Integrated marketing is a holistic approach to communicating your marketing message. It’s making sure that you are delivering a consistent message across all your marketing efforts, both on and offline. It goes far beyond just putting a common tagline across all your ads. It means communicating a consitent identity and message from medium to medium, and delivering consistently on that identity.
Why is integrated marketing so important in today’s world? The answer is fragmentation. With more and more television networks, radio stations, digital mediums and digital devices competing for your consumers’ attention, it’s becoming harder to cut through the clutter and get your message across. More importantly as businesses use multiple companies to work on different aspects of their marketing, they run the risk of fragmenting their message and diluting its impact. An Integrated marketing campaign is a powerful way to overcome theses challenges.
To tackle fragmentation effectively, everything you do to attract, convert, retain, and engage your customers should be integrated. Not only will this help you deliver a more powerful message, an integrated approach results in more efficient use of your marketing resources. Assets and resources can be shared and integrating different channels lets you exploit their individual strengths, maximizing their impact and the return on your marketing dollars.
As mentioned above, integrated marketing goes beyond just using the same tagline across all your communication. It requires not only the identification of a powerful, unifying strategy and a compelling positioning for your brand, but the discipline to roll it across all your customer touch points – from press, TV and radio ads, to your website, branding, outdoor advertising, mobile site, direct mail campaigns and more.
Your marketing is more powerful when every advertising and marketing piece communicates a consistent key message. Each time a customer or prospect sees your message, it’s reinforced in their minds, building greater awareness and trust over time. The result is a campaign that communicates a key message that’s more powerful than the sum of its parts. So when your customer’s ready to buy, you are “top-of-mind.”