Why do you need a well-balanced integrated marketing approach?

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

Updated 6 years ago

Establishing an online presence through a brand new website isn’t enough!

If you want to create a successful, sustainable business plan, you are going to need a comprehensive, well-thought-out integrated marketing approach.

Many people (and companies) are approaching online marketing with a mixture of “things” that they have always been doing, such as email marketing or social marketing. That’s something I like to call “deep-seated habitual marketing”.

The problem? Most likely it’s been the very same approach for the past ten or fifteen years … In other words, their strategies are a bit … khm … let’s say outdated.

But SEO is constantly changing and evolving, there’s new social media being developed almost monthly, etc, and it’s your responsibility to understand how your business can – or should – use these new or constantly evolving technologies in order to make money with them.

What I'm trying to say here: from time to time you’ll have to take a step back and look at everything that you are attempting to do and achieve online.

You’ll have to learn new things, to discover or develop new specialties and of course, to re-analyze the previously adopted methods and strategies. Needless to say, things are rarely going to level off, or go backwards. The demands are only going to increase. But, there is no other way! If you want to craft an efficient business plan, the integrated approach is a MUST both in offline and online marketing. A truly integrated approach should enable you to understand completely what’s happening on your site from a technical perspective, and more importantly, how your SEO, your email campaigns, your social media, your PPC campaigns, your analytics, etc should all come together. And there is more: you should also have a clear understanding about how each of these avenues are – or can be – utilized to reach a certain customer segment, and how to measure the efficacy and the cross-channel integration of each component.

As you can see, developing – and maintaining – a lucrative integrated approach isn’t easy. But it’s worth it! And believe me, it’s achievable! In fact, there is only one really important rule: your message has to be consistent and clear across all these channels.

So, ask yourself a few simple but vital questions! If you were to look at every single message that you are going to use in your next campaign – whether it’s from your post, email, social media, etc – is your marketing message consistent and clear? All your website visitors, email subscribers, social fans and followers are receiving the very same brand message? If the answer is a strong and honest “yes”, than you are on the right path. If the answer is “more or less” or even worse, a clear “no”, than you’ll have to take another step back to re-analyze your approach and to find the dissonant channel(s).