Integrated Marketing

The problem of having a piece-meal marketing strategy

By Robin Anderson

Have you ever read a tweet or post on social media that you found captivating, only to click through to a website and wonder where you landed? Disorienting and disappointing. For many, this incidence of doubt will cause them to move on. The lack of integration, making sure the landing page reflects the social promotion in design and messaging, becomes a missed opportunity for the company. 

Often, when creating piece-meal marketing communications, the one-offs do more damage than good. The path of their customer journey becomes muddled. The purpose of nurturing a prospective customer is to help them obtain the information they need to help make the decision to buy, converting them into a purchasing customer. However, when a company’s communications are ad hoc, not tied to the overall company plan it can easily lead customers astray. 

What is Integrated Marketing?

Aligning your branding and messaging to promote your product or service across all channels digitally as well as through traditional marketing such as direct mail, or print advertising. The integration – communicating across a number of channels - allows you to reach more of your audience with a consistent look, feel, and messaging, all designed to support each other. 

Why is look and feel important?

Look and feel refers to ‘graphical layout and the writing style.’1 The purpose of look is to enable the customer to connect your communications through visual design (color, font, etc), Feel is associated with the customer experience as it relates to the writing style (tone, easy to read and understand). 

Benefits of Integrated Marketing

1. Your customers see a consistent look and hear uniform communications across all media

2. Gives you the ability to reach more customers with multiple touchpoints to further make an impression

3. The repetition with look and messaging drives familiarity which builds trust

4. It is cost effective and increases efficiency by leveraging communications and images across all efforts

An Example of an Integrated Marketing Campaign

Hilton’s “To New Memories” Campaign

Hilton created this campaign to encourage customers to send their favorite memories that involve staying in a Hilton. By sharing that travel memory with Hilton, customers were automatically entered into a drawing for a chance to win 1 million Hilton Honor Bonus Points.

The Email from Hilton, their Twitter and Instagram posts include the same theme with consistent messaging, customized per distribution point, all using the same hashtag #HiltonMemoriesGiveaway. 

While travel has been down by as much as 92% as a result of COVID-19, Hilton is using this opportunity to engage with their customers, knowing that many are anxious to once again start planning to travel and create new memories. So when these customers are ready to travel, they will include Hilton and their family of properties as a part of their plans, essentially becoming part of those new experiences and special moments.

Planning an Integrated Marketing Campaign

Here are the steps to take when planning your next integrated marketing campaign, enabling you to reach more customers and make a greater impression:

1. Set a goal for your campaign 
   Examples include an increase to the number of visitors to your website, an increase in subscriptions to a newsletter, or even to drive a designated number of purchases. 

2. Identify your persona 
   Know their demographics, their attitudes, behaviors, and interests. These details are important as they will influence the type of content you create, where to target your efforts, and helps to make sure you are solving their primary pain point. 

3. Content distribution
   Make a list of the communications channels that will be the most effective in reach with your persona. Your audience may be big time social media users, so your primary distribution will be those where they spend the majority of their time. Or, engagement may be best achieved through traditional marketing such as direct mail or advertising. Knowing your audience will help determine where you should spend most of your time, effort and money.

4. Messaging
   Define your main message and create your content. Your key message will become a part of every piece of communication that is created and distributed no matter the channel. Once that is defined, list the content pieces that will best serve the channels you will be promoting. Start with one main piece of content, such as a blog or a video. Then repurpose different sections of that content for promotion purposes. For example, with a blog, pull snippets to create social media posts, create an infographic, develop an ad. The point is to extend the reach of your core piece by using different segments to reach your audience in different ways. 

5. Schedule
   Customers respond more favorably to those that maintain a consistent schedule on social media. Therefore, set your promotional schedule to align with your predetermined posting dates and times for reliability with posting, and sending emails.

6. Keywords and hashtags 
   Using the same keywords and phrases throughout the variety of your content types will help to gain traction and optimize for SEO. Create a unique hashtag that you can use with all your social media posts.
   
   

7. Monitor and measure 
   Track the progress of your communications. If no one is responding to your social media posts, tweak them. Use market automation tools to help you refine your communications to engage your audience and to help you understand what channels are the most effective. 

Rather than continually creating one-offs, and spending an enormous amount of time generating new pieces of content, start integrating. Leverage that one piece of content and share across the Internet. Having an integrated marketing strategy ensures that all communications related to a campaign are tied together with a similar look and feel, and common messaging.

The benefits of an integrated marketing campaign are to increase your reach and effectiveness. While your target audience is the same, you increase the likelihood they will be exposed to new offers by reaching them where they are present. As a result, this provides you with a greater chance of not only driving interest but also converting. Exceed your goals, by integrating your efforts.

Need help creating an integrated marketing campaign? Send us a note, we’re happy to help!

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Fun Fact

Apple Computer was notable for its use of the term look and feel in reference to their Mac OS operating system. The firm tried, with some success, to block other software developers from creating software that had a similar look and feel. Apple argued that they had a copyright claim on the look and feel of their software, and even went so far as to sue Microsoft, alleging that the Windows operating system was illegally copying their look and feel. The expected landmark ruling never happened.2

1) Wikipedia - Definition of Look and feel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_feel

2)Timothy B. Lee (2011-10-25). "Yes, Google "Stole" From Apple, And That's A Good Thing". Forbes. Retrieved 2015-08-13. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2011/10/25/yes-google-stole-from-apple-and-thats-a-good-thing/#7f32fb0f4e36