Integrated Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid
Integrated marketing is one of the most effective ways to move prospects through pipelines. However, managing an integrated marketing strategy across multiple online platforms is challenging and can lead to mistakes, resulting in lost revenue opportunities. Ensure you know the pitfalls to avoid when creating an integrated campaign.
What Is Integrated Marketing?
Integrated marketing involves the alignment of different marketing strategies to connect with audiences. It communicates a core message across various event channels and touchpoints, improving consistency. These channels and touchpoints include emails, landing pages, display ads, banner ads, social media posts, and direct mail. With integrated marketing, consistency is key as it helps your brand stand out amongst consumers in the cluttered digital landscape.
Now that you’ve been refreshed on integrated marketing, here are some common integrated marketing mistakes.
Not Thinking Like a Customer
Without integrated marketing, marketers can’t deliver a unified message to audiences. That results in inconsistent communication and mixed messaging, which can confuse prospects. For example, a potential customer who sees two different CTAs on a website and Facebook page might think the company that posted these messages lacks organization.
When creating integrated campaigns, marketers should think like the prospective customers they want to target. Prospects want clear messaging across channels to better understand a brand’s products and services. Consistent messaging builds trust in the customer’s mind and helps them make more informed purchasing decisions.
Not Tracking Integrated Campaigns Properly
The most successful marketers track their integrated social media and advertising campaigns from the first customer touchpoint to the final purchase and beyond. However, many marketing teams lack the technology and resources to monitor prospects as they move through their funnels.
While the best data analytics programs require an outlay, these tools give marketers the knowledge to execute more successful integrated strategies. Analytics software reveals real-time insights about prospects at different touchpoints and measures key performance indicators (KPIs) that uncover how audiences engage with brands. For example, marketers can learn when products convert to customers during the sales lifecycle and identify the most valuable leads.
So what should marketers track with data analytics tools? One of the most effective data measurements for integrated marketing is multi-touch attribution, which assigns credit to each touchpoint in a customer’s journey to see the influence of each channel on sales. Another measurement, multi-channel attribution, provides a more comprehensive overview of channel performance.
Not Having an Overarching Campaign Goal
Marketers need an overall goal for their integrated marketing campaign to deliver more effective results. That goal might be to drive more revenue or increase brand awareness. Whatever the goal, marketers should create integrated marketing strategies that help them achieve this objective.
Creating an overarching goal for integrated marketing can establish expectations for a brand’s marketing team and ensure everyone has the same purpose, passion, and direction. It can also make it easier for marketers to choose the most profitable event channels and touchpoints when communicating with audiences. Measuring an integrated marketing goal will ensure that campaigns positively impact engagement and performance.
Misunderstanding What Audiences Want
Not having a solid understanding of the needs and desires of your audience will negatively impact the ability to effectively execute an integrated marketing strategy. Each prospect responds differently to content, meaning marketers need to personalize campaigns for optimal engagement. For example, an email coupon code might encourage one person to convert into a customer but have no impact on someone else.
Because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to integrated marketing, in-house teams should incorporate the specific requirements of different customer groups into their campaigns and collect direct feedback from prospects. Doing so can be challenging for small teams, which is why working with a reputable marketing agency can prove lucrative.
Not Working With an Agency
An organization’s marketing efforts could exponentially improve if it worked with an agency. Many brands benefit from an agency relationship, where external marketers work directly with in-house managers to execute successful integrated campaigns that provide a return on investment.
The best agencies have the skills and resources to help brands optimize their integrated marketing plans and avoid the common pitfalls internal marketers face when executing the integrated approach. An agency brings expertise to every touchpoint and event channel, helping brands realize the full potential of integrated marketing through well-defined objectives. That can remove marketing silos in an organization and help marketing managers achieve their growth objectives.
Final Thoughts
Not thinking like the customer, failing to track campaigns properly, lacking an overarching goal, misunderstanding audiences, and not working with an agency can result in lost revenue opportunities and make it difficult to convert prospects. To have an effective integrated marketing strategy, organizations must put in the time and effort to ensure that each platform aligns with the company’s goals, that performance tracking is being practiced, and that strategies are optimized.
