In this post I’ll discuss marketing from a 40,000 foot view, and why it is crucial that your marketing efforts be integrated with one another (on a practical level).
What is Integrated Marketing?
For those who don’t know, integrated marketing is the idea of maintaining a consistent message and user experience across all marketing channels. Businesses do this to reinforce branding and reduce overall marketing costs through improved effectiveness.
On a more practical level, integrated marketing means your marketing efforts help you close more deals for less money. This applies on both a conceptual and practical level. We’ll touch on the conceptual stuff briefly, as it’s rather boring; the practical implementation is where the money is to be made.
On a conceptual level, you need to keep your marketing messaging the same. That means using the same slogan and logo on all your marketing materials, including everything from your business cards to your flyers to your website. It means you use the same color scheme everywhere. This does not mean you can’t target two different markets with two different approaches, as you can. However, if you are trying to appear edgy and modern in one situation (in an attempt to appeal to a young, trendy demographic), and uptight/formal in another situation, it’s probably not going to go over well.
In most cases, marketers who make this mistake have not clearly defined their Ideal Client Profile (or the business they are handling marketing for has not). When you have a crystal clear understanding of who your ideal client is, you can craft your marketing materials and market messaging to target that person. And because you’re not an amateur (meaning you don’t try to appeal to everybody), you focus on the people that matter (and damn the people who don’t).
Integrated Marketing is Practical (and profitable)
On a practical level, integrated marketing means PPC, SEO, email marketing, landing pages, and everything else work together. In our SEO & PPC post, I discussed how you should be using PPC to identify keywords that drive a good ROI, and then doing SEO for those keywords and those keywords only. Regarding email marketing, that means using your PPC landing pages AND your high ranking website pages (that get SEO traffic) to build your email list.
Regarding social media, it means asking your email followers to follow you on Twitter or Facebook. This one may sound less important, but social proof is no joke. When a brand new prospect lands on your site and sees that you have 3,000 Facebook likes, it gives you social proof (which means it makes you look legitimate). Same goes for Twitter.
Regarding landing pages, it means identifying what headlines, sub-headlines, and body copy drive conversions, and using that knowledge to increase the performance of your website pages (where it makes sense of course). It also means looking at what PPC ad headlines convert best, and testing those on your landing pages.
As you can see, none of these recommendations are complicated or require any money to implement. Unfortunately, many marketers miss the forest for the trees, and get super hung up on one segment of their marketing campaign while completely overlooking marketing as a whole.
Conclusion
In conclusion, don’t be an amateur. You don’t need to read a book on integrated marketing to understand this stuff. Find ways to make your different marketing efforts compliment each other. It will provide a more consistent experience for your users and should lower cost-per-acquisition if done properly.
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