The digital era has seemingly made marketing more complex than ever. There’s more options, platforms, services, and devices. More blogs, emails, videos, and content of all varieties. How do you keep it all straight? And how do you decide what’s best for your marketing goals?
My recommendation? Consider developing an integrated marketing strategy.
Integrated marketing, as described by BusinessDictionary, is defined as “strategy aimed at unifying different marketing methods such as mass marketing, one-to-one marketing, and direct marketing. Its objective is to complement and reinforce the market impact of each method, and to employ the market data generated by these efforts in product development, pricing, distribution, customer service, etc.”
With integrated marketing, you’re creating a consistent, coherent, and effective marketing message. Here’s five quick tips to do it successfully.
Keep things integrated, keep things consistent. If you’re putting together an integrated marketing strategy, then of course you want to keep things integrated. That’s obvious. It’s in the name. But it’s essential that you consider what exactly that means.
You’re not just creating a marketing campaign. You’re creating a cohesive vision. Successful integrated marketing demands consistency developed around a core purpose. You’ll be marketing across a variety of channels, but you’re promoting the same message. You might be developing different content, unique to one specific platform (e.g. a video for YouTube or an article for your blog), but it all needs to be servicing the same goal.
Understand your customers. Before you start putting together an integrated marketing campaign (or really any marketing campaign at all), it’s important to determine who the customer is. A thorough understanding of your customers allows you to determine which channels, content, and promotions are most appropriate for your goal. Different demographics have different behaviors, preferences, and gravitate towards different platforms.
Determine your channels. If you’re just running a small business targeted at a niche audience, you probably don’t need to have a massive campaign spanning every social media platform. Even if your brand is on the larger side though, you’re still better off carefully selecting the channels that will best resonate with your target audience. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but don’t spread yourself too thin either.
Create adaptable content. Because each aspect of your campaign is focused to support a specific goal, much of your output can be used in different ways. Some of your content can be retooled to work across different platforms. For example, let’s say you’ve written an extensive article for your blog. Using that article as a basis, you might be able to extract a YouTube video out of it. Next, once you’ve created that video, you could cut out key points for use on Instagram, where bite-sized clips are more popular.
Automate your marketing with CoGoBuzz. Creating an integrated marketing campaign is difficult work without any assistance. That’s why it helps to automate as much as you can. Fortunately for you, we’ve got exactly what you need to ensure your next campaign is a winner. Enter CoGoBuzz, our state-of-the-art digital marketing service. Leveraging industry-leading WiFi, SMS, and Email solutions, CoGoBuzz promotes your business, learns about your customers, and delivers the results you need automatically.
Our service hooks you up with automatically developed profiles for every single customer that logs into your in-store HotSpot. We’ll store their profile information and automatically send them to your favorite Marketing List, such as HubSpot, MailChimp, and Constant Contact. CoGoBuzz comes packed with a powerful text-based loyalty program designed to keep your customers consistently engaged. Gain automatic Facebook followers, a digital text-based loyalty program, and more!
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Have any integrated marketing tips to share? Let us know in the comments!