Integrated marketing is one of the most effective approaches you can take to generate ROI for your business. As the number of marketing channels to connect with our audiences continues to rise, integrating your efforts is an effective way to efficiently move prospects through the buyer journey and fuel your sales pipeline.
However, while marketers may try to take advantage of numerous brand, demand and event channels to increase touchpoints with their audiences, without a strong integrated strategy in place, multi-channel efforts can become disjointed and ineffective.
There are several mistakes marketers can make that may negatively affect the results generated from an integrated marketing program. Let’s dive into the five most common pitfalls, and discuss how to avoid them so you can yield optimal results and maximize ROI from your integrated strategy.
1) Not Having Clear Goals
Without setting clear goals for your integrated marketing strategy, your efforts will ultimately be unsuccessful at achieving the results your senior leaders are counting on you to deliver. Not only is it important to have well-defined goals that are tied to overarching business objectives like revenue growth, but it’s also important that your goals are measurable so you can successfully track and report on marketing performance.
Rather than focusing on vanity metrics like page views or social media likes, aim to set goals that address the overarching needs of the business, like velocity or win-rate, so you can establish clear expectations for success that your team and senior leadership can agree on. Keep your goals top of mind as you set your strategy and consider all the brand, demand and event channels you’ll need to leverage to achieve them.
2) Limited Understanding of Your Audience
Knowing your audience is essential for building marketing programs that work. With a strong understanding of your audience, you’ll be able to tailor messaging and content to fit their needs while showing how your unique value proposition (UVP) can help solve their pain points. Without that baseline understanding, you’re unlikely to reach your audience in a meaningful way, and therefore unlikely to convert potential prospects into customers.
Take the time to build out your ideal customer profile (ICP) and document everything from their demographic information and revenue to their motivations and challenges. Refer to your ICP to guide your integrated marketing strategy and channel selection so that you’re focusing on the places where your audience is most active to maximize ROI. You can also dive into audience behavior and engagement data from your tech stack to further understand your audience and tailor your programs accordingly.
3) Inconsistent Messaging Across Channels
One of the most common pitfalls of integrated marketing is inconsistent messaging and a lack of alignment in tone and calls to action (CTA) across channels. If your paid ads are telling your audience one thing and your organic social platforms are communicating a different message, your organization will lack a unified voice and fail to establish trust with your prospects.
To create a seamless experience for your audience, be sure to carry a consistent narrative throughout each of your brand, demand and event channels. Clear, strong messaging can help ensure all your activities are engaging for your audience, leading to increased brand awareness, improved customer sentiment and ultimately, increased profit margins. Rely on your brand strategy to form the foundation of communication with your audience to ensure all messages are effective and align with the brand.
4) Not Using Data to Optimize Strategy
A successful integrated marketing strategy requires constant iteration based on data analyses from previous programs. If you ignore the data from your integrated campaigns, or analyze that data haphazardly, you’ll lack insight into how your activities are performing and won’t know how to adjust your strategy to see optimal results over time.
Rather than skimming over your data, take the time before, during and after your campaign to measure the impact of your efforts so you can efficiently identify the channels and activities tied to marketing success. By relying on your martech to measure essential KPIs like conversion rate and velocity, you’ll be equipped to build and optimize strategies that boost your bottom line in the years to come.
5) Lacking a Unified View for Reporting on Performance
A final issue many marketers face when executing an integrated marketing strategy is lacking a full picture of their performance. If your reporting is limited to only a handful of channels or doesn’t tell the story of how your efforts are working together to achieve your goals, you’ll be unable to make data-driven decisions to improve your strategy or prove its success to key stakeholders.
Multi-touch attribution is key to tracking every touchpoint throughout the buyer journey, both online and offline, to provide a holistic view of how your various channels are working together to drive conversions and revenue. With a strong attribution strategy in place, you’ll be equipped to identify the channels tied to marketing success so you can improve efficiency and maximize ROI overtime. Having an optimized tech stack is essential for tracking multi-channel efforts, so make sure you have the necessary infrastructure in place before launching your integrated programs. To see the most impact, consider reporting on your metrics monthly, quarterly and annually to get the most holistic view of your strategy.
When done well, an integrated marketing approach allows you to sync your channels to efficiently move prospects through their buyer journey, all while collecting important data along the way. By avoiding these common pitfalls, you’ll be able to build a robust integrated program that creates a unified experience for your audience, leading to strengthened brand awareness and increased profitability for your company. For more tips on how to generate ROI from your integrated marketing strategy, get in touch with our experts here.
