Why Integrated Digital Marketing is Critical for Your Business
In today’s digital world it’s critical to have an integrated approach with your online marketing efforts. Having a streamlined plan for you digital marketing helps you maximize and consolidate all your marketing efforts under one strategic umbrella. Listed below are four key reasons how an integrated digital marketing approach will help enhance your company’s digital marketing efforts.
Have ONE Marketing Strategy
Too often companies don’t have “one” overarching marketing strategy. Many businesses have multiple marketing strategies for different channels, created by different internal teams or departments, which often produce conflicting conversion goals and results. Although this suggestion may seem obvious, having a solid marketing plan in place that combines all strategies into one isn’t as easy as it sounds. This is why having an integrated digital marketing plan is critical.
Keep your strategy simple and achievable.
To achieve this, start by creating three main marketing goals you want to achieve. Give yourself a certain amount of time to achieve those three goals. Once you’ve agreed upon your goals and your time frame start putting together the road-map. Our suggestion is to keep your strategy simple and achievable. Make sure everyone involved in this process fully understands their impact and role. Remember, it can be difficult when there are too many cooks in the kitchen, that’s why delegation of responsibility is important when it comes to an integrated strategy.
Cross Department Communications
You may have heard the term “cross channel marketing”, which we will talk about in a moment. But let’s focus on a new term, “cross department communications”.
More times than not, your customer base is being spoken to by different team members within your company. First, your customer might speak with a sales rep, followed by an assigned point of contact, then they might have to deal with a customer service rep down the road. It all just depends, but the point here is simple: Most of your clients and customers are being spoken to by multiple people from your business. As you can see, it’s critical to keep a level of consistent, integrated communication.
9 out of 11 audiences are shared by every department.
According to a study from Omobono, 9 out of 11 audiences are shared by every department! So, it’s critical that every department understands your brand message, and tracks how they are communicating that message to those audiences. This brings up our next topic when it comes to cross department communication – creating your communications funnel.
Having a communications funnel is important. It’s critical for you to understand when, how, and by whom your customers are being communicated to. Listed below are three great databases to help you keep your cross department communications funneled correctly.
Multi-Channel Marketing
With today’s fast-paced digital world, we see company marketing strategies always evolving and shifting. The point of multi-channel marketing is the ability to interact with your audiences through various digital platforms. It’s been reported that multichannel customers are more likely to spend three to four times more than single-channel customers do.
The last few years the digital buying process has completely changed, thanks in part to mobile marketing. Let’s look at a multi-channel scenario.
A potential buyer might see your ad on Facebook while on their phone. Let’s say this person clicks on your ad but doesn’t take any hard action. Actually, let’s pretend they barely even stay on your website, and leave shortly after they click on your ad. If you have a strong integrated strategy, you will have pixels in place on your website to remarket to this person.
Now let’s pretend you remarket another ad to this person, but this time they don’t see your ad on Facebook, but they see your ad on their desktop via a display ad. Great, now we are getting our name and content in front of this person twice in two days. Let’s assume we only targeted “desktop users”. The reason for this is because we assume they are stationary and have more time to potentially make a buying decision. Ideal case scenario, this imaginary person now buys.
Now, unlike the scenario above, your digital advertising efforts might not always work that smoothly. This is even more reason why it’s important to be diverse in your channel marketing strategy. It’s been noted that you have less than seven seconds to get someone’s attention online. Now, with the digital space being as competitive as ever, you have to get your content, ads and brand in front of someone multiple times on multiple different channels for them to take any hard action.
Tracking Your Return on Investment
When you start putting together your integrated digital marketing strategy, it’s important to track everything you’re doing. Having good metrics in place will allow you to measure results that matter most to your business.
Most businesses don’t start tracking their metrics until it’s too late. If you get to a point where you are trying to make sense and understand your own company’s marketing results, it’s time to put some tracking methods in place.
It’s absolutely crucial that every business
understands where their leads are coming from.
It’s absolutely crucial that every business understands where their leads are coming from. Are majority of your leads referrals? Maybe you get most of your inquiries from your email campaigns? Or could it be a mixture of both? Just like we have to funnel and track our cross department communications, we have to funnel and track every single lead that comes through the door.
First, you need to figure out what metrics to track. Ask yourself: What are three to five meaningful metrics that will help you improve your marketing efforts in the future once you have data from these metrics?
Once you have measurables in place, make sure you’re always monitoring your progress. Being able to see this data and real time results allows us to adjust and pivot our marketing campaigns when they aren’t working. Which in essence, allows us to save time and money. Remember, you have to be able to track if your marketing efforts are actually driving sales.
Here is a list of the top 50 tools for measuring your marketing in 2016.
Putting together an integrated digital approach to your marketing efforts can be overwhelming. Having a strategy in place is a great place to start, but having measurable action items to execute the plan is where the real traction comes from. Once you have you a multi-channel plan of attack with relevant metrics you will see first-hand how important integrated digital marketing is. Especially in today’s fast paced online world.
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