Many businesses, even small to medium-sized companies, use multiple marketing channels at a time for their campaigns. If you want to do the same for your marketing campaigns, this article will help you better run your integrated marketing campaigns.
Before we enumerate some of the integrated marketing tactics for your small business, let’s define what it is first.
When we’re talking about integrated marketing campaigns, these would be marketing campaigns whose targeted channels are consistent with one another.
Sometimes, the marketing campaigns you run are applied to only one medium. For example, if you’re running a series of TV commercials, you might not be running online ads for that same campaign.
However, with integrated marketing, you should be applying the same marketing themes throughout different marketing channels that are launched and running together at the same time.
It would be best to do this because it helps create a unified brand experience for your potential and current customers.
Now that you know more about integrated marketing, let’s cover the tactics you should apply to incorporate integrated marketing into your campaigns.
An integrated marketing campaign starts the same way other marketing campaigns do: with goal-setting.
Without a goal, you wouldn’t know whether your campaigns were successful. You might not even know categorically if they were failures.
Also, with a campaign goal, it would be much easier to plan out what would be in your integrated marketing campaign in the first place. So, start with a clear and achievable marketing goal for this campaign.
Some examples of campaign goals would be a certain amount of revenue generated, increased brand awareness, more followers, higher engagement rates for social media accounts, etc.
This overall campaign goal will inform all of your marketing channels what their next steps should be and how they can contribute to achieving that particular goal.
Once you know what goals your campaign is aiming for, you should then narrow down who your target audiences are.
Knowing your target audience will help you narrow down what your brand messaging’s content should be. If you’re targeting everybody, you’ll be stuck using the most general ways to promote your brand. With a targeted idea for your audience, it will be easier to use messaging that resonates deeper than general messaging.
You shouldn’t be too caught up in your primary target audience. It would help to consider the secondary target audience that can use your products or services or influence your primary target audience to support your business.
After knowing your target audience, you should use that as the barometer to measure your marketing plans and messaging.
Nowadays, it’s rare for businesses to run marketing campaigns without incorporating and leveraging social media platforms. That’s because social media platforms are a great way to foster your communities, so when it comes time to launch a marketing campaign, you can have that community behind your back to give some steam to your marketing campaign.
You can increase your marketing channels by leveraging your social media platforms and presence there.
Also, you can use the established community to help get more eyes on your marketing campaign. That way, you’re not starting from scratch when getting more traffic to your social media accounts.
Aside from that, your marketing campaign can also positively affect your social media because it can get you more engagement, followers, and views.
Another marketing channel that you should invest in would be email marketing.
If you’re not knowledgeable in marketing, you might not think email is a valid marketing channel with an audience. But, given how lots of other marketing channels are so public and not so personalised, that’s what differentiates email.
Since emails go directly to someone’s inbox, it feels much more intimate, and there’s a better opportunity to personalise it. That way, your emails can impact the people receiving them more.
Email marketing will be beneficial if your marketing campaign is for a B2B audience since targeting more specific accounts is much easier.
Creating content should be a part of your integrated marketing tactics, but you should also ensure that you spread that content around all your marketing channels.
Understandably, some forms of content wouldn’t fit right when you put it in the context of other marketing channels. For example, you might be making long-form blog articles on your website. Posting the same blog article on your Twitter would not only not fit into the character limit but would also be an awkward addition to your socials.
So, when you create valuable and relevant content, tweak and change them so they best suit the media channel you will add them onto.
What’s great about creating more comprehensive content, like a podcast or a whitepaper, is that you can quickly parse that into multiple social media posts. Thus, it’s best to start making more profound content for your integrated marketing channel first. That’s only a suggestion since it’s more efficient to do that step.
SEO and Search Engine Marketing or SEM integrations should be part of your integrated marketing tactics.
If you have a website, you also want to ensure that you get some traffic for a fully integrated marketing campaign. That’s why you should work on the appropriate SEO and SEM campaign that would work with your current integrated marketing campaigns.
It would help if you always had SEO goals running regardless of whether you run a complete marketing campaign. But you can also tweak your SEO and SEM campaigns and align their directions so that they supplement your marketing campaign.
One of the best ways to make the most out of social media for your marketing campaigns is by using it as a part of your lead generation pipeline.
If you want to be more efficient and effective with your lead generation, having an accurate map is best. You can use your social media platforms to get as many potential leads as possible. Then, you can push those leads to drive traffic to the channels that would better lead to achieving your campaign roles.
For example, they could be landing pages for a sign-up or your online store or shop.
Tracking customer actions during your integrated marketing campaign is essential to know how close you are to achieving your campaign goals.
It’s also a great way to know whether your lead generation pipeline works as intended. As a small business, you wouldn’t have a lot of historical data to rely on to inform your future marketing campaigns.
Keeping track of your customer’s journey and their touchpoints with your business would make it much easier to know which opportunities you should be tackling and where you’re lacking.
It would help if you had established key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine whether you’ve achieved your campaign goals. Ideally, it would be best to prove that in advance during the goal-setting phase.
A thorough analysis of the results should inform you:
You can then tweak your future integrated marketing campaigns and optimise them to be the most successful.
These integrated marketing tactics help your small business have successful marketing campaigns despite having to manage multiple marketing channels.
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