Aimee serves as the CEO and lead visionary at Madison Taylor Marketing.
There’s an unspoken belief that integrated marketing efforts must exist anywhere and everywhere to be successful. It’s often tempting to try to pack as much into an integrated strategy as possible, and it’s easy to feel the need to send out email newsletters, appear on industry podcasts, write weekly blogs, attend events and put out every kind of ad imaginable—all while simultaneously posting to every single social media channel.
However tempting to adopt, this “be anywhere and everywhere” approach undermines integrated marketing efforts’ success. It’s the classic “Jack of all trades but a master of none” scenario. Trying to be everywhere and do everything with your marketing will only result in ineffective strategies that waste resources and spread initiatives thin. In my experience, the key to successful integrated marketing lies not in trying to put out content across every available channel but rather in selecting and leveraging the right ones.
Connecting With The Right Customers In The Right Place At The Right Time
Your integrated marketing strategies don’t need to be chock-full of every marketing initiative under the sun—they need to create consistent content and branding that connects with the right customers, at the right time, with the right message. Here are four ways organizations can do just that.
1. Clarify your brand.
At the heart of any great marketing strategy lies a compelling brand identity. Before you do anything related to marketing, you must ensure that you clearly understand who your brand is and what it stands for. In fact, a Nosto survey of 1,590 consumers found that nearly 90% of customers prefer authentic brands, and a consistent and authentic brand can increase revenue significantly. Consider the purpose or the larger “why” behind your brand, and lead with that in your messaging.
2. Hone in on your target audience.
Quality segmentation is vital for integrated marketing success. You can have the best messaging in the world, but if you don’t have a clearly defined target audience, then it will lack the necessary direction. There are several different types of segmentation when it comes to marketing. A few of the most popular types include:
• Geographic segmentation (segmentation based on location).
• Psychographic segmentation (segmentation based on psychological tendencies, values, opinions and personality traits).
• Behavioral segmentation (segmentation based on behavior, routines, usage and purchase patterns).
• Demographic segmentation (segmentation based on key traits like gender, age and income).
3. Understand where your customers are and what they need.
Once you’ve established who you’re targeting, you must understand what makes each customer segment tick. This process often involves creating a buyer persona that represents your target audience. Buyer personas are fictitious archetypal representations of a particular market segment, complete with names, ages, personality traits, childhood experiences and current needs. The idea here is to understand who your customers are, their problems and where they spend their time. Cultivating this information can enable you to tailor your messaging and channels to ensure your marketing resonates with your target customers.
4. Build a strategy that connects you with your customers where it matters most.
After taking time to understand your customers, you need to build a strategy that targets them wherever they spend most of their time. This is a critical aspect of integrated marketing. The goal is not to surround customers with the same content in every possible area they could be, but rather to strategically publish consistent content on channels where you know your customers actually are spending time. For example, suppose a beauty brand knows that most of its customers are women in their 20s to 40s who use Instagram and Facebook to shop for new products. In that case, they should focus on leveraging Facebook and Instagram ads rather than publishing content on Reddit or making a podcast highlighting their products’ value propositions.
Creating Integrated Marketing Campaigns With Impact
When creating integrated marketing campaigns, trying to pack as much into your marketing strategy as possible is often tempting. However, this approach usually leads to ineffective campaigns that sacrifice quantity for quality. The most successful integrated marketing strategies don’t waste their time trying to be omnipresent across every channel and platform imaginable. Instead, they are intentional about knowing which channels to leverage and which content and messaging to connect across them in a way that resonates with impact.
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