Marketing works best when it’s consistent and integrated. No single digital marketing tactic should stand on its own. Some random, one-off tactic that doesn’t appear to be a cohesive fit with your brand or messaging can confuse your audience. And it’s likely harder to attribute any sort of success or ROI to them.
When you unpack an integrated digital marketing campaign, enterprise content marketing teams often play significant roles in all aspects, from strategy to execution. In this guide, you’ll learn all about integrated digital marketing and where content marketing fits into these strategies.
What Is Integrated Digital Marketing?
Integrated digital marketing is a foundation of message consistency distributed through many channels to attract and convert buyers. It’s a unified approach to influencing buying decisions.
Within campaigns, all digital tactics complement one another and create a consistent brand image. It also involves engaging audiences throughout the customer journey, from awareness to consideration to decision.
While it seems like an easy concept, it’s hard to execute.
Challenges with Integrated Digital Marketing
Barriers often prevent the smooth deployment of integrated digital marketing in enterprises. Those can arise for several reasons, including:
- Silos between departments: If there’s no collaboration between all the parts of marketing, it’s hard to deploy an omnichannel campaign.
- Lack of resources: Sometimes, content throughput isn’t sustainable because you have gaps in your team.
- Absence of cohesive strategy: Digital marketing ties closely to your content and overall marketing strategy. Sometimes there’s conflict in all goals and objectives, which means prioritization and agreement needs to occur.
- Broken or non-existent processes: Developing and sticking to content workflows is vital to integrated digital marketing.
- Creating the right digital mix: Integrated means using multiple tactics, which depend on your goals. Often, you may not have a definitive answer on choosing these. It requires testing and delving into content analytics.
Overcoming these challenges with smart strategies and defined processes will help you do what’s key for integrated digital marketing — the unification of channels.
Channel Unification Across Paid, Earned, and Owned Media
Your organization plays in three types of digital media, and unifying them is critical to integrated campaigns. You have:
- Paid media: Tactics that require advertising dollars to launch and execute.
- Earned media: Channels that your brand uses that are third party but not paid (Ex: organic search, mentions in publications)
- Owned media: You have control of this aspect with your website and email. Organic social media falls into this category, but you don’t have complete autonomy because platforms use algorithms that determine how posts filter into the feeds of followers.
In integrated digital marketing, you’ll use all three to deliver a consistent message to accomplish your objectives. For example, a new product launch leverages these in this way:
- Paid media: Investing in banner ads in trade publications to reach a target audience.
- Earned: Publishing a press release that gets picked up by an industry news site.
- Owned: Writing a blog to announce the product, promoting it on social media, and sending emails about its drop.
The goal is to bring attention to the new product to the audience that needs it. With a mix of content and channels, you can connect with people across many forms of media. It can improve their recall and pique their interest.
In addition to playing in all media spaces, integrated campaigns align with the full funnel.
Integrated Digital Marketing Is Full-Funnel Marketing
In most cases, an integrated campaign will touch buyers throughout the funnel from top to bottom. We’ll use the example above to demonstrate this.
- Top-funnel (awareness): Sponsored content on a trusted third-party website about your new product introduces it and your brand to audiences that may have little awareness.
- Mid-funnel (consideration): Optimizing for keyword terms that describe the customer’s need with what your product does, improving your position in organic search.
- Bottom-funnel (decision): Sending an email to a segmented group of prospects that you know to have an interest in what the product solves with an offer to demo or try it.
As you can see, integrated digital marketing requires a lot of work to stay on the same page, so is it worth it?
Why Integrate Digital Marketing?
So, why even bother with integrating digital marketing? Does consistency and being omnichannel deliver returns? The answer is yes. Here’s why.
- Integrated campaigns have stronger ROI: On average, they have a 45 percent higher ROI.
- Attribution is easier: By setting your campaign up to be measurable across every channel, you can connect the dots between tactics and conversions.
- Audiences will be clear on what you do and how you help them: Your message has been the thread throughout your channel ecosystem.
- Everyone knows their role: When all the players come together to work on a campaign, each person knows their responsibilities to ensure the campaign is successful. Having workflows is critical to this as well.
- Content throughput is a machine: With workflows, processes, and a content calendar, you’re less likely to get tripped up in developing and deploying each tactic. Having a content marketing platform to support this makes all the difference as well.
- Thought leadership gets a boost: When you’re in all the channels and creating buzz, you’re also cementing your brand as a thought leader on the topic. This exposure builds credibility and trust, which are golden in B2B.
- Digital visibility rises: With all these formats of content and usage of channels, your brand will have a greater digital footprint. It’s especially helpful for organic search results so that those that need what you do find you.
Integrated Digital Marketing: Build a Campaign with Inspiration
With all these insights and tips, it’s time to develop your campaign. As content marketers, what you produce, from blogs to social posts to explainer videos, fuels integrated digital marketing. All that content can find a home in all media types across the funnel. Now, it’s time to reimagine what these can look like and how they’ll work.
You’ll find inspiration and more in our post, “How to Run Integrated Marketing Campaigns.” To get more great tips, tricks, and how-to’s delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to the DivvyHQ blog today!