Integrated Marketing: Your Secret Sauce For Connecting With Customers
In team sports, every member is crucial to winning a game. Everyone plays a key function, and without each member, the team falls apart and can’t succeed. Integrated marketing works the same.
Integrated marketing uses all your marketing channels, like team members, to deliver your targeted messages directly to your customers wherever they are. With your customers’ pains at the core of your strategy, integrated marketing is your MVP.
Don’t Place All Your Eggs In One Basket: Why Integrated Marketing Works
Integrated marketing works so well because you have to use multiple marketing tactics in an orchestrated sequence to reach and connect with your target audience. One marketing approach doesn’t fit all, and it takes a lot more than one touchpoint to connect.
A Forbes article points out that:
“Integrated campaigns across 4+ channels outperform single or dual-channel campaigns by 300%.”
When your campaign implements a variety of marketing activities and channels, you will have more success in reaching your target audience.
These days, everyone is on their phone or computer. Your target customer is “everyone.” They are active on multiple channels across multiple devices, so your marketing strategy should echo this. Think about your customers interacting with your:
- Website
- Social media
- Email communications
- Advertising messages
Are you effectively utilizing these communication channels to connect with your target customer?
Many marketing teams focus on a single tactic like emails OR google ad words. When you do this, you miss huge opportunities to connect and convert true target customers in a faster amount of time.
According to Hubspot, it takes on average 8 touch points before a customer is ready to convert. A single marketing tactic will not be enough to reach your customers.
Introducing Integrated Marketing To B2B Tech Companies
Having a clear perspective on your persona’s pains comes directly from your target marketing work. With this, you can orchestrate marketing messages on various channels to reach your target audience, exactly where they are, emotionally and physically.
B2B tech customers may have a longer buyer’s journey due to buying “teams” and a more complex buying process. Walker Sands’s article says “Prospects now typically interact with sellers between 7 and 15 times before even “qualifying” as a lead. Your marketing strategy must use multiple channels to reach your customers 7-15 times.
Also, B2B companies typically have to market to different stakeholders involved in the buying process. Todecides deliver that message efficiently, you need to understand their pains and how to reach them effectively across channels
For example, If you are selling marketing automation software to a company, the CFO might focus on the financial pain points of ROI, while the VP of marketing will focus on the functionality and efficiency of the solution to better equip their team.
Having multiple stakeholders that care about different things in any buying process complicates marketing’s job. Clear messaging and integration marketing become your secret sauce. This is where the importance of a marketing strategy cannot be overemphasized; you can’t have one blanket message and tactic for multiple personas.
Integrated marketing allows you to truly target each persona who makes a decision on a sale by using multiple marketing channels and crafting content for each stakeholder’s pain points. You can get into the hearts of your target audience by crafting messages that “hit home,” in other words, directly speak to their needs.
Integrated Planning Building Blocks
All the building blocks we have been discussing in our Play Big Series work together in integrated planning.
| Building Block | How It Plays Into Your Integrated Demand Generation Plan |
| Target Marketing |
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| Content Marketing |
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| Value Proposition |
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| Sales and Marketing Alignment |
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Integrated marketing is the strategic orchestration of using all your marketing channels to address your customer’s pains to create more leads and increase your sales.
Ready to create your integrated marketing campaign? Remember these 5 steps:
- Find your target audience
- Create personalized content and campaigns for all your marketing channels
- Curate your company’s message based on your value proposition, positioning, and your customer’s pains
- Unify your sales and marketing teams to promote your message together
- Set up your integrated marketing plan
Need help with your integrated marketing and campaign planning? This is OUR secret sauce. Let us join your team and help you ramp up your demand generation program.
