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Table of contents
Introduction
If you’re a marketing leader and we’re the betting kind, our guess is you’ve likely been under (enormous?) pressure to do more with less: hit higher targets with reduced budget, produce greater output with less resourcing, be absolute AI experts, adapt to changing priorities with less runway time.
In the race to stay ahead, leaders often gravitate toward the latest and greatest technology which is all well and good... until they fall short at poor integration.
To maintain a competitive edge—or even better, consistently outperform your competitors—you need an integrated set of technology, as well as an integrated set of people and processes.
It’s time to reinvent your approach to marketing. Let’s do it together.
True, effective, highly personalized integrated marketing is just as much about empowering your people and integrating your processes as it is about using the best technology.
In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how to run your team with a bigger, badder, deeply integrated approach, with guidance you can bring home. The next time someone asks “hey, do you do integrated marketing?” you can say, “Absolutely, it’s all we do.”
You won’t be lying, and the proof will be in the numbers.
What is integrated marketing?
Need a quick primer on the definition of integrated marketing? No sweat.
Sometimes known as integrated marketing communications, integrated marketing is the process of delivering a consistent and relevant brand experience to your target audience across every single one of your marketing channels.
Today, we’re digging a level deeper to explore how an integrated marketing approach across your people, processes, and tools will benefit your team and your performance, including breaking down those toxic, traditional team silos that are getting you nowhere.
The benefits of an integrated marketing strategy
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Breaks down traditional silos
Spoiler alert: Traditional team silos are so out. With an integrated marketing approach, you break down those silos that too often divide your marketing team and their efforts. Instead, with a series of strategic actions—like introducing more efficient workflows, streamlining your communication channels, and adopting the right martech tools—you foster a culture of collaboration and alignment. The result? A unified front that improves communication, streamlines decision-making, delivers consistent results, and enhances your team's creativity. Tick, tick, tick. ✅ 
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Better marketer experience
At Optimizely, we're all about making marketers' lives easier by banishing content chaos, marketing mess, and general day-to-day stress. That's kinda why we're so obsessed with integrated marketing strategies.
By breaking down those team silos and enhancing both collaboration and creativity, an integrated marketing strategy allows your team to be more supported, spend more time doing the tasks they enjoy, and generally, be more excited to get out of bed in the morning.
Because of this, you'll see them perform with greater efficiency, precision, and creative freedom. Less of the creative burnout, more of the 🔥 FIRE 🔥 content.
Experiencing a lot of team burnout? Here are the signs your marketing team is broken (and how to make it better).
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Better customer experience
As the adage goes, "garbage in, garbage out." Investing in your marketer experience is a direct investment toward their output: your customer experience.Today’s customer expectations are more complex, demanding, and intricate than ever. Channels and touchpoints are multiplying, attention spans are waning, competition and content are more saturated than ever.
But experiences that meet these new standards don’t just happen—they take an incredible amount of deliberation, intentionality, and strategic insight from your marketers.
Long story short: The benefits of integrated marketing are... integrated; they link together. Talk about practicing what you preach.
leadership & strategy
Strategic leadership: How to align your team for success
As a marketing leader, your role is to create a unified environment where each team member feels integral to the larger mission. Here’s how to lead with purpose:
- Align your marketing strategy to wider business objectives: Convert your business’s core objectives into specific and actionable marketing initiatives for team guidance an proof of bottom-line impact.
- Create shared OKRs: Clarify each team member's role and responsibilities—emphasizing ownership, accountability, and teamwork.
- Lead with transparency first: Be incredibly open about the team's direction, decisions, and the rationale behind them. Encourage feedback and address challenges openly to set a precedent for honesty and respect.
Need more tips on how to align your team? Check out our guide on team alignment.
Chief marketing officer
Team, culture, and execution
Julia Maguire, Digital Marketing Director, sits down with Michiel Dorjee, Digital Marketing Director, to explain the balance between breaking down silos and encouraging creativity (May 2024)
Next stop: Defining your team mission and vision
Defining and communicating your vision creates a common understanding of your purpose and expectations, and ensure that everyone is aligned and committed to the same goals.
And then: Defining your team values
Shared values are the bedrock of your culture as a marketing team. They shape behavior, influence decisions, and foster unity.
You’ll notice that ‘no marketing of marketing’ is one of our core values as a team, meaning our principle is not to boast externally about our accomplishments.
By doing the right things and delivering real results, our hard work will speak for itself.
framework, process & creativity
How to run effective integrated marketing campaigns
The most effective marketing campaigns are built on a solid foundation, which consists of a) a strategic framework paired with b) the right processes.
Here, we’ll pull the curtain back on a proven approach that has consistently driven success within our own organization—and it might just be the key to unlocking your team’s potential, too.
Structuring your marketing team
Let's be real; different organizations have different priorities, and therefore have different marketing team structures.
But we've got one hot tip for you, that you can apply to any organizational structure.
Inspired by General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams, Optimizely’s marketing operates in a network model that enhances adaptability, self-organization, and cooperation, characterized by:
- Shared consciousness: Radical visibility, transparency, and information sharing.
- Empowered decision making: Letting people who are closest to the action make key decisions.
- Agility: Enabled by the above elements, facilitating unmatched speed and adaptability.
Chief marketing officer
General Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams
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Shafqat Islam, CMO, Optimizely sits down with Ellie Dunbar, Sr. Content Marketing Manager, to explain the benefits of working in a team-of-teams style marketing org (May 2024)
Planning your campaign hierarchies
- You are first and foremost custodians of your business. Everything you do should stem from your brand.
