5 Reasons Integrated Marketing Campaigns are So Effective

Do you know the saying about working smarter, not harder? That’s integrated marketing campaigns, in a nutshell – but we’d also add that it’s about working more cost-effectively, too, for reasons you’ll read about in a minute.

An effective integrated marketing campaign isn’t just about repeating the same message over and over. It’s taking a core message, concept, or idea and translating it so that it makes the most of each channel. That can mean, for example, finding a way to make your concept come alive in just a few words on your signage or blowing it out with visual flourish in a video. It requires a lot more strategy than simply creating one-off pieces, but the benefits will be worth it!

1. Stay Top-of-Mind with Your Customers

A well-crafted campaign can surround potential customers at every turn: think about an in-store experience, including signage and packaging, that ties to a website or e-commerce channel, and then appropriately timed touches via social media, direct marketing, and digital advertising. Each tactic can reinforce your message and get your offerings in the minds and consideration sets of both prospects and existing customers.

2. Make Your Brand Feel Bigger and More Trustworthy

While being perceived as a “big brand” might not be right for every company, you definitely want to be thought of as confident, trustworthy, and credible. Here are three crucial ways an integrated marketing campaign can increase your credibility:

• Repeated exposure to a message can build both familiarity and credibility.
• Using social media allows smaller companies to appear just as polished and authoritative as much larger brands.
• Add in some direct mail: According to Marketing Sherpa, 76% of people trust the mail they receive.

3. Start a Two-Way Conversation with Your Customers

Increasingly, customers want a personal connection with your brand. Integrated campaigns give customers numerous opportunities to interact with your brand, and put a human face on it, too. Social media offers the most direct opportunity for dialog with your customers. Still, there other ways to let your customers know you want to hear from them, such as:

• Creating simple, clean landing page forms that don’t ask for a lot of information.
• Writing in the first person (e.g., “We’re committed to our customers,” as opposed to “Bright Company is committed to its customers.”), so your copy invites conversation. 

4. Dramatically Improve Your ROI

An experienced partner can help bring down costs by:

• Developing assets that can be shared across channels (e.g., original video that can be used for your product page but then edited down into bite-size clips for your social feeds).
• Advising you on using less expensive channels to achieve broad reach comparable to pricey tactics such as outdoor or broadcast advertising.
• Helping you harness efficiencies by planning ahead – especially if you’re going to include direct mail in your mix (which we highly recommend, since it continues to deliver impressive response rates, it’s perceived as more personal than emails or digital advertising.

5. Evolve the Campaign Over Time for Maximum Impact

Campaigns get their strength from repetition, but over time, customers can experience messaging fatigue. If you’re using email, direct mail, social media, or other channels that generate useful analytics, you can tweak small elements and then measure the impact. That way, you can keep the concept that both you and your customers are invested in. In 2020, Old Spice’s long-running “Smell Like a Man” concept morphed into “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” keeping the core idea but tweaking it in a way to bring women into the conversation. The campaign pulled in some user-generated content from social media and quickly became the most popular interactive campaign in history.

We started this article with one adage, so we’ll end it with another: with the best integrated marketing campaigns, the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts – but those parts need to be able to stand on their own, too. 

If you’d like to learn more about how a campaign can help you grow your business, call us. We work with fledgling and experienced integrated marketers all the time to help create targeted integrated marketing campaigns that get results. How can we help you?