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Integrated marketing

What is integrated marketing?

Integrated marketing is the process of delivering a consistent and relevant brand experience to your target audience across all marketing channels.  

Often known as – or at least associated with – IMC (integrated marketing communications), 360-degree campaigns, and omnichannel marketing, integrated marketing ensures a unified messaging across the board, bringing together channels and tactics such as:  

  • Content marketing  
  • Social media marketing  
  • Email marketing 
  • Public relations (PR) 
  • Case studies and testimonials 
  • Digital media  
  • Influencer marketing  
  • Paid search and SEO  
  • Direct marketing 

By binding these different channels together with an integrated marketing approach, you not only develop a consistent, customer-centric experience for your brand, but also drive solid brand awareness, brand recall and brand authority in doing so. 

Oh, and this kinda alignment and consistency makes things a lot easier and more productive for your entire marketing team too. Fun times for your team and fun times for your customers and prospects? What’s not to love. 

Check out how handy guide on how to build an integrated marketing team.

5 (big) benefits of an integrated marketing strategy  

Okay okay, you’re sat there like “but what else is in it for me?” – we ‘ve got you.  

Here are 5 – real big – reasons why an integrated marketing strategy is so effective:  

1) Improves marketing-influenced revenue 

While you probably have a passion for marketing, not everyone (aka your non-marketing colleagues) recognizes just how powerful it can be for sales.  

Enter: Your integrated marketing team with your integrated marketing strategy, showing all those other departments who’s boss.  

That’s right, with effective team integration and consistent messaging across the board, you’ll see marketing-influenced revenue fly… In fact, brand consistency in itself has shown to increase revenue by 10-20%. 

2) Boosts performance in marketing KPIs 

When you’re bringing in that sweet revenue, you’ll also be hitting those marketing targets.  

Alignment across your marketing and brand messaging is proven to boost performance and metrics, including:  

  • Website traffic 
  • Engagement rate 
  • Conversion rate 
  • Retention rate 
  • Referral and loyalty  

…and overall marketing ROI as a result. Hands up if you want in on that: 🙋🙋 

3) Builds trust and authority in the eyes of your target audience 

We’re in a competitive world, and a money-conscious world – if you want to succeed, you need authority within your industry and your target audience to trust in you as a brand.  

Consistent messaging and efficient targeting = your answer. 

Talk the talk, but also walk the walk to get ahead of your competition and prove yourself as a leader in your space.  

4) Improves operational efficiency  

When you’ve got a good level of transparency in terms of what everyone is working on, it streamlines marketing efforts all round.  

But this cross-functional team collaboration can go further than that. A good level of clarity, transparency and consistency across your marketing team can really elevate your projects, campaigns and content, giving them a turbo boost that even Mario and Luigi would be jealous of. 

Don’t say it, don’t say it…. Teamwork makes the dream work! …fine, we said it. 

5) Enhances marketing visibility and internal transparency 

With a fully integrated team and that real sense of unity, you will show yourself to be a powerhouse part of your company.  

This will not only boost your marketing visibility, but also inspire other teams to work in this way. We’ve shown that marketing alignment sees great results, so when the alignment is company-wide, you’ll be unstoppable. 

Why an integrated marketing strategy is so effective  

Integrated marketing strategies work so well because it streamlines your team and streamlines the buyers’ journey down the funnel.  

Here’s an example: Let’s say a customer is interested in buying a new bike.  

Sure, they might have a cycle guru friend to make some suggestions, but it’s likely they’ll be hitting up a search engine and entering a basic search.  

Step #1 of the research process has begun. ✅ 

This is where they’ll come across all types of online properties, including: 

  • Company websites 
  • Review sites 
  • Social profiles 
  • Blogs 

And once they’ve visited all these pages, they’re going to see the retargeted ads.  

We already know a multi-channel marketing strategy is essential for this to work (not to mention the fact you’ll see 5x greater ROI than single-channel campaigns) but making sure your brand messaging is aligned across each of the channels means more focus, more consistency, and a lot less confusion for your target audience in the buying process.  

In fact, customer retention improves by up to 91% when customers engage with a brand in multiple channels, proving integrated marketing’s long-term benefits too.  

Optimizely 🤝 Your integrated marketing plan 

If all those juicy facts and stats about integrated marketing got your attention, two things:  

  • Same 
  • And, here’s how Optimizely can help you see similar results… 

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform is an all-in-one, end-to-end workspace, purpose-built for marketing orgs  – what does that mean to you? It means transparency, teamwork, time-saving, and terribly good results for your marketing department.  

In other words: with Optimizely, you can play out the ultimate integrated marketing campaign and entire strategy, and win (way) bigger as a result.  

See how Optimizely Content Marketing Platform works in this video demo.