- Take your company's wider end-goal objectives and break them down into big bets—strategic plays that move your organization toward a goal in pursuit of revenue and profit growth.
- Your integrated campaigns will live under your big bets. These campaigns should include the topics you want to own, grow, and build authority on—topics that all channel owners across the globe can focus their work around.
- And then every. single. aspect of your marketing—every channel, tactic, activity, every piece of content—should ultimately ladder up to a defined integrated campaign.
The supporting resources you need to bring your integrated campaigns to life become much clearer, and you're able to connect everything directly back to your company goals by using this structure as a lighthouse.
digital marketing director
Integrated campaign structure
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Julia Maguire, Digital Marketing Director, sits down with Michiel Dorjee, Digital Marketing Director, to explain how Optimizely runs integrated marketing (May 2024)
Working in tiger teams
‘Tiger teams’ originated in the aerospace and defense industries (most notably during the Apollo program) to describe a group assembled to solve specific, often critical, technical or systemic problems.
Tiger teams defined: A small, cross-functional group of experts who come together to solve specific problems, or work on specific projects or product solutions.
Dynamically staffing our integrated campaigns with tiger teams of channel experts has helped us shed the segmented setup that many marketing teams might be familiar with today.
Choosing the right messaging
FYI: We're making this section a case for more creativity and more testing.
Why? Because allowing your teams to take calculated risks and experiment with new ideas encourages creative problem-solving and can lead to unexpected breakthroughs that significantly advance your organization's goals.
We’ve been working to reignite the creativity in our marketing campaigns for a few reasons:
- We want to be a brand that people think about on the weekend
- Award-winning creative campaigns generate 11x more ROI than non-awarded campaigns
- It’s just... so much more fun for marketers to work on
Here are some of the boldest creative marketing examples (and risks) we’ve taken lately:
And here’s why we’re able to do it.
- Maintained persona placemats and messaging briefs for each of our products align everyone on who our audience is and what we want to say to them.
- We always know our campaign objectives, the action(s) we want our audience to take, the channels we want to go after, and the budget we have to execute.
- Most of our meetings don’t exist anymore, so the ones we do have are saved for collaborative brainstorming and creative endeavors.
- We have access to reliable data and testing tools to make decisions about what does and doesn’t work.
As storytelling expert Jonah Sachs says, “Good marketers see consumers as complete human beings with all the dimensions real people have.”
A fresh, creative approach is how you’ll connect with real humans, win the eyes of your audience, and get back to driving real ROI.
digital marketing director
Guardrails for integrated creativity
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Julia Maguire, Digital Marketing Director, sits down with Michiel Dorjee, Digital Marketing Director to talk about the positive impact on creativity with an integrated marketing approach (May 2024)
Tools and technology you need for integrated marketing
Integrating a centralized and collaborative platform into your marketing technology stack provides a single source of truth to ensure every team member is on the same page and working together.
When selecting a platform, look for features that promote seamless collaboration, streamline workflow management, and offer comprehensive analytics to track and measure success.
AI as an integrated marketing sidekick
While we can stop sweating over the idea of AI stealing our jobs, we shouldn't boycott it completely out of spite. In fact, there are a lot of practical uses of AI for marketers, including:
- Content creation
- Automation
- Brand-specific content
- Experimentation
- Auto-suggest
- Personalization
AI can play a part throughout your content lifecycle. By integrating AI directly into your workflows, you will streamline efficiency and enhance the quality of work produced—all within the familiar environment where your team already operates.
Get your hands on our AI playbook, made especially for marketers, to take your team's AI knowledge levels from general to guru, making sure it's being used to its full potential.
product and engineering
The benefits of AI for marketers
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Lauren Hammarstedt, Sr. Director of Product Management, sits down with Zahid, Sr. Manager of Software Engineering, to discuss the different ways AI is helping marketing teams (May 2024)
Calendar views for increased visibility
Shareable, comprehensive calendars views provide a system that gives everyone full visibility into current and upcoming marketing activities.
Leadership always knows exactly what projects are in flight, marketers can see what’s heading their way, and nobody wastes time on duplicative or redundant work.
Source: Optimizely Content Marketing Platform visual campaign calendar
Workflows for collaboration, ownership clarity, and deadlines
Collaboration. Is. Key.
Flexible automated workflows help your team (and other teams that you work with) spend less time in meetings about work and more time being creative, doing the actual work, or getting feedback quicker.
Everyone knows exactly what’s expected of them, the cumulative effort needed to get a project over the finish line, and what deadlines the group is working toward.
Source: Optimizely Content Marketing Platform workflows
Clear reporting and measurement
Clear, reliable, and digestible reporting is what helps your team make informed decisions, evaluate and refine their strategies, and ultimately drive growth by focusing on metrics that matter most to the business.
This makes a difference to, not only your content and campaign performance, but operational and efficiency reporting too. Use reports to determine bottlenecks, how long it takes to create different content formats, how many pieces of content you have per topic, and so on.
Source: Optimizely Content Marketing Platform content analytics and operational efficiency metrics
Your teams should be able to easily access information to analyze which assets are driving the most traffic or desired behaviors, understand how audiences are engaging with their activities, and quantify the impact on lead generation and revenue.
Pssst... you might find our guide to evaluating content marketing platforms very handy too.
Build your integrated marketing strategy
By implementing the strategies outlined above, you're well on your way to leading an efficient, effective, and truly integrated marketing team capable of achieving remarkable results.
Ready to deepen your knowledge and refine your approach to integrated marketing? Check out our 10 step guide to building your integrated marketing strategy.