These days, the term ‘integrated marketing’ has been eclipsed by shinier and trendier buzzwords, but the concept is still just as relevant. In fact, today’s marketers are expected to be able to perform integrated marketing feats on a daily basis. But in some ways they have lost sight of what integrated marketing actually is. We see it all the time: slap on a common key visual and – tada! – you have an integrated marketing campaign. Put your campaign on three or more marketing channels and – shazam! – that’s good enough to be called integrated.
In some ways, integrated marketing has become a shield for lazy marketing. Time to stop and think: is this really the best you can do?
What is Integrated Marketing all about?
Marketing is essentially putting forth a specific proposition to a specific target audience with an agenda to convert the audience towards a positive outcome. In our modern world, with its explosion of marketing channels and its wealth of content formats, we need to hold on to these fundamentals even tighter. You only need to consider three basic concepts:
People
People must be at the heart of every marketing campaign. Start by creating three personas – the persona of your brand, a representative persona of your brand’s existing customers, and one of your potential customers. Now think about the relationship between these three personas.
Dig deep and ask lots of questions – how will they interact with each other? How will the customers get to know your brand? What will ‘wow’ them? What sort of experiences do they like? Where do they hang out and who do they hang out with? To answer these questions, you need to understand how the latest marketing trends and channels work and how your audience uses them.
Data
We now live in the age of big data, where we can accurately and scientifically attribute particular behaviours to a particular stimulus. Data helps validate the experiences you create for your audiences. We recommend collecting two different data sets: interaction or behavioural data and profile data.
Interaction data captures an audience’s reaction to the experience you have created, be it an event, a pop-up store or a campaign. Profile data keeps a record of the buying habits and demographic profiles of your audience. This information will help you track of how well your three personas are ‘getting along’ and show you what you can do better.
With technology, the collection of these data has made it more available to marketers. From data collected at registration, or the number of scans you get for a brochure download, there are options galore to help you. With the advent of event apps, you can also work in gamification features, and from there, infer the popularity of your exhibits, for example. Then, how about monitoring the amount of buzz during your event? Did your event manage to garner more positive sentiment? Did you acquire a better understanding of your products?
Whilst technology enables, it takes a skilled and conscientious team to pick and choose the tools to use, and to plant touchpoints so that data can be collected in the most non-intrusive manner possible. Again, there’s nothing wrong with tried and tested methods – the good old survey form sometimes still works well for me.
And the final piece of the puzzle?
Courage
Every campaign needs a courageous decision-maker to weed out unnecessary channels and messages and ask brave, challenging questions, like: how can we weave the principles of integrated marketing into our event? Can we augment it with gamification? Can we work in social elements? If you’re planning an ‘ordinary’ marketing campaign, can you create a unique, emotional experience out of it?
The courage to answer these questions, to disregard the noise and to make ‘big’ strategic decisions as well as smaller stylistic decisions is what will focus and consolidate your next integrated marketing campaign and separate you from the herd.
