What is Integrated Marketing, Why is it Important? - ITechnical World

• What is Integrated Marketing?
• What is the Purpose of Integrated Marketing?
• What are the Features of Integrated Marketing?
• Integrated Marketing Components
• Advantages of Integrated Marketing
• How Is It Different From Multi-Channel Marketing?
• Why Should You Use Integrated Marketing in Your Business?
• Creating an Integrated Marketing Strategy

 An integrated marketing campaign can start with a television commercial with a memorable character. This character may appear on other channels later. For example, these channels; It could be billboards, in-store displays, or social media posts. In this way, the company establishes a strong consumer awareness and relationship with the brand by marketing its characters in complementary channels.

A solid integrated marketing campaign should include a striking logo and slogan along with a consistent visual aesthetic. It is important that all this is constant in every channel involved in the campaign. Consistency ties the message together and nurtures brand awareness.

Awareness and attribution are not the only desired outcomes. Effective integrated marketing campaigns encourage consumers to engage in social media both by sharing content and ideally by creating their own.

Integrated marketing gives you the opportunity to interact with customers more deeply than traditional marketing. It also saves money. This is important for any business, but especially for those with a small marketing budget.

Integrated marketing allows you to use the same content . For instance; You can upload a video ad on multiple social media platforms. Instead of relying on separate ad agencies, PR firms, and sales departments, you can combine all your efforts into one marketing group.

What is the Purpose of Integrated Marketing?

Like other marketing strategies, the integrated marketing process aims to enable potential customers to develop a positive attitude towards the brand. The more satisfied your customers are with your brand, the stronger your brand loyalty will be. In this case, they continue to buy the products and services offered. Trust and loyalty are the most basic components of marketing.

After selling your product or service, you need to maintain your brand relationship with your customers. A brand that does not disrupt customer relations even after sales can create loyalty. After sales, brands need to use different strategies to build relationships with their customers. The purpose of a brand in the integrated marketing process is to increase the trust in its products and services. After-sales service should also be strong in this process. In this respect, it is important for the customer to know that after purchasing a product from a brand, he is with the brand and is not alone.

Another purpose of integrated marketing activities is to ensure continuity. With the continuity between the brand and the customer, all the products and services of the brand are of high quality in the eyes of the customer. In this respect, if the brand provides continuity, it will appear successful in the eyes of the customer, even if a new product is launched.

What are the Features of Integrated Marketing?

The integrated marketing process differs from traditional marketing in many ways. These features are:

• All communication tools are used as a marketing mix for integrated marketing research.
• Technology and digital strategies are used throughout the integrated marketing process.
• The focus is on the consumer and customer base.
• Rather than raising awareness about their products and services, companies develop policies directly linked to purchasing behavior.
• All strategies used in an integrated marketing project should be measurable.
• A two-way communication flow is established between your brand and your customers.
• In the planning and implementation stages, all integrated marketing activities take place from a single source. Multi-source applications are against the integrated marketing process and negatively affect the project.
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Integrated Marketing Components

Digital marketing requires a fully integrated campaign spanning multiple platforms. While online marketing is crucial for companies, it's also important not to forget traditional forms of advertising to complete the campaign. According to this information, the components of integrated marketing are as follows:

• Print Ads:  Even in the digital age, print ads are an essential component of an integrated marketing campaign. After all, you can't engage in email or social media marketing without building a presence. That's why these ads are a great way to be seen. Print advertising builds brand awareness and can act as a gateway to more personalized marketing. Moreover, it does not require an internet connection to read or share.
• Banner Ads:  Banner ads create awareness about your brand and help facilitate queries from potential customers. Additionally, you can target your banner ads to certain demographics at certain times through targeted advertising. This way, your ads are displayed by those most likely to be interested in and purchase your product.
• Landing Page:  When someone clicks on an ad, they should get the right message. Also, make sure they have an easy way to take the next step in building a relationship. The landing page gives you the opportunity to make a great first impression and present very special content. If these pages are strong enough, you can get people to sign up for your email list right away.
• Email Marketing:  The most customizable, personalized and convenient way of marketing, email marketing allows you to stay in constant contact with customers and keep them informed of your latest deals. At the same time, email marketing helps you understand the trends of your best customers by ensuring which buyers click on your links and ultimately make a purchase.
• Social Media:  By creating relevant content for your followers, you can strengthen their bond with your company and even enable them to advertise on your behalf with social media.
• Organic SEO:  Search engines rank results according to how relevant the pages are to certain search words and phrases. This means you can tailor your pages to be more relevant to popular search words and move your website to the top.
• Paid SEO:  If organic SEO isn't for you, you can always buy your way to the top. Paid search means buying the rights to a particular search phrase and having your ad appear in front of, next to, or below organic search results.
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Advantages of Integrated Marketing

