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What Is Integrated Marketing?

With the amount of users in the online market, you may try to maximise your online exposure by setting up your business across multiple online platforms. However, different online platforms have different users and trends, so you could try to strategise with your marketing team on how to manipulate your content to adapt to the appropriate platforms and trends.

This can be a chaotic process, and it requires a lot of work. What marketing strategy can you use to contain the chaos? Integrated marketing!

What This Blog Can Teach You about Integrated Marketing

As you go through this blog, you can find the answers to:

  • Definition of integrated marketing
  • Why integrated marketing is a hot topic among marketing agencies
  • Types of integrated marketing campaigns
  • Examples of integrated marketing campaigns
  • How to get started on your own integrated marketing campaign
  • Key takeaways

Definition of Integrated Marketing

Integrated marketing involves having a uniformed, coordinated message of your brand across all of the online platforms that your business uses. Without integrated marketing, you risk inconsistencies within the content of your online platforms. For instance, automated replies should be consistent across all platforms.

Consistency with your image, content, and tone will give your business an online reputation of credibility.

Online users see you as a credible source because you are conveying one unified ultimate message across different social media platforms and advertisements. If you are viewed as a credible source, you can rank higher in search engines, attract more traffic to your online platforms, and have a greater visitor-customer conversion rate. Higher conversion rate equals more sales.

Why Is Integrated Marketing a Hot Topic Among Marketing Agencies

Integrated marketing is a hot topic among marketing agencies because it helps your business convey a consistent purpose across the multimedia platform. This would leave an impression and a sense of familiarity among users, and they are more likely to engage with your ads or content since consistency leads to credibility.

Once a customer is satisfied with your service, they are likely to become a “repetitive customer”, which means that once they’ve trusted your brand, they are more likely to engage with your brand again; this is also called a consistent customer experience. These customers will most likely promote your brand to their friends or family. Since you use integrated marketing, you are confident that you can maintain your credibility regardless of whichever social media platform they visit.

This marketing strategy also helps your company with marketing campaigns. Using integrated marketing strategies will convert your basic website into a high-performing website. This shows that integrated marketing can come as a cost-effective marketing strategy for your marketing campaigns because it saves time, resources, and money.

Types of Integrated Marketing

Integrated marketing communication campaigns refer to the activities that a marketing agency uses to promote their products and brand. There are four ways that this can be applied:

External

Keeping your employees in the loop about your brand integrations and advancements will help them understand your brand better and may even get them excited about your products. Once they have achieved a substantial amount of understanding and interest with your product, they will then promote your product to people they know outside the company.

Internal

As a marketing department head, it is your responsibility to maintain a healthy and working relationship with your team. This allows you to have clearer communication within your team and other marketing departments within your company. Clearer communication can help you and your team have a better, more unified understanding of your brand.

Vertical

If your product doesn’t align with your company’s mission and vision, this will create confusion among you and your employees or team members, as well as among your audience. Why would you sell a product that doesn’t relate to your company’s foundations?

Digital Integration

Once your company — and with its employees — have unity regarding your product and brand, you can then easily apply it to your online marketing platforms. Employees with a uniform understanding while managing different social media platforms will still produce uniformed output.

Examples of Integrated Marketing Campaigns

Here are examples of successful integrated marketing campaigns:

Always #LikeAGirl

Always is a feminine product brand with the new generation of consumers as their target customers. They aim to help young women with their transition from childhood to young adults, helping them with the necessities of puberty.

Research shows that young women feel awkward and insecure during the puberty transition. Always used the phrase “like a girl” — which was taken from a derogatory context and used instead to empower women — transforming the meaning of the phrase to how women go through much during puberty and still manage to surpass those challenges and changes.

Always even made a documentary film focused on women empowerment. It generated over 150 million views on YouTube across over 150 countries. The phrase “like a girl” no longer had a negative impact on young women and instead felt a positive association with the phrase. Even the majority of men who have watched the documentary stated they will never use the phrase “like a girl” in a derogatory manner.

This is one of the best examples of effective integrated marketing strategies because it not only increased the company’s brand reputation, but it also positively impacted young men and women in our society.

Domino’s

The pizza restaurant chain created the “AnyWare” campaign that enabled customers to order their pizzas on any technological and smart devices that can access the internet and social media.

Customers can choose from a vast variety of possible ways to order a Domino’s pizza — from ordering through text messaging to ordering through a tweet!

