Build Brand Trust With Integrated Marketing

Integrated marketing involves the active assembly of fully integrated marketing programs that are designed to create, communicate, and deliver value to customers using the company's resources, partners, and employees holistically.

Many of the most successful consumer-facing companies leverage integrated marketing to unify their customers’ experience across all of their marketing channels, but some brands and businesses fail to see the necessity of it.

If you wish to implement a holistic marketing strategy, leave no stone unturned. Read on to discover what integrated marketing is and the potential benefits it can offer to your company.

What Is Integrated Marketing?

An integrated marketing approach incorporates any components of your business that work together to develop and promote your products or services. There are four primary forms of integrated marketing, with each being equally important to the overall process.

External

Communicating with people outside of your company to promote your brand or advertise your products is the core process of external marketing. Through external marketing efforts, you can deliver messages to your audience using an array of communication channels. Some examples of external marketing include broadcast advertising and email distribution. More advanced external marketing strategies typically employ social networking services and other media-heavy platforms

By building the external marketing capability of your company, you can develop the infrastructure you need to implement holistic marketing campaigns.

Internal

Your employees are your most valuable assets, and they can become an essential part of your marketing strategy as well. Internal marketing involves keeping your employees excited about the projects they are working on. By doing so, you create buzz and excitement that will inevitably be transmitted outside of your company.

If you want to incorporate internal marketing into your business strategy, here are some common methods that work well for businesses of all sizes:

Employee recognition programs- Providing your employees with incentives can immediately improve their morale and boost productivity. You can provide financial incentives, but often just hosting employee-oriented events is enough to provide employees with the recognition they need.
Integrated communication applications- If you provide your employees with the means to communicate with each other easily, you will increase the number of opportunities they have to develop meaningful connections. You can also use communication apps to measure engagement, allowing you to understand how your employees are engaging with your internal resources.
Group discussions- Providing your employees with the space to talk about their workplace issues with each other can improve the overall satisfaction of your employees. Think about it, if your employees are busy working, will they ever have time to discuss their thoughts about the company and their work? A group discussion that involves the leadership can give your teams the chance to circulate ideas that could improve your marketing efforts significantly
Bonding activities- To effectively perform internal marketing, your team must be comfortable working with one another. Bonding activities, such as retreats and camps serve as unique opportunities for your staff to build meaningful connections that may make them more effective at work. This internal marketing method promotes positivity in your company, and that positivity moves workers to create stronger, more successful marketing campaigns.

Horizontal

Horizontal integration of your marketing processes involves managing the lines of communication between departments of your business that may have an impact on your marketing or sales. This means that your production teams and financing teams may need to collaborate to ensure that both sides have all of the relevant information they need. With all areas of your company working together to ensure that your marketing efforts are successful, you can create better outcomes for your business.

Vertical

Vertical integration of your marketing processes looks like a top-down adjustment of your company’s processes, with the targeted intent of making all of your business activities align with your company’s mission.

Why Is Integrated Marketing Essential To Your Business?

By integrating your marketing channels, you can ensure that your brand has the infrastructure it needs to communicate important information to your valued customers. A well-crafted message has a lot of potential for returns, and by widening your reach with integrated marketing, you can ensure that your messages reach members of your target audience.

Integrated marketing can also help you leverage your external marketing channels to cultivate customer relationships and build the public’s trust in your organization. Through these trusting relationships, you will be able to sell more products and generate far more engagement.

As more trust builds for your company, brand recognition and brand loyalty are sure to rise

As more trust builds for your company, brand recognition and brand loyalty are sure to rise as well. Brand recognition measures the likelihood of consumers recognizing your brand when they see it in their daily lives. Brand loyalty, on the other hand, is a measure of how likely consumers are to continue buying your products or services.

Upon growing these areas of your customer engagement, you will be able to reach larger audiences than ever. Your current marketing strategy may not include niche communications platforms like radio or television, but that doesn’t mean you can’t change course.

