What Is Integrated Marketing? Strategies and Examples

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There are more ways than ever to reach your target spectators, but simply launching campaigns across multiple marketing channels isn’t enough to resonate with buyers. That way can actually complete up wasting your valuable period—not to mention your marketing strategy.

Instead, businesses can advantage from a user-centric way known as integrated marketing. With this type of marketing way, you customize your marketing efforts toward the needs of your customers at each stage in their customer trip. An integrated marketing way is not only about prioritizing unified messaging across all your channels; it’s about prioritizing the cultivation of ongoing relationships with your customers by speaking directly to their goals—not your own.

Keep reading to get a better understanding of this customer-centric marketing way, including tips for how to make your own integrated marketing campaign.

What is integrated marketing?

Integrated marketing is a way to align brand messages at all customer touchpoints. Formally known as integrated marketing communications (IMC), this marketing way prioritizes an external focus on customer needs, not an internal focus on sales goals.

The core principles of integrated marketing are:

• Communicate with your customer based on their needs and interests, not your sales goals.

• Use your brand communications to construct a connection with your customer.

The concept of integrated marketing predates the commercial internet. Its original definition is most commonly attributed to Don E. Schultz, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University in the late 1980s:

“(a) IMC is about starting with the needs and interests of the customers or audiences for the communication, not with the goals/objectives of the seller for his or her product/service, and, (b) the communication focus was to be on sharing created worth and building relationships.”

Today, the riches of customer data available allows you to receive an integrated marketing way a step further: You can now tailor your messaging to an person customer’s needs and pain points as they leave through the marketing funnel. By using both first-event data and third-event data—which reveal customer insights like demographics, displayed intent, and behavior online—you can deliver relevant and resonant messaging to every person customer as they shift down your funnel.

Example of integrated marketing

Let’s declare you sell pool toys. With a different marketing way, you might buy ad space from a publisher next to “swimming pool” content. But if the articles in that publisher’s editorial pattern happen to be all about building a recent pool, your pool toy ad is bound to have a low click-through rate. After all, if someone hasn’t decided whether or not to construct a pool, they probably aren’t looking to buy pool toys.

With an integrated marketing way, here’s how your pool toy business could way advertising: Instead of simply serving ads next to a relevant keyword, you could work with the publisher to segment readers who read multiple pool-related articles. You could then serve those users pool toy ads three months after they engaged with the pool-building content—a period where they are more likely to be interested in pool toys. Instead of focusing on the keyword “swimming pool,” you can serve ads to those users wherever they read about water recreation or summer activities.

Integrated marketing vs. multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing is a marketing mix way that uses multiple marketing channels—ponder: website, social media, email, live activations—in your marketing way. Integrated marketing means you unify your communication across those marketing channels.

When you use integrated marketing as an overall strategic way, each marketing channel specialist can use the particular strength of their channel to tailor your brand’s core messaging to its best and most poignant use.

Essentially: Multichannel marketing is not inherently integrated marketing, but it is ordinary for integrated marketing to also be multichannel marketing.

Integrated marketing vs. omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is a surround-the-prospect way to marketing in which you attempt to reach a prospective customer at every marketing channel they use during their trip. Tactically, it involves higher-level marketing technology like ad servers and programmatic advertising trade desks because you target the same IP address everywhere.

But omnichannel marketing doesn’t necessarily cruel your messaging is consistent at every touch point. It also doesn’t necessarily cruel you use customer data to personalize the communication for each customer.

Integrated marketing is an umbrella communication philosophy you can apply to an omnichannel way, in which your messaging is consistent across touchpoints, always buyer-centric, and (in today’s globe) personalized. ponder of it as an extra layer of intentionality that can make your marketing campaigns more effective and efficient.

How an integrated marketing way benefits your final profit

There are two main ways successful integrated marketing campaigns can boost your final profit: by improving conversion rates and increasing brand loyalty.

Here’s how integrated marketing benefits those key goals:

Improved conversion rates

Relevance and resonance with the buyer are the most significant factors driving high conversion rates. Because integrated marketing focuses on delivering ads that are both relevant and resonant, it tends to outperform other approaches.

To yield to our previous example: It’s straightforward to imagine that an ad for pool toys that appears next to all pool-related content would have a lower conversion rate than that same ad served only to users who are solemn about building a pool. 

Increased brand loyalty

When a brand consistently proves itself to be relevant to its customers, they gradually develop the conviction that “this business gets me.” When this happens, brand loyalty skyrockets. Loyalty is crucial to your final profit: According to a 2023 update from Smile.io, the top 5% of customers are responsible for 35% of an ecommerce store’s turnover.

