prospects but would also build customers’ trust in your brand.
2) Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign Makes Your Sales Team More Unified and Effective
Imagine having your social media marketing team spend lots of hours on creating a video ad, only to find out that the email marketing team has created its own video ad with a slightly different message.
However, with an integrated digital marketing campaign, your marketing team as a whole can collaborate on marketing materials and prevent duplication.
3) Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign Saves Money
Businesses can benefit from saving money by collaborating on unified marketing materials and preventing duplication as there would no longer be wasting of time and resources.
Considerations for Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign
Are you thinking about how to implement an integrated digital marketing campaign into your marketing strategies?
Here are a few considerations that go into the integrated digital marketing campaign process:
a) Create an online presence
The first step to implementing digital marketing is creating an online presence and the cornerstone of your business’ online presence is a business website followed by social media profiles.
Make sure that your website is responsive, adaptive, and loads fast.
Having a responsive and adaptive website makes it possible for your prospects and customers to access your website from any device they’re using now or would use in the future.
However, if your website is not responsive and adaptive or loads slowly, it’s high time you consulted a professional web designer and developer to look into it.
Also, you need to create business accounts across several social media platforms. This will support your marketing efforts.
However, identifying your customers will help you in choosing the right marketing channels and this leads us to the next point.
b) Identify your target customers
Before you choose your marketing channels, you need to have a solid understanding of the audience you’re trying to target with your marketing campaign.
Without knowing this, it’s impossible to create a unified marketing campaign.
Identifying your target customers will help you to develop a better positioning strategy that would maximize your chances of success.
To identify your target customers, create a persona that answers the following questions:
- How old are your target customers on average?
- What are the needs and pain points of your target customers?
- What are they doing presently to meet these needs?
- What is the educational level of your target customers?
- What is their gender?
- What are their interests?
- What is their job title?
When describing your target customers in the persona, pretend that you’re describing a real person with all of the qualities above. You may even give a name and a face for a better description.
More so, you may create a few more personas to describe other, slightly different types of customers your brand, products, or services might appeal to. After identifying your target audience, you can then move to the next point.
c) Choose what marketing channels you want to use
Although an integrated digital marketing campaign refers to the distribution of your unified content across multiple marketing channels, it doesn’t mean your business must appear on all channels or mediums.
Instead, figure out what marketing channels you should choose to reach out to your target customers. One of the ways to determine this is to use the persona created above.
For instance, if you run apparel business and you’re targeting young adults. You might do well to spread your business message through regular image posts on Instagram.
This is because Instagram is a platform that mainly supports visuals and has a high engagement rate among young adults.
Another way is through a passive survey. Ask yourself the following question:
- Does your target audience rely heavily on Google searches or YouTube videos?
- Are they largely on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram?
- Or are they fans of your blog?
- Do they spend more time on a mobile device than a desktop or not?
Finding answers to these questions will help you to choose the right channels. Note that using every marketing channel out there will only dilute your message.
Since an integrated marketing efforts should be more focused, it’s better to keep a few marketing channels for effective performance.
Note that customers’ preferences can change quickly. So always reevaluate how your marketing channels are performing.
For instance, if you realize that your audience is gathering around your video ads, put in more effort and resources into that.
If your audience is moving away from LinkedIn, evaluate the reason for this and check if you can improve things there, or whether you should shut down the channel and direct your efforts into other marketing channels.
If you’re not careful, you may end up wasting both time and money on creating an online presence on every digital channel.
This doesn’t make sense, especially when the vast majority of your customers are heavy users of only two or three platforms.
d) Adopt a creative content marketing idea
You know that content is king and the basis of all digital marketing strategies. Brands can only use content marketing to convey their brand message to the target audience.
For example, Coca-Cola’s message is encapsulated in “Open Happiness,” and this shows in all their digital marketing campaigns. Your brand message should also control everything you do to promote your business.
So you need to start your integrated digital marketing campaign with a creative content idea or you want to communicate with your prospects and customers.
You can then start spreading the same content across different channels in different formats using a content management system. It all boils down to having a plan in place.
Your content, which can be text, pictures, or video, must be attractive and engaging.
Also, remember that your content should be well-optimized to rank well in search engines.
That means you need to find several relevant keywords that represent search terms your target audience might search for while looking for related products or services.
e) Make sure that your message is clear, compelling, and consistent
Most importantly, make sure that the message in your content is clear, compelling, consistent, and delivered in a way that it would connect with your target audience.
You may tell your brand’s story or the problems your business has solved for others.
While you remain consistent across all the marketing channels, let your creativity take advantage of the unique properties of each channel.
Although you may not use the same tagline and color splash in all campaigns across all platforms, your messaging, graphics, and photos should all be related or consistent across all the online channels.
f) Understand geo-targeting
Since mobile phones are personal and users keep their mobile devices with them wherever they are, companies can use this opportunity to deliver geo-targeted, location-specific mobile ads to their audience.
IPs can also be tracked to deliver geo-target marketing campaigns to desktop devices too.
Google and Facebook are currently utilizing sophisticated ad targeting features to serve users with targeted campaigns over desktop devices, smart devices, and mobile phones.
g) Take online engagement seriously
Setting up an impressive integrated digital marketing campaign is not enough.
Once you’ve implemented your marketing campaigns on the relevant channels, it’s important to use these channels in their unique capacities, especially social media channels.
Instead of just creating an online presence, be the presence. Use all the possible ways to interact with consumers and build online engagement.
Promptly respond to comments, questions, and inquiries; ask questions; take feedback, etc.
h) Evaluate the performance of your marketing campaign
While setting up your integrated digital marketing strategy, don’t forget to also set up media metrics to track and measure the effectiveness of each marketing channel.
Evaluating the performance of your marketing campaign based on the effectiveness of each marketing channel will help you to monitor changes in campaign performances so that you know which is working and which is not and make necessary adjustments.
i) Work With a Professional Digital Marketer
Sometimes, it can be very difficult to create campaigns that focus on a single business’ core message across multiple channels.
However, you can make the process easier by working with a professional digital marketer or agency. Click here to contact Mabbly.
A professional digital marketer knows how to create a more unified marketing campaign for all marketing channels and can help you to structure and align your marketing teams together.
More so, a professional digital marker knows how to optimize your content and messages so that they adapt to all the marketing channels.
Conclusion
It’s the year 2020, if you’ve not implemented an integrated digital marketing campaign yet, you don’t have an edge.
Businesses that don’t connect and engage with their customers through digital marketing will fade out slowly.
As businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on digital marketing nowadays, brands need to adopt an integrated digital strategy.
An integrated online marketing plan helps to maximize the possibilities inherent in multiple channels, providing companies with bigger and better results than they would have gotten from a single channel.
You’ve seen all the benefits associated with implementing an integrated digital marketing campaign.
It’s up to you to either jump on board and adopt the marketing strategy that matters in today’s digital world or sit back satisfied with benefit from a single channel.
If you need a trusted digital marketing agency to help launch your campaign, contact Mabbly today.
