The Integrated Marketing Process: A Strategic Approach

• Benefits to integrated marketing 101

• Why is integrated marketing a winning approach?

• Stages to integrated marketing success

Benefits to integrated marketing 101

Integrated marketing companies offer a blend of consistency, efficiency, expert knowledge, and adaptability, making them an attractive option for businesses looking to streamline their marketing efforts and strengthen their brand presence. Do you think you understand integrated marketing? Is it just a buzz word used by marketers to sound clever? Let us run through the concept, benefits and stages you can employ within your business to drive business growth.

Consistency Across Channels: Integrated marketing helps you ensure a consistent message and brand identity across all marketing channels, whether it’s digital, print, television, or social media. This consistency helps reinforce the brand message and creates a stronger, more recognisable brand identity.

Efficient Use of Resources: By consolidating marketing efforts under one roof, businesses can achieve greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It eliminates the need to coordinate with multiple agencies, thereby saving time and reducing potential communication issues.

Enhanced Client Experience: Onefeed’s integrated digital marketing offering is full-service, which creates a seamless customer experience across the different digital marketing disciplines. A single view and single team working to the same objectives we liken to a war ship pointing its guns in the same direction and firing at the same time. It is far more powerful and leads to far greater results. From a time saving point of view our weekly catch up meetings ensure less time is spent in meetings and relevant people provide updates on their part of campaign delivery. Our clients love the fact that they sit in a single marketing meeting surrounded by experts delivering all aspects of their digital marketing, rather than having meeting after meeting, discussing disconnected, sporadic ideas and objectives!

Data-Driven Decision Making: Integrated marketing companies like Onefeed use advanced analytics to track customer interactions across different channels. This provides valuable data that can be used to make informed decisions about future marketing strategies, ensuring that resources are allocated to the most effective channels. As consumer journeys and touch-points to conversion are experienced across multiple channels a multi-channel approach is obviously needed.

Adaptability: An integrated approach allows for more flexibility and adaptability in marketing strategies. If one channel is under-performing, resources can be quickly reallocated to more successful channels, ensuring the best possible return on investment. With regular “sprint” meetings with our cross disciplinary team we quickly identify issues or opportunities which we can respond to and put resources behind. As a result Onefeed charge a single clear retainer, which ultimately gives you access to a full team of highly skilled experts in their field at a fraction of the cost of hiring internally.

Comprehensive Strategy Development: “Integrated marketing” companies typically offer a range of services, from market research to campaign execution. This allows them to develop and implement comprehensive strategies that address all aspects of marketing, from brand awareness to sales conversion. Historically this has applied to any and all marketing services, but we are different in this respect. Onefeed technically offer integrated digital marketing, as our focus is online. Our heritage as a technical Google Shopping / paid advertising company puts our expertise in all areas of digital marketing using online metrics and KPIs to measure effectiveness, but as these diverse services are brought together under a unifying strategy, still deliver an integrated full-service offering for e-commerce and e-retail businesses.

Expertise and Specialisation: With a team of specialists in various marketing disciplines, which can be leveraged to create highly effective, targeted campaigns across multiple channels. Expert personnel is expensive and requires advanced organisational workflows, project management and seamless collaboration to deliver a single strategy. What Onefeed deliver every day for many clients is exceptionally difficult to achieve with in-house teams or smaller, less specialised agencies.

Scalability: Integrated marketing companies can scale services to suit the size and needs of the business. Whether it’s a small, targeted campaign or a large, national initiative, we have the resources and expertise to manage marketing efforts at scale. We also use our digital marketing maturity model to identify the stage any business is at and what efforts and tactics are needed at that stage of growth, but also to go back and resolve any missing components needed from earlier stages of maturity.

Why is Integrated Marketing a Winning Approach?

Integrated marketing is cohesive and merges various marketing methods and channels to create a unified and seamless customer experience across what we call a “digital footprint”. This can be defined as the platforms, networks communities and online spaces a brand or business occupies. In today’s digital age, where consumers interact with brands across numerous platforms and devices, integrated marketing becomes essential. It ensures all forms of communications and messages are linked together to reach relevant consumers at the right place at the right time.

By doing so, this joined up cross-channel or multi-channel approach amplifies the brand’s voice across the internet. It works to nurture customers throughout the marketing funnel from brand awareness to conversion seamlessly for advertisers to grow customers and revenue while reducing ‘total cost of sale’. People use different platforms for different reasons (think how people interact on social media like Instagram vs looking for services on search engines) a different approach is needed for each, while working together to achieve the same aims with the same message and brand positioning.

The Onefeed Integrated Marketing Approach in Summary

Despite being a well established discipline, using integrated marketing strategies to deliver a unified experience to the target audience which results in net growth and ROI often fails. Poor understanding of the target audience, ineffective practical implementation, poor data insights, lack of road-mapping and a failure to prioritise and scale the activity are a few reasons we see companies fail.

At OneFeed integrated marketing involves collaboration between SEO, Google PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising), paid social media marketing, and content marketing as a whole, focusing on fluidity to drive marketing objectives across the marketing funnel framed by our digital marketing maturity model. It is not ‘different departments working together’. A data driven approach and unifying strategy sets the agenda and role for each channel/discipline to fulfill a role in capturing and converting customers and sales.

Onefeed have been developing what we term the “digital marketing maturity model”, helping an increasing number of clients reach their potential across channels. This is crafted through years of experience and tailored for each business to generate the greatest positive impact on our client’s core KPIs. We approach integrated marketing from understanding each situation, industry, vertical, target audience, internal capabilities, budgets, long-term objectives and technical setup to name a few.