Leverage your research team, strategists, and digital and social marketing resources to increase revenue. Once you add integrated marketing into your business strategy you’ll be capable of yielding higher revenue, as your company will have the capacity to deliver clear branded messaging across various channels.

Create Your First Integrated Marketing Campaign

You have many choices for where you can promote your products and services. You could use traditional methods, like print advertising and direct marketing, but there are also more complex methods such as email marketing. Other web-based marketing campaigns may be successful as well, so consider placing websites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at the core of your marketing campaign

To create a fully integrated marketing campaign, you must organize your strategy correctly and execute on each step as effectively as possible. These are the steps we suggest you follow to coordinate a successful integrated marketing campaign.

Step 1: Define your target audience

It’s impossible to optimize your marketing strategy without identifying your core audience and target demographics. Before creating the foundation for your integrated marketing campaign, you must develop a thorough understanding of the attitudes, interests, and behaviors that your customers commonly portray. By doing this first, you can acquire valuable data that can be used to inform the later steps of your internal marketing strategy.

Step 2: Decide which platforms you will use for communication

Facebook isn’t the best place to sell every product. Some products may thrive there, but others not so much. When choosing which platforms you will use for communication in your business. You must focus on how many people you want to reach, and where. If your goal is to reach people in a certain age group, choose an advertising platform that supports that objective

For example, network television is known to have an audience that consists primarily of older adults. If your company sells something that is appropriate for that age group, a television commercial may be a niche, but highly effective method of promoting your brand.

Always consider where your messaging will work best, and how much it will cost you to market yourself using those channels. If one platform appears to be more equitable than another based on your marketing research, choose that platform rather than one of the others.

Step 3: Maintain consistency

Your branding is the first part of your company that your customers will identify with. If your promotional materials are not consistent across all of your marketing channels, consumers may be confused by them.

Develop brand guidelines and style guidelines that dictate how you prefer your company to be portrayed. With set rules for how your marketing campaigns should be organized, you can ensure consistency in the style and tone of all of your messaging. This can increase brand recognition and promote repeat business.

Step 4: Create engaging content

If your content isn’t engaging, it doesn’t matter if people see it. Boring and uninteresting content will never convert as well as well-crafted, engaging content. Strengthen your overall marketing strategy by focusing on creating high-quality content that is made with your target audience in mind.

Every impression you get can lead to a sale, so think closely about how you can make better content as soon as possible. If necessary, do a case study to find out what works in your industry, then implement a strategy that capitalizes on what you’ve learned. With enough effort, the returns on this investment could be huge.

Step 5: Ensure that your messaging is fully integrated

If you are sending an email newsletter to your audience, why not also include a link to your latest promotional video? If you’ve been doing relationship marketing properly, people should eventually become loyal enough to your brand that they will begin engaging directly with your content. If there is nowhere for them to go after seeing some of your promotions, you won’t be able to fully capitalize on the lead.

As a rule of thumb, try to drive traffic to your ultimate target in as many ways as possible, at all times. If you provide as much value as possible in each promotion, your customers are certain to respond in turn.

Step 6: Keep your employees organized

Whether you rely on a marketing agency or internal marketing team to execute your integrated marketing strategy, you will need to keep your teams on task and organized to effectively reach your objectives. Train your team leaders to be highly responsive and engaged, and the quality of your leads will improve dramatically.

Step 7: Track your campaigns

The data produced by your marketing campaigns can allow you to create even more targeted campaigns in the future. Keep track of marketing analytics data to ensure that you have access to as much data as possible. As you produce campaigns continually, you will gain more and more understanding of where, when, and how you are achieving conversions.

Implement Every Step Of Integrated Marketing Now

If your current marketing team hasn’t proposed an integrated marketing strategy, they can learn more here.

If you want to ensure that your integrated marketing strategy works, you should work with a digital marketing agency like BeNatural Marketing. Our team of talented marketing experts can help you develop a holistic marketing strategy that incorporates valuable marketing methods like integrated marketing.

With our help, you can engage more customers and build brand trust. To get started, please fill out the contact form located at the bottom of this page. ∎