Why Marketing Should Be Integrated

Marketing is the culmination of many tactics coming together. Here’s why your business needs an integrated approach to marketing.

Most businesses have a siloed approach to marketing. They hire a specialized company, like an SEO or PPC firm, to run digital advertising and thereby think they’re “doing marketing.” Or they bring in a junior generalist and hope they can make miracles happen without extra hands, a deep knowledgebase, or specialized tools.

However, marketing goes far beyond any one tactic and requires more than one skill set, in addition to several enterprise-level software tools. Marketing is the culmination of multiple tactics—like content creation, SEO, social media, email marketing, and paid search—and the expertise required to implement them effectively as a single coordinated program.

What is Integrated Marketing?

Integrated marketing is when you strategically set up and implement a suite of marketing tactics. In integrated marketing, each of your tactics and assets for the tactics are carefully mapped and executed to work in conjunction.

Think about integrated marketing as an orchestra, rather than a one-person band. While a one-person band is fantastic, an orchestra is the result of many individual musicians working together to create a harmonious, unified, grand result.

Marketing is no different. While a siloed approach might be effective to a degree, you need integrated marketing to truly grow your brand and your business.

Create a symphony with your marketing—not a drum solo.

Your Marketing isn’t Integrated if…

How do you know your marketing isn’t integrated? There are three major indicators that you have a drum solo, not a symphony:

1. You are only doing one type of marketing.
2. Your users have a confusing user experience.
3. Your marketing doesn’t get the results it should for the time and money you’ve spent.

No single marketing tactic will get you results. If think buying search engine ads or posting on social media is marketing, think again. As mentioned above, you need several marketing tactics in a coordinated marketing plan, working together in harmony. Undertaking a full marketing plan that includes several tactics working together takes time, discipline, and expertise—but it is the only way to get results.

Further, marketing that doesn’t work in a coordinated fashion will confuse your target audience. If you create search engine ads that send people to your home page, not a dedicated landing page coordinated with the advertising campaign, you’ve wasted money. You haven’t fully considered the full marketing funnel needed to carry an interested person through to making a purchase. Nor have you considered how to bring a customer back to buy from you again in the future or how you can market other relevant products, services, and information to them.

What a missed opportunity.

In the best-case scenario, the confused user just clicked away. Maybe you’ll get them back easily if you try again—they may not remember they’ve clicked on your ads before. In the worst-case scenario, clicking through an ad to a confusing webpage will make them see you as disorganized or even shady—which means they’ll never come back.

Examples of Integrated Marketing

Let’s look at what happens when your company adopts integrated marketing.

To create an integrated marketing program, you determine which set of marketing tactics work best to achieve your business goals.

Let’s say your marketing plan involves content marketing. You need to create content for your website, designing all needed visuals and writing the text in such a way that it shows up when people use a search engine, like Google, to find the type of products and services you offer. You need to create signup forms for your company newsletter and you need to create and manage email marketing efforts that share your content, along with social media posts to promote the content.

This is a very simple example for illustration purposes—most marketing plans require far more complexity to achieve results—yet it shows how marketing tactics need to come together to support a marketing program.

For a more complicated example, take the earlier scenario and add in search engine and social media advertising. These ads need to lead to dedicated pages on the web that tie back to each ad’s featured message and graphics, to ensure that each prospect has continuity of experience across your marketing effort. When the prospect fills out a form on the dedicated landing page, this person gets added to your CRM and your e-mail marketing databases. Your marketing and sales efforts then automate e-mail to these prospects and change their status in your system based on their interaction with your outreach.

Putting multiple marketing tactics together and coordinating them so that they work in concert to achieve a better result than any one tactic can achieve when operating independently is the brilliance of true marketing. An integrated marketing approach strengthens the efficacy of each tactic and helps maximize your return on investment for marketing.

Why Don’t More Companies Integrate Their Marketing?

Integrated marketing takes a lot of time, planning, coordination, and expertise. Integrated marketing requires a big-picture perspective and careful technical execution—both of which require multiple skill sets.

The results of integrated marketing are long-lasting and highly effective, yet they take patience and know-how to realize.

A company looking to build a lasting brand, a loyal customer base, and steady but consistent growth uses an integrated approach to marketing.

How Do You Integrate Your Marketing?

To support businesses looking for lasting and steady growth, FrogDog has created a set integrated marketing plans that it executes on an ongoing basis for its clients. These packages help us work effectively with companies to bring them steady growth.

We want to help companies develop their brand, nurture leads, and increase their market share. Learn more about FrogDog’s marketing packages and schedule a consultation today.