Integrated Marketing: Your Secret Sauce for Connecting with Customers

In team sports, every member is crucial to winning a game. Everyone plays a key function, and without each member, the team falls apart and can’t succeed. Integrated marketing works the same.

Integrated marketing uses all your marketing channels, like team members, to deliver your targeted messages directly to your customers wherever they are. With your customers’ pains at the core of your strategy, integrated marketing is your MVP.

Don’t Place All Your Eggs In One Basket: Why Integrated Marketing Works

Integrated marketing works so well because you have to use multiple marketing tactics in an orchestrated sequence to reach and connect with your target audience. One marketing approach doesn’t fit all, and it takes a lot more than once to connect.

A Forbes article points out that:

“Integrated campaigns across 4+ channels outperform single or dual-channel campaigns by 300%.”

When your campaign uses more marketing channels, you will have more success in reaching your target audience.

These days, everyone is on their phone or computer. Your target customer is “everyone.” They are active on multiple channels across multiple devices, so your marketing strategy should echo this. Think about your customers interacting with your:

• Website
• Social media
• Email communications
• Advertising messages

Are you effectively working with these communication channels to connect with your target customer?

Many marketing teams focus on a single tactic like emails OR Google Adwords. When you do this, you miss huge opportunities to connect and convert true target customers in a faster amount of time.

Introducing Integrated Marketing To B2B Tech Companies

Having a clear perspective on your persona’s pains comes directly from your target marketing work. With this, you can orchestrate marketing messages on various channels to reach your target audience, exactly where they are, emotionally and physically.

B2B tech customers may have a longer buyer’s journey due to buying “teams” and a more complex buying process. Walker Sands’s article says “Prospects now typically interact with sellers between 7 and 15 times before even “qualifying” as a lead.  Your marketing strategy must use multiple channels to reach your customers 7-15 times.

Also, B2B companies typically have to market to different stakeholders involved in the buying process. In order to deliver that message efficiently, you need to understand their pains and how to reach them effectively across channels

For example, If you are selling marketing automation software to a company, the CFO might focus on the financial pain points of ROI, while the VP of marketing will focus on the functionality and efficiency of the solution to better equip their team.

Having multiple stakeholders that care about different things in any buying process complicates marketing’s job.  Clear messaging and integration marketing become your secret sauce. You can’t have one blanket message and tactic for multiple personas.

Integrated marketing allows you to truly target each persona who makes a decision on a sale by using multiple marketing channels and crafting content for each stakeholder’s pain points. You can get into the hearts of your target audience by crafting messages that “hit home,” in other words, directly speak to their needs.

Integrated Planning Building Blocks

All the building blocks we have been discussing in our Play Big Series work together in integrated planning.

Integrated marketing is the strategic orchestration of using all your marketing channels to address your customer’s pains to create more leads and increase your sales.

Ready to create your integrated marketing campaign? Remember these 5 steps:

1. Find your target audience
2. Create personalized content and campaigns for all your marketing channels
3. Curate your company’s message based on your value proposition, positioning, and your customer’s pains
4. Unify your sales and marketing teams to push your message together
5. Set up your integrated marketing campaign

This blog was written by  Shannon Prager from LeadITMarketing, a fully outsourced marketing service business specialized in B2B technology and B2B professional services companies. Head to their website for even more great content and to see how they can help you get your marketing strategy on track.

From time to time guest contributors write on the Workbooks Blog – have something to say? Email Megan at megan.cheney@workbooks.com.