What is Integrated Marketing?

What is an integrated marketing plan and how do I create an integrated marketing campaign of my own? 

Oftentimes the elements necessary for an integrated marketing campaign are operating in silo. This guide will help teach you which elements of integrated marketing communications are necessary to success.

Marketing has become fragmented

When it comes to marketing decisions the chief aim of integrated marketing communication must be vector alignment of individual marketing components. When individual marketing elements are integrated it magnifies the total output of the department. 

Marketing requires precision and repetition. Without a consistent strategy and data to back your decision making, you will spend more and grow slower. Investments into integrated marketing communication activities should generate trackable ROI, however, with today’s climate of digital marketing tools and trends it is easy to fall short on the measurement and attribution of the effectiveness of individual channels and campaigns. As entrepreneurs, business owners and marketing decision makers, we have begun to stray from lean marketing operations that maximize profits without enough concentration on the integrated marketing mix.

Revamping your strategy to focus on staying lean requires focus on your desired outcome as an organization. By defining the KPI’s that matter as it relates to each individual component of your integrated strategy and understanding the process behind what goes into each marketing deliverable is critical to measuring progress.  

This guide is meant to serve as a roadmap for your planning and execution of what we call the 4 Pillars of Marketing as it relates to creating an integrated marketing campaign. Although Marketing is not limited to these pillars, these are the critical components that will take you from 0 to 1. These pillars are as follows: Customer Relationship Management Implementation, Content Production, Search Engine Optimization, and Advertising. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Implementation

The CRM is the bedrock of your strategy; it is the nucleus of your marketing department. As marketers we must know who our customers are and what specific pain they are feeling. Customer Relationship Management software gives us the ability to track these records and use this intel at scale. The CRM is the glue that holds together your integrated marketing communications. 

Your CRM should organize your prospects and customers into buckets based on: 

• Persona
• Demographics (age, job role, HHI, etc.)
• Geographics (city, zip code, etc.)
• Firmographics (head count, annual revenue, etc.)
• Psychographics (attitudes, beliefs, etc.)
• Context 
• Where & how were they introduced to your brand
• Engagement level
• When & how often have they engaged

Although CRM is considered a single pillar, oftentimes CRM technology bundles a handful of software into one place. The good news is that this helps streamline your integrated marketing strategy. The bad news is that it can be overwhelming to maximize all features of your CRM. Here are a few common tools included in a traditional CRM:

• Email Automation & Segmentation
• Sales workflow management
• Lead Scoring (Sales IQ)
• Pipeline management
• Webinar, forms, landing pages, and lead magnets

The key is not to initially master every tool, but rather to maximize the effectiveness and measurement of one piece of CRM at a time. In terms of measurement, below is an example of how to focus on more granular data as it relates to components of a CRM:

Good Data               Misleading Data

A/B Tested open rates Total open rate

Total SQL's MoM Total leads added

Total Appointments booked MoM Total appointments booked 

Because marketing requires precision on timing, tools in a CRM can be extremely helpful to uncovering the context and engagement level of prospects so that correspondence is well received and helpful to the customer.

Although CRM has many capabilities, a large part of its value is being a delivery mechanism for the content that you produce to the right people at the right time. Enter the next element of our integrated marketing strategy. 

Content Production 

Content production usually means expensive and time consuming. When it is created arbitrarily, the cost almost always outweighs the benefit. By creating topic clusters or themes for your content based on your desired outcome (i.e. debunking misconception, showcasing differentiating factors), distribution processes will start to queue without additional planning. 

When creating content that must gel with your integrated marketing strategy it is important to think five moves ahead. You must be asking questions such as “how will I use this video on social media?” or “Can this be repurposed into a podcast?” 

By keeping it lean, though, we can maximize the impact of quality content through a concept we like to call “wringing out the washcloth.” 

Below is the detailed step by step process that will help maximize the impact of each piece of content that is created so that we can ensure that the time and costs behind the production create the outcome we want from our overarching integrated marketing communication strategy… That’s right, ROI. 

1. Identify overarching topic clusters that have existing search volume
2. Write a blog (500-2000 words)
3. Repurpose blog into long form content (i.e. video, podcast)
4. Splice long form content into short form content (10-60 seconds)
5. Convert short form video into static imagery (i.e. quotes, infographics)

Once these steps have been completed, distribution processes should be triggered. When your marketing systems are integrated these processes can be automated. This means content will touch the CRM for email distribution,Advertising for paid media distribution, and SEO for blog distribution.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO has long been an ever changing puzzle that requires specialized knowledge to execute. Although there are nuances to SEO that can give you an edge on Google search rank, many of the key pieces to a quality SEO strategy are doable for your average Joe. 

