How to Create an Integrated Marketing Campaign

Effective marketing begins and ends with the consumer. So how do you engage with your consumer frequently in today’s fast-paced world? Simple, you create an integrated marketing campaign.

An integrated marketing campaign is a strategy of delivering a consistent message about your brand over many channels. Similar to SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Content Marketing, you want to choose channels that not only spread your message but complement each other; these channels include:

• Video
• Print
• PR
• Social media
• Digital
• Link building
• Blogging
• Etc.

Integrated marketing not only helps consumers understand your brand message, it will help your ROI and help you keep more consumers.

To create a successful integrated marketing campaign, here are five steps to help you get started.

1. What Is Your Goal?

When implementing goals into your integrated marketing campaign you will start to have a more focused approach to engage with your consumers. This focused engagement will help you understand your consumers’ needs and wants, which will help you bring in additional consumers with similar needs and wants, provide for your consumers, and build your business. However, you want to make sure your goals are SMART and focused. A SMART goal is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. To demonstrate this, let’s create a SMART goal example, featuring Old Spice. Our SMART goal will be:

Increase the number of Old Spice sales by 30 percent over the next two quarters.

To break this down, let’s begin by looking at this SMART goal. We are wanting to increase the number of Old Spice sales by 30 percent over the next two quarters. By specifying an achievable and realistic increase in sales over a specific time, we are able to measure how successful we are in increasing sales during the allotted time. Thus, our SMART goal is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

Credit: Old Spice Campaign Smells Like a Sales Success, Too

When Old Spice released its campaign for “Smells Like a Man, Man” back in February 2010, Old Spice suddenly became appealing to younger generations. Old Spice saw its sales jump 55% over the following three months of the campaign. During the fourth month of the campaign, Old Spice saw sales increase 107% (AdWeek, Old Spice).

With a SMART goal in place to drive the efforts of “Smells Like a Man, Man” Old Spice was able to focus its efforts to create a successful integrated marketing campaign. Though the SMART goal was not the only reason for success, Old Spice was able to surpass the limit of 30 percent increase in sales over two quarters, within the first quarter. Just like Old Spice, it is important to first create a SMART goal because it will how you focus your efforts to drive your campaign to success.

2. Define Your Audience

Understanding your target audience is the fundamental building block of a widely accepted integrated marketing campaign. To begin understanding your target audience, there are multiple factors to take into account:

1. Gender
2. Age
3. Education
4. Likes/Dislikes

Using these factors you are able to conduct further research to narrow down your target audience and better understand them. Some research options you can use to better understand your target audience are:

• Focus groups
• Social media research
• Surveys

Once a complete and focused understanding has been developed for your target audience, it’s time to define the motives for your marketing campaign. To do this you will look at your target audience’s behavior. What websites do they visit, what are their interests, and what are their pain points with your products or services?

Understanding your target audience in such depth will allow you to start understanding what your target audience’s needs and wants are, so your message can be focused and engage with your audience on a personal level. This is the first critical step to start your integrated marketing campaign.

3. Choose Your Channels

Just as important as defining your audience, you need to choose your channels. We mean where do you want your integrated campaign to portray your message?

You want to determine where your audience spends their time; is it in print, digital, video, social media, link building, or blogging? Keep in mind that you want to spread your consistent message on multiple channels, which will allow you to reach more consumers and create more engagement with these consumers with your message and brand.

During Oreo’s 100th-anniversary integrated marketing campaign, they did a fantastic job of using multiple channels to spread a consistent message to their target audience. Oreo created a campaign called the “Daily Twist,” which was focused on sharing consistent posts for 100 days reflecting on iconic events in history that happened during the 100 years of Oreo being a brand.

Credit: Oreo Crowdsources Final ‘Daily Twist’ Ad Live in Times Square

By using social media, digital ads, print ads, and PR campaigns, Oreo’s “Daily Twist” was able to create simple, engaging, and impactful messages. These messages allowed consumers to interact with the campaign on a personal level. Oreo saw 110 percent growth of fan engagement through the life of the “Daily Twist” integrated marketing campaign. One of the main reasons this growth happened was because Oreo incorporated the “Daily Twist” message over multiple channels.

4. Create Versatile Messaging

Your message has to be engaging with the consumer. Just like Old Spice and Oreo, you must create a message that can be developed and can be adapted to your chosen channels. Both Old Spice and Oreo created messaging that impacted both target audiences on a personal level.

Old Spice showed women that their men can smell like a man by using Old Spice body wash. Oreo was able to engage with its target audience by showing different things that happened throughout history, during the 100 years Oreo has been a company.

Each of these campaigns allowed consumers to engage with the campaign, allowing both Old Spice and Oreo to understand what their target audience liked and disliked about the campaign. This understanding helped both companies make the necessary adjustments to further each campaign’s’ success.

5. Measure, Track, and Correct

Finally, probably the most important part of your integrated marketing campaign is tracking your success and failure throughout the campaign. It is imperative that you monitor your campaign throughout the duration to see where you are having successes and failures. This will allow you to make changes, if needed, to further your success.

To measure and track your campaign, you will want to go back to your SMART goal to monitor the pace your campaign is on towards your goal. You will want to look at your Google Analytics to review your website visits and conversions during the campaign.

By following these five steps:

1. What Is Your Goal
2. Define Your Audience
3. Choose Your Channels
4. Create Versatile Messaging
5. Measure, Track, and Correct

You will be able to create a successful integrated marketing campaign. This will not only build your brand, but it will build the relationship you have with your target audience, which will further your company’s success for years to come.

Need some more help with your integrated marketing campaign? Contact us here at Big Leap and get started right away with our SEO, social media, and content marketing services.