Using an integrated marketing approach is effective in more ways than one, as there are significant advantages to unifying your brand messages across all channels rather than running completely unique campaigns in each. These advantages are as follows:

1. Better Result

In traditional marketing approaches, you often find a high level of separation between different teams. This results in press releases, advertising, direct marketing and sales promotions everywhere and in some cases conflicting. From the outside, this appears disorganized and complex to consumers. But an integrated approach brings your marketing teams together to create a great and beautiful marketing idea. The result is a cohesive message that contributes to customer trust.

2. High Brand Image

Consistency alone is not enough to improve the brand image. It can also be used for logos, sound, titles, etc. It is very important to have a uniform brand message throughout. Consistency builds trust and lets consumers know you care about your product. Using integrated marketing ensures that your brand's elements align seamlessly. This approach maximizes your market impact and exposes your niche or industry. Thus, you can achieve a high brand image.

3. Variation

It is not possible for your customers to see all your ads. That's why integrated marketing is so important to your business. Because a customer who sees your billboard on the roadside may never see your television advertisements, hear your radio advertisements, or even see your digital advertisements. However, if you implement integrated marketing, you will ensure that your message remains the same regardless of the type of medium your ads use. A consistent message means your potential customers won't miss out on your offering.

In addition, thanks to this diversity, you can reach more of your customers on the platforms they prefer. For example, different demographic groups prefer to receive their messages from various platforms such as email, text message, social media or podcasts. As a result, this type of marketing technique will help you reach a larger audience thanks to its diversity.

4. Affordable Cost

The first question you need to answer when looking for new marketing strategies is whether it is effective and cost-effective. Integrated marketing is actually likely to be more cost-effective as you create content that can be used for multiple purposes across multiple platforms. Not only that, but some integrated marketing campaigns rely on user-generated content, which can help reduce your costs while increasing efficiency and engagement.

5. High Efficiency

A strong integrated marketing creates a dynamic and well-connected marketing team. Part of building this team is ensuring that members have a line of communication they can use to reach all departments quickly.

With streamlined communication channels and a unified goal, your business sees less time spent from repetitive messages or trying to communicate with others for information. The result is an increase in productivity.

How Is It Different From Multi-Channel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing focuses more on the customer experience. In this respect, it blends various communication channels to ensure a seamless customer interaction with a brand.

In contrast, integrated marketing focuses more on the message. So it's about seamlessly integrating everything from ads and sales promotions to PR and social media and target customers. It's important to remember that while there are separate marketing activities, omnichannel and integrated marketing must work together.

Why Should You Use Integrated Marketing in Your Business?

Integrated marketing is an important concept that any marketer and business owner should understand. Positioning your ads across different channels can help you gain the awareness you need to increase sales.

Most customers prefer to wait until they know more about a product before purchasing. Integrated marketing provides consumers with a large amount of information through a wide variety of sources. This can make a huge difference when it comes to selling and retaining loyal customers.

Consumers are bombarded with advertisements and as a result they learn how to opt out. This is doubly true for younger consumers. But the trend of highly personalized advertising fits perfectly into an integrated marketing approach. Now you can reach your target audience on the platforms they use and value the most.

As a result, an integrated marketing approach that repeats the same and consistent message in various places is the key to building brand loyalty.