How to make an integrated marketing campaign

1. commence with the voice of the customer
2. make a customer trip chart
3. Conduct keyword research
4. Determine what information the customer needs
5. adjust messaging for different marketing channels
6. assess campaign act

Here’s how to embed integrated marketing into any campaign, regardless of your marketing strategy:

1. commence with the voice of the customer

Any integrated marketing campaign should commence with understanding the customer’s different use cases and language, not yours. The way to do this is with the voice of the customer (VoC).

VoC is a type of customer research that involves conducting surveys, focus throng polls, or social listening to better comprehend customers’ needs. With VoC data in hand, you can craft integrated marketing campaigns that talk directly to your customers, using their exact words.

2. make a customer trip chart

Based on the target spectators research you’ve done, determine the appropriate messaging for each stage of the marketing funnel using a customer trip chart. For each stage of the customer trip (awareness, consideration, and conversion), you’ll use your research to respond the following questions:

• What is the customer asking?

• How is the customer asking?

• What does the customer require?

• What content can we make to meet the customer’s needs?

The answers to the first question—what is the customer asking—should arrive directly from VoC data. To respond how the customer is asking, you’ll match customer questions to the words and phrases they might use when searching for answers to their questions online.

3. Conduct keyword research 

Keyword research involves identifying the terms customers use to discover answers to their questions. For example, a customer who wants to recognize “How do I receive worry of my lawn myself?” might search for “DIY lawn worry” or “lawn worry tips” in a search engine or on social media platforms.

Many marketing campaigns involve keyword research. The difference with integrated marketing campaigns is that keywords are secondary to real customers’ actual questions.

Instead of looking for the highest-volume keywords associated with your product and then purchasing Google Ads or creating SEO content marketing associated with those keywords, you’ll commence with the customer’s question and then determine the keywords they might use to discover answers. This way leads to more relevant marketing campaigns, since all keywords arrive directly from customer insights.

4. Determine what information the customer needs

This step involves looking at the answers to the first question in the customer trip chart (What is the customer asking?) to determine what answers would assist the customer shift to the next stage of the funnel.

For example, if you run a lawn-worry service, what would shift the customer who wants to discover how to receive worry of their lawn from the awareness phase to the consideration phase? Maybe they’d appreciate an overview of different lawn-worry options that weighs the pros and cons of DIY lawn worry versus hiring someone to worry for your lawn.

5. adjust messaging for different marketing channels

Now that you recognize what information your customer needs to shift down the funnel, how can you best use different marketing channels to convey this information?

For example, one way to respond the question “How do I worry for my lawn?” is to make a quiz on your landing page that helps users determine whether they should receive worry of their own lawn or hire someone else to do it. You might include questions about the size of their lawn, their strategy, and the climate where they live to deliver a personalized outcome.

You can then run ads and social media posts (targeting the keywords you found in Step 3) that direct users to the quiz.

6. assess campaign act

The best way to assess the effectiveness of an integrated marketing campaign is informed awareness. You can track informed awareness by running a regular, statistically significant survey of non-conversions from your advertising efforts in the education phase via a poll.

The poll should be structured with three divide statements: one about your business, one about a competitor, and one about a business with a name similar to yours. The objective is to have the participant match one statement to your business’s name. Positive changes in the ability of your targeted spectators who never converted but can match you with your communication will navigator to sales gains over period.

Another way to assess campaign act is by tracking actions that signal a potential buyer has moved from one stage of the customer trip to the next. For example, an email opt-in suggests a shift from the awareness stage to the consideration stage: a potential customer has enough yield in your brand they desire to receive more information.

Tracking the percentage of users who shift between stages helps you identify opportunities. For example, if a high percentage of users opt in to email but do not convert, you might add testimonials to your marketing emails. This could inspire email subscribers to shift to the next phase of the customer trip and actually buy your product.

Example integrated marketing campaign

The customer trip chart is the cornerstone of integrated marketing. It provides a straightforward, visual framework for linking your customers’ needs at each stage in their trip to your marketing efforts.

Below, you’ll discover an example customer trip chart for a fictional lawn-worry service, broken down into different phases:

• Awareness/education phase

• Consideration/information phase

• Confirmation/conversion phase

Each phase in this example customer trip chart includes:

• Questions from real customers

• Relevant keywords customers might use to search for answers

• Information that can assist customers shift to the next stage of the funnel

• Content and marketing channels that can convey that communication

Use this example customer trip chart as a jumping-off point for developing your own integrated marketing campaign.