9 Essential Integrated Marketing Tactics Every Small Business Needs

Last Updated: 

October 21, 2024

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.

a marketing team doing a strategy session.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

Key Takeaways on Essential Integrated Marketing Tactics

  1. Define Clear Campaign Goals: Start your integrated marketing campaign by clearly defining achievable goals. Whether it's revenue generation, brand awareness, or increased engagement, having a specific goal informs all marketing channels about their role in achieving success.
  2. Identify Target Audiences: Narrow down your target audiences to tailor brand messaging effectively. Consider both primary and secondary audiences, ensuring that your marketing plans and messaging align with their preferences and needs.
  3. Leverage Social Media Platforms :Incorporate and leverage social media platforms to foster communities and gain support for your marketing campaigns. Use established communities to boost campaign visibility, engagement, and followers.
  4. Email Marketing Integration: Invest in email marketing as a personalised channel for B2B audiences. Leverage the intimacy of emails to impact recipients more effectively, especially for targeted campaigns.
  5. Create Valuable and Relevant Content: Spread valuable and relevant content across all marketing channels. Customise content for each channel to maximise its impact, considering the unique characteristics and limitations of each platform.
  6. SEO and SEM Integration: Integrate SEO and SEM tactics into your marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your website. Align the direction of SEO and SEM with your overall integrated marketing strategy for a comprehensive approach.
  7. Craft Lead Generation Blueprint: Use social media as part of your lead generation pipeline. Create a clear map for lead generation, directing potential leads to channels that align with your campaign goals, such as landing pages or online stores.
  8. Track Customer Interactions: Monitor customer interactions during the campaign to understand the effectiveness of your lead generation pipeline. Keep track of touchpoints to identify opportunities and areas for improvement.
  9. Monitor Performance and Analyse Results: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure campaign success. Analyse results to determine the effectiveness of strategies, identify successes and areas for improvement, and optimise future integrated marketing campaigns.
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What is integrated marketing?

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.

1. Define your campaign goal

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.

2. Identify your target audiences

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.

3. Leverage social media platforms

marketing team using socialmedia marketing for their business
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

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.

4. Email Marketing Integration

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.

5. Create valuable and relevant content

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.

6. Search engine optimisation (SEO) and SEM integration

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.

7. Craft your lead generation blueprint

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.

8. Keep track of customer interactions

Tracking customer actions during your integrated marketing campaign, with the help of tools like Ipaas, 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.

9. Monitor your performance and analyse results

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:

  • Which strategies worked
  • Which didn’t go according to plan
  • Whether your goals were achievable in the first place
  • Whether your customers enjoyed the campaign, regardless of your campaign goals

You can then tweak your future integrated marketing campaigns and optimise them to be the most successful.

Conclusion

These integrated marketing tactics help your small business have successful marketing campaigns despite having to manage multiple marketing channels.

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