Firstly, integrated marketing is the term used when combining multiple marketing methods to help achieve your objectives. Whether that’s driving traffic to your product/business, raising awareness of your brand, increasing engagement and interaction, generating new leads to talk to or helping to drive sales.

This is usually achieved by combining traditional marketing with new media. In essence, you are combining different marketing methods and channels so you can talk to your target audience on different levels, finding the most effective ways to get your message across. Yes, your message must be relevant to your audience but it also needs to resonate with them, hitting at the right time to get a reaction. If your business stuck to one way of marketing to your target audience, then you’ll miss out on a potentially huge section of your profile who aren’t susceptible to that particular form of marketing.

For example, email marketing is a fantastic tool to communicate to your audiences and the analytics you can receive are both very useful and clever to use again and again. But, if you only ever communicate via email then you’re going to miss out on consumers who don’t value it or aren’t really connecting with you as you aren’t connecting with them on a deeper level.

So, your latest email has a great open rate, but has your message really hit home with that person? Would it not have a better chance of being remembered afterwards if it has been reinforced with another communication? Maybe through Social Media ad retargeting. Finding the right combination of methods in order to reach your audience and connect with them is key and should always be considered.

Integrated Marketing, why is it right for your brand?

In a nutshell, integrating your marketing channels will increase your chances of achieving your business objectives. It requires strategy and planning, but by appealing to your audience across a variety of methods, you will get better results.

When planning out your plan of action, the first question should always be the same, why would my target audience be interested in my product/business/skillset? You start with the why because consumers don’t buy what you do, but why you do it. Then why is your purpose. That’s where you grow long-term relationships with consumers who believe in you. We’ve learnt that from Simon Sinek and it forms the basis of all our strategic thinking.

From there, you can ask yourself how – how do I get people to listen? And then you finish with what – what can I offer to my customer base.

It’s clear to us that integrating the right marketing methods in a campaign will get better results. It not only allows you to talk to your audience on different levels, at different times but also allows your brand to grow your marketing appeal and reach new audiences within your target profile.

Like with any marketing activity, the overall strategy needs to be considered and the objectives you want to achieve along with your ‘why’, need to be at the centre of the decision process. You shouldn’t jump on to a new marketing channel just to venture out. It still may not be right for your brand or your audience. Social Media is a great awareness and engagement tool but it may not serve your business objectives the same way that print might. The value is in picking different channels that complement each other.

How should you integrate your marketing activity? You don’t need to do everything to be effective.

In today’s world, it’s more important than ever to integrate your online and offline activity. Reaching your audience with both physical and digital work is paramount to success. Certain people will be more susceptible to digital activity whereas others will prefer to be reached in a traditional format.

But, integrated marketing isn’t about using as many methods as possible. It needs to be considered and the outcome needs to be focused around using a combination of marketing platforms to deliver on the overall strategy.

Some forms will focus on generating awareness whilst others will complement awareness messaging with the conversion. For example, your initial communication may focus on raising awareness of a new product in an email format. Your second approach may segment the consumers who have opened and clicked through the content (using your analytics), with a stronger conversion message in print format. Of course, it will be harder to reach your target consumers with new GDPR legislations but it puts a greater emphasis on marketers to make a deeper connection with their target audience to get their interest and opt-in.

So, what do we think about integrated marketing?

Setting up your integrated strategy is unique for each business. Our approach focuses on a five-pillar framework; Understanding, Planning, Execution, Measurement and Optimisation.

Understanding – we work to understand the requirements of the project, what our clients want to achieve but also what insights we can draw on to support

Planning> – we make SMART objectives to achieve goals. Plan the right strategy and marketing methods to achieve the goals we’ve set out and see where we can integrate our deliverables to strengthen our message to make sure it’s memorable

Execution – our design team then takes over with concept designs, visual exploration through to artwork ready for production. We manage the production of all our projects too, making sure what we’ve planned and agreed to achieve matches the design and end result.

Measurement – we believe it’s important to not only deliver great strategy and creative, of course that’s a huge part of getting your campaign noticed, but we also believe in measuring the resulting and learning about what works and the pitfalls. You perhaps learn more about what didn’t work so well more than what did so you can move forward.

Optimisation – and finally, once we have analysed the campaign and gained the knowledge of the successes, we optimise. Whether that’s through live changes during a campaign or taking our learnings at the end of the campaign to use in the next one. That knowledge is vital for growth.

The mind-set of integrated marketing is a big part of our thinking for all of our clients, whether we work predominantly with them on creative, digital or print projects. That’s because we believe in questioning the detail in all of our briefs so we can understand what the best strategy and activity is right to answer business objectives. And the answer never rests on one sole marketing method.

If we’re asked to do a brochure design, we interrogate the motives to see if the objectives can be better achieved by integrating the brochure with other elements of the marketing mix. Maybe that’s together with social media, PPC or email marketing. Maybe even all of them if the answer has the best chance to achieve the best results.

It’s what makes us different, we’re not yes people. We want to help brands grow and we want to guide them in the right direction.