Implementing an integrated marketing strategy is an effective way to guide your company’s brand identity and ensure that every aspect of your organization is aligned. This complete approach empowers your business to create consistency within your marketing and ensure a cohesive, meaningful experience for your key audiences. By using an integrated marketing approach, you can more successfully connect with your stakeholders, drive growth, align company culture and enhance brand awareness to stand apart from the competition.
How Integrated Marketing Can Unify Your Brand
Integrated marketing centers the customer experience by considering whether your messaging achieves the 4 Cs: the content must have a coherent message, every aspect of your marketing strategy must be consistent, all parts of your campaign must tell the same story and maintain continuity and each component of your marketing needs to complement the others. These principles guide marketers to create campaigns that always follow the same unified brand identity.
An integrated marketing approach can bolster your business in many ways:
- Providing consistency. No matter how or where audiences are interacting with your company, they are receiving the same messages and tone across all touchpoints, establishing a cohesive brand identity.
- Encouraging loyalty. Repeating the same message through a variety of channels, whether that’s via in-person interactions, social media or your website, ensures that your customers will remember your brand and can look forward to a consistent experience, encouraging brand loyalty. If customers remember you, know they can trust you and know what to expect from you, they will tend to trust your brand more than organizations that are inconsistent.
- Efficiency and effectiveness. Consistent marketing across all channels reduces redundancies in creating content, allowing you to repurpose creative across multiple channels, which is more efficient and effective.
What Does Integrated Marketing Look Like?
Now that you know the ways an integrated marketing strategy can benefit your business, what does implementing this approach look like? Let’s say that your company is launching a new promotional campaign on social media. To be truly effective, this campaign can’t exist in a vacuum. It will appear disjointed and won’t complement the whole of the brand.
Creating a unified front will allow you to get the most out of your campaign. Integrate this campaign across all marketing materials – digital and physical. Create continuity so that, whether your audience is seeing you on their Instagram feed, in a magazine ad or in a physical location, they are getting a consistent message. Take input from sales to ensure the campaign aligns with their goals and that they can effectively use it in their own work with customers.
Apple is a great example of a company that uses integrated marketing strategies to create a cohesive brand across all entities. All of their marketing channels communicate a consistent message, tone and aesthetic. When you come into contact with the company you can easily identify it as Apple.
Find The Right Alignment
Take the time to evaluate your organization and look for areas where customers may have a disjointed experience. Does your marketing fall in line with your actual company culture and values? For instance, if your company culture is more conservative and buttoned-up, but your marketing department is running a campaign that paints you as an edgy alternative, you’re not creating marketing that complements or is consistent with your true brand identity, which can lead to confusion for customers.
If your marketing campaigns aren’t being integrated through other departments, you may run into issues where salespeople and marketing are contradicting each other, showing customers that you aren’t a unified brand and discouraging them from establishing a strong connection with your organization.
Find the places where inconsistencies lie, and establish a strong creative direction that roots them out and provides a unified goal and identity that every aspect of your company works towards. Establish open lines of communication between teams and ensure everyone in the company is heading in the same direction. Integrated marketing takes teamwork and every facet of your organization working under a consistent brand identity.
To really be effective in today’s oversaturated and highly competitive marketplace, an integrated marketing approach can help your organization be successful. Making changes to create a unified marketing strategy can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it alone. CONNECTIVE Agency is here to help with all of your marketing needs. To learn more about all the ways we’re ready to support your company, visit our website.