“Doing the right thing badly is ineffective. Doing the wrong things well spells disaster.“

So what? Get the strategy right! A bad strategy can kill a business.

The approach and framework are crucial in ensuring that all channels are not only working towards the same goals but also complementing and enhancing each other’s efforts. Too often a sporadic approach to different marketing channels results in lack of understanding in their respective roles, causing a wasted budget and pinch points in the user journey to conversion. Are you looking at all channels to drive the final sale? An integrated approach, which models value across the marketing funnel drives short as well as long-term growth. Focusing all marketing effort on final sale neglects capturing new interest and brand awareness, often resulting in a gradual decline in sales and customers.

Integrated or cross-channel marketing takes many forms. For example, content optimised for SEO purposes can be leveraged in social media campaigns, and data insights from PPC and Social Media inform SEO strategies. While GA4 and analytics can use custom audiences, very useful in retargeting/ marketing higher value website traffic. Seamless data sharing leads to more efficient use of resources and a higher return on investment for clients.

Stages to Integrated Marketing Success

The following steps outline a revised integrated marketing process, designed to be universally applicable across various industries and client requirements. These steps provide an idea for how e-commerce businesses can create tailored, impactful marketing campaigns that resonate with target audiences, attract and convert sales with scalability and budget control.

Let’s delve into these steps to understand how each contributes to a successful integrated marketing campaign:

1. Develop a Tailored Strategy:
   • Adapt marketing efforts and targets based on identified pinch points in the user journey to conversion using Analytics data
   • Match the current technical setup and costs associated with setting up and running truly integrated marketing to ensure focus on what will deliver the most initial value, while planning future investment into data collection and marketing technology.
   • Create a testing plan to segment brands or product categories according to market trends, seasonality and channel specific response.
2. Establish your Digital Foundation:
   • Conduct keyword research across all data points available to identify high-traffic, low-competition keywords relevant to your industry.
   • Optimise existing website content, blog posts, and product descriptions to increase organic search visibility, while supporting key interests and keywords in paid media.
   • Benchmark user journeys from Ad click through to checkout to ensure full visibility, reliability and accuracy to model user behaviour
3. Integrate SEO and PPC Keyword Data:
   • Analysing SEO and PPC data to determine the most effective and highest value keywords is key to optimising Search as a whole.
   • Turn audience and performance data into insights to inform PPC campaigns, aligning paid ads with successful organic search terms and content production.
4. Utilise PPC Data for Social Media and SEO Campaigns:
   • Gather demographic and interest data from PPC campaigns to create targeted audience segments for social media ads.
   • Identify high converting and value keywords to segment campaigns
   • Use a cross-channel marketing platform like Google Analytics to measure relative success of campaigns, ROI and trends to create insights useful in tweaking the strategy and tactics.
   • Assess touchpoints to conversion model to see which channel has impact on different parts of the journey to conversion.
5. Implement Detailed Social Media Targeting:
   • For specific client sectors, like fitness products, target social media ads to users based on interests, demographics, and previous engagements.
   • Test a number of targeting options and goals to assess relative performance and the role social media plays in the conversion funnel
6. Execute Mutual Remarketing Across Platforms:
   • Ensure remarketing tags on the client’s website to track visitors.
   • Create remarketing campaigns on Google and social media to target these visitors with specific ads.
7. Strategically Use Social Media Ads for Consideration Stage:
   • Develop engaging video ads for new products aimed at increasing brand awareness and interest,. using a lower cost reach campaign.
   • Run these ads on social media to target users in the consideration stage of the buying process.
8. Allocate Shared Ad Budgets for Flexibility and ROI:
   • Share a monthly budget between Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
   • Regularly adjust the budget allocation based on the platform’s performance and ROI.
9. Target High-Cost PPC Keywords via SEO:
   • Identify and target high-cost PPC keywords organically with high-quality content, reducing reliance on expensive PPC campaigns.
10. Implement Integrated Marketing Reporting:
    • Combine data from SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns in a monthly report at a channel centric level as well as aggregated summary for total value generation or “Marketing Efficiency Ratio” assessment.
    • Break down the performance by channel to show contributions to overall marketing goals like traffic, lead generation, or sales.
11. Test and iterate:
• Form a testing plan once campaigns have matured and normalised to drive incremental revenue and develop additional tactics and strategic changes as needed.

Ok, we’ll give away one real life integrated marketing strategy as a final thought:

One approach which has proven to work well, in particular for companies with limited time, budget and/or cash flow is cyclical  targeting. By focusing on a manufacturer brand per quarter will allow you dive deep into each brand’s unique attributes and tailor their strategies accordingly. The target brand is identified through volume, market potential, seasonality and current sale performance in the market.

SEO’s immediate role in improving the overall domain rank sets the foundation for a robust online presence and improving organic rank and signals for that brand category/ product range. This enhanced SEO dovetails with PPC (Google Shopping, Search and Performance Max campaigns) and paid Social strategies, leading to cost-effective Ad spending. SEO now functions as much as a signal for Google on which website should perform better in an Ad auction, prioritising Ads from websites which are most likely to convert and facilitates a user journey to final purchase.

Utilising PPC data to shape social media campaigns and keyword targeting in SEO vice versa ensures that campaigns are responsive to real-time audience behaviours and preferences. The mutual remarketing efforts across Google and social platforms underscore the importance of a unified approach in re-engaging prospects and maximising reach.