A Pro’s Guide to Managing Integrated Marketing Campaigns
HubSpot describes integrated marketing as,
“the process of arranging your different marketing channels to work in tandem to promote your products or services, typically through a strategic campaign”
From a B2B perspective, integrated marketing campaigns don’t only include your inbound or digital channels, but also traditional channels like print, radio, and TV, as well as buyer personas and the touch points at each stage of their journey.
All these moving pieces made it hard to achieve a seamless customer experience through an integrated marketing campaign ……….until now.
The following 7 step guide will enable your team to develop a stronger integrated marketing campaign for greater future results.
1. Define Overarching Campaign Goals
Before considering the channels that will be part of your integrated marketing campaign, you must define the overall goal of the campaign. These should be SMART goals so they help you stay focused, track success effectively, and learn where you can improve for next time.
Here are a few examples of categories your goals can be based on:
- Customer Types (Personas, Target Accounts)
- Budget
- Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQL)
- Sales-Qualified Leads (SQL)
- Closed-Won Deals
Once you know who you’re targeting and have your goals set, you’re one step closer to successfully implementing a seamless integrated marketing campaign. Take a moment to map out how you want your campaign to impact your bottom line, too.
2. Know Your Target Accounts and Personas
If you haven’t taken time to create your buyer persona profiles, there’s no time like the present! Here are the questions you should be answering to really understand who your business is targeting.
- What’s their job title?
- What industry are they in?
- What’s their education level?
- How many employees are in their business?
- What are their individual, team and professional goals?
- What challenges do they currently face?
- What are their common objections?
- How is their professional success measured?
- Small demographic profile (age, gender, lifestyle type)
3. Make Sure You Have a Strong Team
Each integrated marketing campaign requires the use of technology and processes, but it all begins with people, therefore it is vital that each campaign has a strong leader that can orchestrate the process. If there is a certain area you need additional support in whether that is lack of manpower, lack of budget to hire internally, lack of expertise, need for training or strategic guidance, you should consider outsourcing part of your campaign.
Maybe you need a consultant to guide the process. You might need artwork created but don’t have the need for a full-time internal designer so you might consider a contractor. Or maybe you need someone to guide your media planning and help you get some of the best rates available for advertising (hint hint, that’s us).
Whatever your need is, if your internal team doesn’t have it, don’t think it’s not possible to do it, you just have to be clever about the way your team is structured.
4. Choosing the Correct Marketing Channels
Integrated marketing campaigns involve a number of channels and it is vital that as a marketer, you understand the media channels and titles your persona is consuming.
There are two ways to do this, the wrong way which is to go off what you feel will work or what was previously done in the company. Or you can choose the right way which is to make educated marketing decisions based on what data and insights are telling you about your buyer persona, we like to also call this the Buymedia way.
The channels that will work best for you will vary depending on the industry, brand, personas, and other external factors, and what worked this time last year may not work this time next year because consumer habits are constantly changing and it is extremely difficult to keep up to date with these changes.
Be sure that your plan includes decisions that are data driven because this could greatly impact the success of your integrated marketing campaign.
5. Deliver a Consistent Brand Experience
The more consistency you achieve with design, tone, messaging, and themes of your integrated marketing campaign, the better it will be. Brand consistency allows for all communication to align so that no matter what channel it is consumed, the same message is received.
To deliver a consistent brand experience, consider including the below documents:
- Visual brand guidelines
- Brand voice guidelines
- Brand messaging guidelines
- Buyer persona profiles
- Map of the buyer’s journey
All these documents form the bible for team members and external contractors involved in your integrated marketing campaign, so it is important to make sure they are accessible and maintained.
6. Create a Lead Nurturing Plan
Once you launch your campaign and leads are rolling in, what are you going to do with them? What is your plan for processing, routing, qualifying, and nurturing new leads? This should not be an afterthought once you’ve launched your campaign, but instead should be incorporated into the planning.
To provide a seamless transition, messaging in your lead nurturing plan should be consistent with the campaign messaging. Follow up emails can help to continue sharing value while also building trust and it is a good idea to make sure this process is automated. Marketo describes marketing automation is as “a key technology that streamlines, automates, and measures marketing tasks and workflows to help you save time and money”. It can reduce the manual element and let your team focus on other tasks. Marketing automation is a vital component to ensuring a successful lead nurturing plan.
7. Monitor, Learn & Repeat
When the campaign is launched and the team is busy following up on leads, it is important to take a step back and look at the performance at every stage of the funnel. Integrated marketers can understand their campaign and businesses health when they have a full view of the funnel and from here, they can adjust the campaign accordingly, whether that is increasing budget for syndication, or improving lead nurturing workflows.
Measurement and optimisation should be constant and using the correct technologies and processes, marketers can have a comprehensive view of every stage of the process and from here take learnings for the next integrated marketing campaign.
Final Thoughts for Successful Integrated Marketing Campaigns
While implementing an integrated marketing campaign can be difficult, a lot of the guesswork can be taken out of the process. Once you define your goals and persona, your team and/or external contractors can use data and insights to make educated decisions on the channels that will target your market best. Creating a consistent brand experience throughout the campaign and nurturing plan will help add value to the lead and give them a clear brand message. Monitoring each stage of the process and taking the findings into consideration in the next integrated marketing campaign will help you bring stronger campaigns that will help you achieve your goals.
