What Exactly is Integrated Marketing

With conversational search and AI tools eating into our SERPs and SEO performance, it's even more important to adopt an Integrated Marketing Communications approach.

Integrated marketing refers to a strategic approach that intentionally unifies all aspects of marketing communication to deliver a consistent message to consumers across various channels and platforms. So with Search happening everywhere, creating multi-channel communications is key to showing up in the right search at the right time, in the right format.

What Makes Integrated Marketing Different?

In my years in marketing, I have worked in different marketing structures, some tiny and some large and fragmented. The goal of integrated marketing is to provide a seamless and cohesive brand experience for your consumers, ensuring that all your marketing efforts are working together to deliver your key brand messages - effectively rather than in isolation.

It's like the Left Hand may not be talking to The Right Hand

The larger and more fragmented your marketing teams and operations become, the less integrated they will be. This is a natural occurance in operational structures such as "agile" ways of working and "category management" structures where each area of the business, be it a category - perhaps "Beauty" - or a customer mission - perhaps "Personal Care" - operate in something like a silo.

This of course is not the intention of the set-up of these organisational structures, in fact on the contrary they are meant to be more customer centric and deliver a better optimal performance for that category or area, through deep focus.

However, in my experience, these "areas of responsibility" can take on a life of their own, producing vastly different communications to their customers, leaving the brand itself with a) no budget and b) an overall lack of cohesion in messaging.

Give me an Example

Retail probably has to be the worst offender here, especially department stores, big box general retailers (think Walmart), or supermarket retail. With each area of the business having their own KPIs and sales objectives, this go-to-market strategy can quickly become very inconsistent and lacking in its overarching brand proposition that created brand love in the first place.

Sticking with the beauty example - one retailer may have positioned itself as a value retailer, aiming to be cheapest or best value in the marketplace - ie: perhaps they offer a jumbo sized body cream that no one else does, or they run regular multi-buy specials that add extra value and savings. Beauty is not a category however that lends itself to bold colours, big prices and low-end marketing. So managing your brand positioning along with appealing to customers, and competing in the beauty market could be specifically challenging.

Here are some ways an integrated marketing approach can help:

1. Consistency

All marketing messages and brand communications should convey the same core message and values. This helps strengthen brand recognition and customer loyalty. For example, a consistent approach to talking about your best value products and offers ahead of everything else.

2. Multi-Channel Strategy

Then creating content that reinforces this messaging across various communication channels, such as traditional media (TV, radio, print), digital media (social media, email, websites), and direct marketing. This doesn't mean you can only promote your value offers if you are above-said brand, but ensuring the weighting or messaging and creative does not stray too far away from the core of your brand. By utilising multiple platforms, brands can reach target audiences where they are most active. This may require some nuances in creative, but it should not have to be radically different - ie: Instagram is more "photogenic" and Facebook is more "real-life".

3. Cross-Functional Collaboration

Integrated marketing involves collaboration among different departments within an organisation (such as sales, public relations, advertising, and customer service) to ensure that all efforts are aligned and support the overall marketing goals. A tool to help this is to create a one-pager or "brand-on-a-page" for every person in the organisation to use in their workflows and communications to make sure each thing they are working on ladders up to this core.

4. Consumer-Centric Focus

Here's where it can stray a little - understanding customer needs, preferences, and behaviours. As per point 3 you can do this differently for different segments, but always revert to the "Brand-on-a-Page" as a check list to ensure messaging and content is BOTH tailored to resonate with the target audience, creating a more personalised experience, but also delivering to the key brand values and proposition.

5. Measurement and Optimisation

Integrated marketing will always review the data and metrics across the broadest range of data points to ensure that the marketing activities are delivering to the core of their reason for being. Simply looking at a Google Ads metrics, or Facebook engagement is not holistic enough.

At its core every piece of marketing should deliver to the following metrics over time:

1. Increased brand awareness

2. Increased brand love

3. Improved Net Promoter Scores (NPS - a persons willingness to refer your business to friends and family on a scale of 1-10)

4. Revenue growth year-on-year

5. Loyalty - or repeat customers

What does this mean for the stok.communications approach to integrated marketing for SME customers?

For SMEs integrated marketing should be a lot easier. However, many SMEs have found themselves caught in a web of marketing service providers that they have collected over the years. First they may have had a website development company tackle their website. Then came social media, so a social media agency was added. Community management and customer care requirements escalated, and so another 3rd party may have been added. Then came Google - a minefield requiring further specialists. After that the industry was abuzz with SEO, organic search, SERPS (search engine page) and a bigger requirement for content and optimisation of that content. Something none of the above specialists seemed to be doing, and so further resource was added.

Now we are sitting in a whole new realm of AI driven search, which some have called "Search Everything Marketing | Optimisation" (SEO or SEM). This means that people are not only using Google for Search, but multiple AI tools (ChatGPT, Co-Pilot etc) as well as simply searching on their channels of choice - we see younger audiences using Instagram or YouTube to search for brand or product information because they know they will quickly get to the User Generated Content about these products and services quicker than they will get the answers they are looking for via a brand search on Google.

Google itself has of course introduced AI search to its search functions and therefore, your sponsored Google Ad or organic SEO work may not be showing up in the same way anymore.

This is - by definition - Integrated Marketing

At stok.communications we have specialised in multi-channel marketing since inception, focussing not just on one aspect of your business, but all of them, and all the channels where we can show up.

We understand the role of video assets - and linking them onto your website, creating a YouTube channel so that you have a home there, and linking that content to your Google Ads. Gary Vaynerchuk talks about many marketing principles that deliver to the brand, but mostly he focuses on volume. More content across more channels. In fact he talks about 64 pieces of content a day and "7 Hours of Content" - meaning that someone needs to absorb 7 hours of content from you to become a lead.

Using tools like LATER we push out content across as many platforms as we can and always ask ourselves "could this also be a blog" in fact more often than not, we try to start a content funnel with a full length blog post or a landing page based on a long-tail search them or a keyword phrase we believe will be of interest to our audience and bring them to our websites to find out more.

Doesn't this cost a lot?

If you worked with the multiple list of agencies and 3rd parties mentioned above, then yes, it would cost a fortune, and unlikely end up integrated at all - unless you put a lot of personal time and effort into making sure it does.

At stok.communications we tackle this approach one month at a time. Our content strategy approach works through your business each month working out what to write about, what to produce and where to communicate it. We use AI tools to help wherever we can and we tools like Canva to minimise all costs of production and facilitate speed to market.

In Summary

Marketing activities are no longer just one thing, or just one channel. The old fashioned approach of briefing an agency or multiple agencies and then waiting in line for your resource allocation is no longer fit for purpose.

Our cost-effective month-by-month approach will enable you to create multiple layers of content synergistically across various marketing channels and activities. At the end of the first year, your integrated marketing will be regularly surfacing across multiple channels and ranking in "SEO" - "Search Everything Marketing".

Integrated marketing enhances the effectiveness of marketing activities by creating a multi-channel, but unified and engaging experience for consumers, to build awareness, brand loyalty and deliver sustainable revenue growth - that is not just bought through paid advertising spend.

To find out more about an integrated marketing package for your business reach out to us at stok@stok,nz or book a virtual consultation in my diary below.

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