Once you stop marketing in channel silos, you’ll discover that the whole (integrated marketing campaign) is greater than the sum of its parts. Here’s why integrated marketing will become your new favorite strategy: integrated campaigns allow you to maintain consistent messaging, create a brand story, and reach potential customers across multiple channels—all while streamlining content production.
Sounds like a dream, but how do you start? This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about an integrated marketing campaign: what it is, how to create it, and how to maximize results.
An integrated marketing campaign promotes a consistent message to a targeted audience across multiple marketing channels—like email, content, social media, display advertising, website, public relations, SEO, and direct mail. Stellar marketing departments (usually) run integrated campaigns because of their efficiency, effectiveness, and positive impact on brand awareness.
Here are the top five reasons you should consider adopting an integrated marketing plan for your next campaign.
Consistent messaging: Increase brand recognition and trust when you greet potential customers with consistent messaging on every channel.
Increased reach: Access a wider audience (and increase chances that it will be a successful campaign) by leveraging multiple marketing channels.
More insight into performance: When you run consistent messaging across every channel, you’ll be able to isolate variables and determine what’s working and what’s not.
Increased ROI: Concentrating all your marketing efforts around a singular message can increase the effectiveness of your campaigns and generate more revenue.
Enhanced customer experience: Providing a seamless customer experience makes it easier for customers to engage with your brand and make purchases.
All successful campaigns start with the same thing—marketing strategy. Your campaign strategy should clearly lay out what you’re trying to achieve (sales, leads, brand awareness, etc) and who you’re trying to reach (target audience).
Tips for setting your integrated marketing campaign strategy: define your objectives, clearly lay out your target audience (if you’ve got customer personas, use ‘em), and choose which marketing channels can help you meet your goals as effectively as possible.
Set goals to clearly outline how you will determine whether or not the campaign is a success. If your organization doesn’t already have a corporate goal-setting and execution strategy, you might want to consider SMART goals. SMART stands for “specific, measurable, achievable, and time-bound.”
SMART goals for an integrated marketing campaign might look like:
Increase social media engagement by 15% by [END OF CAMPAIGN].
50% increase in post reach, views, follower count, and social shares during [CAMPAIGN PERIOD].
Achieve a 40% open rate on emails sent during [CAMPAIGN PERIOD].
Generate $X revenue from [EMAIL MARKETING, SOCIAL MEDIA, BLOG POSTS, INFLUENCER MARKETING, ETC].
Next, you need to create the messaging framework for your campaign. Every integrated marketing campaign needs a core message. What are you promoting? What is the value proposition? The specifics will vary depending on the purpose of your campaign—whether it be a seasonal push, new product launch, brand awareness, rebranding, or other type of campaign.
Clarity is essential for effective collaboration. Now is the time to name which channels you’ll include in your integrated marketing campaign. In a perfect world, would you use them all? Yeah, sure. But you’ll be better served by being realistic about what you can achieve with the resources you have. A thirty-person omnichannel marketing department might be able to pull off a “whole shebang” approach, whereas a two-person marketing team might be better served by picking a handful, like email marketing, social, and paid digital ads.
Whatever your campaign, you want to begin the creative process by creating the overall campaign messages, from the copy to the CTAs to the graphics. Getting clear at the beginning makes it easier for each marketing channel leader to see how they can best support the marketing strategy in their individual channel.
Bring all the key decision-makers together at this stage to provide feedback and make necessary changes. This streamlines content production, avoids potential headaches down the road, and gets team members excited about your marketing campaign because they’re bought into the marketing strategy.
Once you have your primary messaging locked in. It’s time to version. Adapt the core messaging framework for each channel. If you’re not sure how to approach that, here’s a tip: it’s often easiest to start with the “biggest” pieces of content—like a blog post, a video, or a whitepaper, and then you can find ways to cut it into smaller pieces for different channels and audiences.
You’ll want to schedule your content rollout based on your audience’s behavior and engagement patterns for each channel. Your audience might be most active on email during the day and most active on social media in the evening. Choosing a cadence that plays to each channel’s strengths will maximize the success of your integrated marketing campaign.
Instead of putting pressure on yourself to hit the “publish” button at the perfect moment, use scheduling tools to make your life easier. Twilio SendGrid Email Marketing Campaigns can help you schedule emails–at different cadences for different subsets of your audience, allowing you to curate your messaging for optimal engagement.
Track performance on each channel. There’s a chance you’ll hit it out of the park on the first try, but it’s much more likely that your message will work in some places but not others. That’s okay. You learn, you adjust, you grow.
Tracking performance is also essential for demonstrating the value of marketing to the rest of the organization. So whether you have a robust Power BI dashboard or you’re DIY tracking in a spreadsheet, it’s worth it.
(This feels like a good time to mention that Twilio Sendgrid Email Marketing Campaigns tracks all the email metrics you need to know if your campaign is successful.)
Once your integrated marketing campaign has ended, schedule a time for all the stakeholders to meet and discuss what worked and what didn’t. Talk about everything from email engagement and sales to project management and collaboration. It pays to give and receive honest feedback so you can do better next time.
Ready to make “more effective email marketing” part of your next integrated marketing campaign? Discover how Twilio SendGrid Email Marketing Campaigns can help you improve everything from your deliverability rate to your click-through rate.
