With every product launch, new announcement or rebrand, all businesses hope that it will go out with a bang, getting as many eyeballs, footfall, clicks, likes and shares as possible. A positive and news-worthy launch will set the tone for the rest of the brand’s campaign.
However, in today’s highly competitive market, the traditional advertising and marketing promotions do not work effectively. You need to be in tune with all forms of marketing and launch PR activities to gain maximum awareness for your brand.
To do so, one of the best strategies is to use Integrated Marketing, which has evolved as well. Integrated marketing today is vastly different from what it was 10 years ago.
Here are 9 tips for you to synergise your marketing efforts for the best ROI!
- Understand your target audience
Integrated marketing needs to be customer-centric. Only when the target customers of the product are identified, we are able to choose integrated marketing channels based on their preferences through in-depth market research.
You need to understand which channel is the most effective way to communicate with your customers.
The main source of information for customers is the internet, online news sites, social media, newspapers, magazines and broadcast channels such as TV and radio.
If they use social media, what kind of topics are they mainly browsing and discussing?
What are the posts that get the best engagement and in which format – videos, GIFs, animations, infographics?
You should have a deep understanding of customers’ preferences for obtaining information to formulate the most appropriate integrated marketing strategies for the products.
- Obtain a strong database
A large-scale, constantly updated database is necessary for integrated marketing. Expand your database by continuously investigating and studying the behavioral preferences of potential customers.
This way, you can use it as a reference when choosing a suitable marketing channel for your product. A constantly updated database can also help you in monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, and make appropriate adjustments accordingly.
It also helps you to find the most relevant content for your advertisements that attract customers, and keep abreast of the latest market trends.
- Having a consistent and distinct style
Maintaining a consistent style in multiple channels of marketing can help your brand establish a positive image in the minds of customers for top-of-mind recall. It takes time and consistent effort though.
Designing an attractive and memorable logo or slogan and using it repeatedly in advertising and all communication channels can often leave a deep impression on customers.
Some highly creative or socially resonant content can even lead to virality just overnight. Every time the audience comes across these content, they can associate it to your brand, and have a strong sense of affinity to it.
This not only creates a social effect for your brand, but also creates a wave of free advertising for it.
- Make sure your marketing teams are working in sync
The cooperation among multiple departments and channels is a must in integrated marketing.
You have to make sure every team shares the same strategy and objective for each marketing campaign. They are required to share same content and have the same standard or all products.
This can be done by holding regular inter-department meetings to provide information about the product and the campaign across the board to ensure your branding has a consistent look and feel no matter the platform.
- Choose suitable channels
Targeted selection of marketing channels for your products can help you establish contact with customers faster. Not all products are suitable for promotion on social media. Although social media has huge traffic, many elderly people still cannot use them proficiently.
Similarly, traditional advertising channels are not suitable for all products. Some traditional media, such as newspapers and magazines, may not have good enough traction amongst millennials or Gen Z.
Effective marketing needs to focus on the most direct and relevant marketing channels for the audience, rather than covering everything, and these choices are made based on your database and understanding of your customers.
- Build a strong connection with your customers
Different from the one-way infusion of information in traditional marketing, integrated marketing also regards the voice of customers as an important aspect of audience engagement.
Good communication with customers and customer communities helps to maintain customer loyalty. It also plays a role in promoting your brand in the communication between customers and other potential users. However, frequent communication with customers needs the joint efforts of multiple departments, especially in public relations, which is responsible for the direct communication with the commands, feedbacks and inquiries from the customers.
- Create a unique experience for everyone
According to market research, the product itself only accounts for 25% of the purchasing decision. Other considerations are the entire customer journey process from browsing, payment, delivery, unpacking and after-sales experience.
Provide customers with multiple purchase channels, free product customisation, convenient payment experience, worry-free delivery service, proper product packaging, and complete after-sales service system, which are all components of the integrated marketing ecosystem.
- Identify your channel managers
Depending on the size of the company, you may have multiple people or teams responsible for multiple marketing channels. Therefore, you must ensure that there is an in-charge responsible for every fixed channel.
If you ask one person to manage several channels, there’s a risk of overload and a compromise on quality of the campaign.
At the same time, you have to ensure the professionalism of your team members, so that you can continue to push the sales activities of each channel to attain the best campaign results.
- Find a professional and reliable team for the campaign
For many SMEs, they do not have a proper marketing department.
On the one hand, hiring a whole marketing team costs a lot while the current campaign may not be require that amount of manpower; on the other hand, if the company decides to make the campaign on their own, they do not have the expertise or resources to gain maximum results.
Thus, it is necessary for the companies to find a marketing partner that can help them to promote the campaign with high quality while remain at relatively low cost. A reliable marketing or PR agency can offer you quality campaigns and strategies among a wide range of media channels to keep you and your customers connected.
