5 Key Steps to Building an Integrated Marketing Strategy

Imagine this scenario: You see a billboard for a car rental company. The billboard is painted in vibrant hues of red and blue, and it proudly proclaims, “Car Rentals Done Right!” Intrigued, you decide to visit the company’s website when you get home. But when you do, you’re greeted by a completely different color scheme of orange and yellow, and a slightly altered tagline that reads, “Do Your Car Renting Right!” You’re left wondering if you’re even looking at the same company.

What you’ve just experienced is a fragmented brand experience. This hypothetical car rental company has presented you with a different image and message across multiple marketing platforms. As a business owner, it’s generally in your best interest to avoid such customer confusion. You can achieve this by delivering a consistent message across all your marketing initiatives, a practice known as integrated marketing communications.

What is Integrated Marketing?

Integrated marketing is the practice of delivering consistent messages across all your marketing communication platforms. Businesses with an integrated marketing strategy strive to present customers with the same visual style, slogans, promotions, and overall tone across multiple platforms. Whether they interact with your brand through a digital ad, a billboard, or an in-store encounter, they’ll notice a consistent look and feel.

Benefits of Integrated Marketing

Successful integrated marketing efforts can offer several benefits to both small and large businesses, including:

• Increased brand recognition: You want your customers to hear a consistent message from your brand so they can quickly associate it with you.
• Multiple opportunities to connect: When your customers interact with your brand through different channels, you have multiple opportunities to deliver the same consistent message.
• Cost savings: Integrated marketing can stretch your digital marketing budget. You’re essentially getting multiple campaigns for the price of one because you’ll use very similar creatives across different marketing platforms.
• Streamlined management: An integrated marketing strategy makes it easier for your marketing team to manage all these platforms and channels because you’ll be using the same tagline, color scheme, and sales promotions across all of them.

Building an Integrated Marketing Strategy

Developing an integrated marketing strategy involves a three-step process:

1. Identify the creative direction: This is your brand’s aesthetic or the overarching theme of a specific campaign. It includes voice, color, and typography. Make sure each of these elements can adequately appear on all your platforms.
2. Establish channel strategy: For each channel, you need to decide on distinct creative executions and how you will distribute the creative. Regardless of how many channels you use, each one should contribute to the same end goal: expressing your brand identity consistently across all platforms.
3. Plan your launch: Once all teams are in place and working together under a single integrated marketing plan, it’s time to launch your campaign. Your website, social media accounts, and ads all feature your new creative. Although it’s not as simple as flipping a switch, launching should appear that way to your customers.

Final Thoughts

Very few customers actively evaluate a business based on how consistently it executes its marketing strategies. However, your audience picks up a lot of subtextual cues from your marketing coordination—or lack thereof.

Customers are implicitly allowed to trust them and transact with them because they develop integrated marketing campaigns with a consistent brand image. By adopting an integrated marketing strategy, you can ensure that your brand delivers a unified and consistent message, helping to build trust and recognition among your customers.

As a premier digital marketing agency, Bonelli Systems provides a comprehensive suite of services, including an integrated marketing strategy, email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and business automation. Our commitment to customer success and our white-glove support truly set us apart. We believe in investing in our customers because as they grow, we grow. Discover more about our services and how we can fuel your business growth.

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