If we are going in chronological order, the first step to integrating SEO into your campaign is just before making production decisions. Using tools like Google Keyword Planner, Spyfu and SEM Rush can help give you an edge in terms of understanding search volume around broad and specific keyword clusters. By planning the correct content to produce based on search data, we ensure that we can appeal to customers in a meaningful way and integrate our marketing campaigns. 

While there is no “one size fits all” approach to SEO here are some of the best practices as it relates to quality SEO in 2020: 

• Index and optimize content on your website weekly
• Utilize and distribute content across Google’s entire suite of products (Youtube, Google Search, Google my Business)
• Do your keyword research to properly utilize correlating short and long tail keywords in headings and subheadings (Yoast/competitors and MKT Agencies can help here)

Content planning and distribution is only half of the battle when it comes to quality SEO. The other half is measurement and reporting. It is critical to understand how your content each month is performing. Without quality insights it is nearly impossible to correctly predict the impact of new content and what content should come next on the queue. 

Below is a comparison of some of the good and misleading data that you should be tracking as an organization as it relates to SEO reporting: 

Good Data                   Misleading Data

Dwell time Average session duration

Month over month traffic Total website traffic

Page rank by keyword Page rank overall

Benchmarking your KPI’s and monitoring experiments month over month will shed light on what activities are moving the needle and what activities need to be optimized. Integrating this reporting data into your overarching strategy ensures that your marketing systems are always communicating and dictating your strategy.

Advertising

Ad management is oftentimes viewed as the primary function of marketing agencies and integrated marketing campaigns. Advertising is often misrepresented as the hero of marketing strategy, however, it takes integrated marketing communications of all the other pillars for advertising to truly have a sustainable impact. 

Paid media will allow you to acquire customers quickly and introduce your product to qualified prospects at scale. Without the right calibration or process, though, advertising can be a black hole of a marketing expense. 

Advertising distribution should be considered when planning content themes. Understanding what types of media your customers are consuming, where they are living digitally (i.e. Youtube, Linkedin, etc.) and how your product is positioned within your market will help to direct how videos should be shot and the benefits that should be outlined in long and short form content. 

Another important consideration is the prospecting vs retargeting journey. By understanding these two phases of advertising and how to make both phases lean, omni channel marketing budgets can be stretched as far as possible. 

Prospecting advertising focuses on the top of the funnel; this is the first impression you will make with customers via paid distribution. The following decisions must be made at this phase: 

1. What are the average CPM’s (cost per 1,000 impressions) across the channels where my customer engages
2. Which placement should our product be introduced to customers (i.e. story ad, newsfeed ad) 
3. What attributes of customers will you be targeting (i.e. age, location, device) 
4. What is the call to action

Retargeting advertising is the follow up component to advertising. As your prospecting ads turn strangers into leads, your retargeting ads paired integration communications with your CRM and SEO turn leads into paying customers. Retargeting advertising strategy begs answers to the following questions: 

1. Why didn’t the prospect take advantage of the offering the first time when they showed interest
2. What (if any) channels are viable places to retarget besides the prospecting source
3. Is there a channel that has more upside or engagement than the prospecting source if the CPM is not as big of a consideration
4. How much are we willing to spend per customer for a conversion
5. How many touches does it take to convert

Unfortunately, the answer to all of the aforementioned bulleted questions related to prospecting and retargeting strategy are… it depends. This calls for experimentation in order to validate hypothesis. It also calls for integrated marketing communications between systems to let data, not emotion, lead your decision making. Where digital marketing knowledge comes in handy is being able to extract critical insights from testing with small budgets and predict outcomes of advertisements effectiveness based on these tests. 

Measurement and quick feedback loops are necessary at this stage. The following outlines how all advertising data is not equal: 

Good data     Misleading Data

Cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) Impressions

Cost per click (CPC) Total Clicks

Cost per lead (CPL) Reach

Testing and constant iteration are a given when it comes to omni channel ad management. Advertising is where you will see the greatest effect of your integrated marketing strategy. With the correct onslaught of paid advertising, SEO and correspondence via CRM customers will start to tell you, “I see you everywhere.” This is the exact phenomenon we hope to create by weaving together the four Pillars of Marketing: Customer Relationship management, Content Production, Search Engine Optimization, and Advertising.