Integrated marketing campaigns call for a combination of consistent and complementary communications. By speaking with your audience authentically and through different channels you can solidify your brand identity and develop trust. With so many platforms on the menu, it can seem overwhelming to map out a plan. But it doesn’t have to be.

What’s an Integrated Marketing Campaign?

The goal of an integrated marketing campaign is to build an experience where consumers can interact seamlessly with your brand. When developing your brand’s marketing strategy, remember that your communication should be consistent and centered on your user. Your brand’s story should also be uniform across each touchpoint, both traditional and non-traditional, so that each interaction supports the brand’s overall position.

Traditional and Digital Marketing

With 84% of U.S. companies using digital marketing, it can be easy to forget traditional marketing. Do you need both for your integrated marketing campaign? Typically, yes. By taking an integrated approach, you create variety for your audience. However, you don’t require a 50/50 plan for your integrated marketing campaign to be effective. Instead, you can retain the traditional marketing channels that work and use digital to support the rest.

Traditional marketing methods like TV, billboards, and direct mail move slower than digital, and can still effective at reaching audiences. Digital marketing strategies move faster and farther. With a massive online audience, with digital marketing, you can reach a large user base for less.

Digital marketing opens the door wider when communicating with your audience. People can engage directly with your brand, which sparks conversation, and creates more engagement. Since digital marketing is also more flexible, you can gather data, track metrics, and adjust quickly.

Why Integrate Marketing Channels?

Different marketing channels have different end-goals. The key is to integrate the channels that make sense for your brand under one strategy. To make an impact on audiences who are now seasoned content consumers, brands must develop stories that are both memorable and cohesive.

By creating cohesive and concise messaging across channels, you’ll help the consumer get to where they need to on their journey, and build brand awareness in the process. Remember, even if your customers know you exist, they may still need some reminding that you do.

Create brand awareness and trust through brand storytelling

Here are a few tips to help create brand awareness and trust through brand storytelling:

1. Find the big, juicy idea to create cross-channel messaging around. This should be crystal clear. This way, you’ll be better positioned to develop cohesive and straightforward communications that can float amidst the rising sea of content.
2. Center your integrated marketing campaign messaging around your audience. The brand voice should be polished, knowledgeable, and approachable — like a human you’d like to meet. When you create messaging that’s consistent and authentic you build trust. With trust, your audience is more likely to engage.

Start it Up

Integrated marketing can accomplish several things, but it does with one very well: bringing people together to interact with your brand. Now, what do you do before getting started with an integrated marketing campaign? Here are a few points to consider before you take-off:

• Make sure everyone on your team is on the same page about the campaign’s goals, deliverables, details, and integrations. And, make sure your tracking is in place before you hit the starting line. Your team should include senior- and management-level staff to customer-facing reps. With everyone on the same page, you work as one team.
• Create a marketing communications strategy with clearly defined goals. Define the campaigns’ messaging. Then refine it and simplify it. The messaging should reflect the brand’s core values — think brand building.
• Develop and finalize your brand guidelines. Guidelines that govern logo usage, typography, colors, and imagery will help the brand remain consistent across multiple touchpoints so that nothing gets lost in the mix.
• Explore your options. Dive into both traditional and digital advertising, don’t be afraid to use A/B testing, and gather and analyze the data as it’s available. Once you can see what’s working, you can employ an agile approach to your integrated marketing campaign where you can quickly adapt to change, implement, and continue forward.
• Now repeat and continue.

What insights have you learned from a past, or current, integrated marketing campaign? Which channels worked best and why? Let us know in the comments below.