The world is becoming increasingly complex and that has also been reflected the way companies market. There are now multimodal approaches to marketing and that has allowed businesses to reach out to people like never before.
However, it has also layered in unnecessary complexity. What makes a marketing campaign effective is not the variety of your channels but how well you integrate all of those into one cohesive strategy.
Here is everything you can do right now to achieve huge success with your integrated marketing communications strategy.
Learn about your audience
One of the key principles of aligning your integrated marketing communication strategy is to actually consider what it is that your customers are looking for. If there is one thing for sure about online ads it is that no one ever likes to see irrelevant recommendations. That is why top-tier marketers leverage marketing personalization.
Luckily, modern data and analytics tools allow companies to carefully examine their target audience, spot patterns and monitor their online habits. All of this information can be extremely useful as it allows marketers to create personalized offers.
Things to consider include; the location and the social media platform of choice for a given target audience, potential motivations, identifying common customer journey problems and following interaction history.
All of these will allow you to deliver fine-tuned content and offers that have a high chance of resonating with your clients. Not only will you be able to make better offers, but also streamline your strategy, especially in terms of making it more cohesive.
Set up clear objectives
Once you have clear data and metrics in place, you can actually ask specific questions about where you want to direct your strategy. Setting up clear objectives early on will allow you to track progress in the long run. Ideally, you should set up milestones along the way on a weekly, monthly, and yearly level.
Once you know why you are doing something it will be much easier to find the answer to the question of ‘how’ you should do it.
Pick the best channels
If you know who you are targeting with your marketing campaign it will be much easier to find the best marketing outlets. For instance, you might find that the majority of your teenage audience can be found on TikTok. Whereas, older generations will usually have an active Facebook account. This depends also on the purpose of your business and the type of messaging that you want to convey.
For optimal results contact a professional marketing consultancy agency that will get you on the right track. In addition to that, consider what kind of content your business will benefit from the most. For instance, if the majority of your products have great visual design and cannot be simply explained using words alone, you should definitely leverage platforms such as Instagram, which are predominately image-based.
This is not to say that you should stay clear of other advertising methods. The goal of your integrated marketing strategy is to capture the best parts of your brand and then send out targeted messages that are going to be optimized for various types of media platforms.
For instance, if you are going to promote your offers through e-mails you will definitely want to make the message feel unique and personal, which is where good personalization tactics come into play.
Think like your customers
In order to deliver offers that really get the right message across, you will want to understand your customer’s decision-making process. The first stage always starts with realizing that there is a potential problem that they want to solve.
In an attempt to solve it, they will look online for potential services and products that can help them. This is the crucial part where your strategy comes into play, you have to show up in the total pool of all possible options, and on top of that you want to present the most relatable and relevant offer. This will allow them to consider your product or service as the most optimal option.
However, note that just making the sale is not the sole purpose of your marketing, you also want to create an excellent after-purchase experience and offer the ability for your customers to review your product and reach out to you if they have any questions or suggestions.
Repurpose your content
With a multi-modal marketing approach, you definitely want to consider reusing your content in order to realize a fully integrated strategy. In some scenarios, you will be able to simply reuse the content in its original form. For instance, most Instagram reels are just reposted TikTok videos.
This allows you to actively engage with your audience on both fronts. On the other hand, other types of content can be readjusted or transformed so that they deliver an equally potent message but in a different way. For instance, you can repurpose some of your successful blog posts and articles and turn them into video scripts for YouTube.
In conclusion
As you continue to develop your strategy you will have to reiterate and refine. This makes your strategy even more cohesive and well-integrated over time.
However, you will be on the right track as long as you stick to: understanding your audience, setting up clear objectives, finding the best channels and carefully repurposing your content.
By Mike Johnston