• The power of integrated marketing is unmatched. Research has shown that integrated campaigns on more than four channels can outperform single or dual channel campaigns by as much as 300%.
• You will get better results. When you combine communication tools and messaging, it increases marketing effectiveness. The more unified, planned, and focused a customer's journey is, the higher the likelihood of sales and brand loyalty.
• You can build better brand awareness when you're consistent with graphics, headlines, and key phrases across different mediums and platforms. Creative consistency helps reinforce campaign themes by increasing the number of times potential customers see or hear the same message.
• You save money. By focusing on a single message, you not only reduce campaign creation costs, but also avoid the waste of budget that occurs with inconsistent campaigns.

Creating an Integrated Marketing Strategy

An integrated marketing campaign understands that customers are not limited to a single channel. Consumers today encounter brands and ads wherever they go, from the bus to their favorite websites and emails. In order for your brand to stand out in the eyes of customers, you need to create ads that appear on platforms that customers frequently use. At the same time, campaigns need to share similar characteristics so they stand out in the minds of customers.

It is important to develop a strategy before implementing integrated marketing for your brand. You need to plan certain aspects ahead of time, such as knowing your audience and choosing which marketing channels to focus on. In addition, you can follow the steps below to create an integrated marketing strategy:

1. Combine Your Marketing Channels

Marketing channels can be integrated in many ways. For example, you can use the same visual elements in different contexts. You also need to provide consistent language in how you talk about and portray the brand.

Use multiple strategies to combine marketing channels, but be sure to choose the strategies that make the most sense based on your marketing needs and resources. If some of your channels are visual (for example, online and television commercials) but others are not, it's harder to leverage your visuals for consistency. Similarly, if some channels are interactive and others are outsourced only, you need to choose marketing content and strategies that work for each.

2. Collect and Analyze Customer Data

Your integrated marketing strategy should be driven by data about your customers' behavior and updated regularly in response to new data. By collecting and analyzing data from all of your marketing channels, you can determine which channels are most effective. It also helps you identify where you might need to devote more resources to making your messaging more consistent. If data shows, for example, that one channel is underperforming, it may be a sign that it lacks the messaging consistency available in other channels.

KPIs for data collection and analysis vary depending on your industry and which marketing channels you deploy. Here are some key data points to focus on in general:

• How many potential customers are exposed to marketing resources in each channel?
• How many potential customers are actively interacting with the resources in each channel?
• How often does the same lead reconnect after first viewing a resource? Do repeated interactions happen on different channels or do they happen on the same channel?
• What times of the day, days of the week, or seasonal periods see the highest engagement on different channels?
• How do engagement levels differ between buyer types? For example, are you seeing more new lead engagements from buyers lower in the sales funnel?

It is often difficult to know which marketing strategies will be most effective for integrated marketing before launching a campaign. That's why you need to test your content beforehand. Marketing technology brands offer A/B testing capabilities where you can submit variations of your content to determine which variables, such as images, colors, or product offering, have the greatest impact on your audience.

3. Do Teamwork

Given that integrated marketing spans multiple channels and includes a range of different resources and platforms, it requires interacting with different teams across your organization. Marketing and sales teams play an important role in determining how to run integrated marketing campaigns. But you should also draw on the expertise of groups like your software development team. Because they can advise you on what types of digital marketing resources can be applied. Collaborating with more than one person will help give you a broader perspective on how you can more effectively meet the needs of more of your customers.

4. Use a Marketing Automation Program

Manually managing the many variables and data sources involved in integrated marketing would be incredibly difficult and time consuming. Instead, you can leverage a marketing automation platform that can help you track KPIs across channels, engage with customers, measure ROI, identify the most promising leads, and more.

5. Be Interesting

At the core of integrated marketing is a compelling and engaging brand narrative. The marketing messages you deliver across each channel should build on each other and gradually educate your audience as you continue to engage with your brand.

The story could be about the history of your brand. Customer can focus on success stories. It can also be a fictional narrative built around a brand mascot. Whatever the approach, the goal should be to convey a narrative that customers want to continue to follow and learn more about as they engage and re-engage through different channels.