As you start reviewing your marketing results for 2018 and preparing for 2019, one of the questions you want to ask is how you can make the process more efficient in the year ahead. An integrated marketing strategy is one where you consolidate your efforts on every front and create an overall arc, rather than just looking at each aspect of marketing on its own. Here are the four main benefits of this approach:
1. It brings all your goals together. Putting together a marketing plan is difficult enough, but it becomes unnecessarily complicated when you’ve got separate marketing streams that are all independent of each other. If you can start bringing all of your marketing goals into one place, you can see what your biggest goals actually are, and create a plan for achieving them that minimizes the amount of overlap and unnecessary duplication.
2. It creates a seamless experience for your audience. Brand and message consistency are so important, and the easiest way to ensure that your audience is getting that consistency is to have a single source from which all your messaging flows outward. This way, everything is controlled uniformly, and you don’t have to worry about contradictions in tone, wording, or visuals across mediums.
3. It allows for a more comprehensive multichannel digital approach. Today’s consumers know how to do their research everywhere – on social media, on search engines, and on websites – and before they choose to make a purchase, they want to see several versions of a message that all reinforce each other. When you integrate the digital aspects of your marketing, your channels can be complementary to each other, rather than just duplicating the same content or having content that is irrelevant in the context of your other channels.
4. It simplifies the tracking process. With any kind of marketing, it’s important to be able to measure your ROI, as well as analyzing your processes to see if you need to make any adjustments. When you integrate your strategy, you can clearly see which channels are underperforming, where the problem areas are, and how you need to evolve.
You still have a few weeks left in the year to start planning for 2019 – take some time to look at your various marketing threads, and start weaving them together so that you can see exactly what you need to do to move forward and reach your marketing goals in the new year.
Cogo Interactive is an award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in online marketing strategy, web design, SEO and social media marketing. We work with clients in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC and nationally.