Domino’s public campaigns drove a lot of traffic to the AnyWare website that led to an outstanding amount of success and social media recognition, like segments on television shows. Domino’s even made a television campaign for AnyWare for an entire quarter of 2015 that generated over 10.5% in yearly sales growth.

Volkswagen

The “Think Small” integrated marketing campaign of Volkswagen is often considered as the golden standard of advertising.

The campaign started in the 1960s and Volkswagen still increased their car sales despite having a difficult time selling German products since World War II. Volkswagen cars were even smaller than what people were used to at the time. Instead of cowering away in the face of adversity, they used “Think Small” for their campaign and succeeded in increasing sales.

Dove

Dove paved the way to redefining feminine beauty standards with their successful “Campaign for Real Beauty” integrated marketing campaign.

Their campaign started by asking motorists if the models that they featured on their billboard advertisements were “wrinkled or wonderful,” “44 and hot or 44 and not,” or “fat or fit.” This actually gave men and women a different perspective on feminine beauty, which drove them away from focusing on the flaws and forward to appreciating natural feminine beauty.

This increased their sales from $2.5 billion to $4 billion. As a result of this campaign, beauty industries started a less sophisticated screening process for hiring models for their ads and campaigns. Women of varying ages and sizes started to be accepted in modeling roles and absolutely redefined the stereotypical standards of “feminine beauty.”

Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines created a website called “Transferency” where customers could use the website to pay for checked bags, flight changes, and other commodities that can be provided by Southwest Airlines.

This campaign strategy is much like Domino’s AnyWare, where the company created a website that conveniences customers, created lots of website traffic, and generated a lot of sales over time.

How To Get Started on Your Own Integrated Marketing Campaign

If you are unsure what to do or how to start your own Integrated Marketing campaign, then here are a few tips and steps to guide you.

1. Establish Your Goal

Before starting your campaign, you must meet with your marketing team and evaluate how you can create a compelling impact on society using your brand. Your end goal is to increase your brand sales.

In Dove’s “Campaign to Real Beauty,” they not only increased their brand sales by over $1 billion; they also made an impact on society by changing people’s perspective on feminine beauty standards. Once you’ve created a positive impact on society, your integrated marketing campaign will be seen as “memorable and intuitive.” This will increase traffic to your brand and generate sales.

2. Pick Your Platforms and Target Audience

Choosing the platforms through which you will establish your campaign is important for its exposure. After evaluating what your campaign goal is, the next step is to determine your target audience and the platforms that would be the most efficient in reaching out to your target audience.

The platforms that your campaign can use can be billboard advertisements, tv and radio advertisements, or social media promotions and advertisements. As long as you can capture the attention of your target audience, any of these will work!

3. Create a Virtual Persona

Across multiple platforms, it may be hard to catch the attention of your target audience, and you may be seen by other platform users, so it is vital that your tone and persona can easily be adapted or manipulated to fit certain social media trends and users, while still having a consistent message to deliver to users.

4. Find Competent Platform Managers

It is important that your campaign is handled properly and tastefully. With so many potential platforms to use, it also comes along with a lot of information regarding its audience and trends.

The person you choose to manage a certain platform must be an expert — or have familiarised themselves with — the platform that they are managing in order for your campaign to reach optimum results and feedback.

5. Establish Communication Within Different Teams and Departments

When organising a campaign, you may come across communication barriers between departments, which may lead to inconsistencies. It is important to keep everyone on the same page to ensure your campaign’s efficiency.

6. Create Integrated Marketing Campaign Content

Once you have established a goal and assembled a competent team, it is time to strategise on your campaign’s content.

It’s important that the content of the campaign can be used and manipulated to adapt to all the platforms that you will use.

Different materials can be made and used for your campaign project with a certain adaptability, such as memes, videos, pictures, hashtags, blogs, and articles. It is important to utilise these materials in order to maximise the efficiency of your campaign.

7. Launch Your Campaign

Once you’ve launched your campaign, it is important to remember that your work doesn’t stop there. There are multiple ways and tools to determine your campaigns efficiency across multiple platforms.

Your campaign team must follow up and make necessary adjustments to your campaign. You must also make sure that your team has learned the necessary principles of starting a campaign for future campaigns your brand might make.

Key Takeaways

In order to have a successful integrated marketing campaign, you must first evaluate what problems society is facing that your brand can solve. Your campaign must also align with your brand’s mission and purpose, so consumers can associate your product with a certain social issue and how your campaign has positively impacted society's perspective on that issue.

Solving real-world issues may certainly help your campaign towards success, but it is no easy task. With the proper training, research, and execution, you can make any campaign and help your brand and society itself.

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