Christopher is the co-founder, head strategist and CEO of The Go! Agency, a full-service digital marketing agency.
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On the internet, brand recognition can only get you so far. Competition is springing up in all corners of the business world — so how can you keep a valuable online audience from being scooped up by a competitor? The answer is to essentially turn your digital marketing efforts into a web with your conversion point at the center. It’s time to get integrated.
Integrated digital marketing means taking all aspects of your digital campaigns and making sure they flow into one another. After all, if your social media posts don’t link to your website or convince people to sign up for your email list, the likelihood of them ever becoming a customer grows thinner and thinner.
In this article, I’ll go over how to choose your channels, how to reformat your team to think collaboratively, and how to run an integrated strategy that makes customers want to get to the finish line.
You should have at least three channels.
You need two channels at the bare minimum to even have an integrated strategy. But the more channels and coverage you have, the higher the number of conversions you set yourself up to get (and remember, conversions don’t just mean sales).
Choosing channels for your campaign isn’t a package deal — you need to customize it for every brand that you work with. For example, chatbots and SMS marketing can be very effective for B2C campaigns, but for a B2B campaign, they’re both ineffective and inappropriate.
Channels and platforms are not the same things. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are all options under the broader spectrum of your social media channel. Consider social media — no matter how many platforms you’re using — as one prong of your integrated digital marketing approach along with email, SEO, chatbots, advertising, CTV/OTT and more.
Now, does this mean you only need to be on one social media platform? If only it were that easy. In my personal opinion, every social media campaign should encompass at least three of the four major platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. Here’s a quick guide to how to choose which ones you need to be on:
• Not having a Facebook account makes your brand seem illegitimate. Post regularly and spend money to boost your content, but unless you have an older audience, you don’t need to go all out in terms of audience engagement or spend too much money on the platform.
• Every business needs a LinkedIn account. It’s essential for making B2B connections. I would suggest a company page and a personal profile if you or one of your higher-level employees is willing to be the face of the brand.
• As for Twitter and Instagram, it depends on your resources. Instagram is preferable, but if you don’t have the capability for high-quality photography and video, then there’s really no point. If that’s the case (or if your brand just isn’t image-focused), go for Twitter.
Collaboration, not competition.
If you’re just switching over to an integrated approach, it will take some time for your team to adjust. The various experts among your staff will no longer be competing to see who got the highest number of engagements or the largest open and click-through rates. Now, success is a make or break for everybody.
The way that I did this with my team was to give all team members a voice in every part of the campaign. Yes, they still have their roles as experts since they’re trained rock stars at email marketing and Facebook Ads, but those have just become one function of their jobs rather than the whole thing.
Who you should be competing with are other brands. If you haven’t been looking at the competition, make that a part of your monthly cycle for every campaign. When you don’t keep your eye on them, you lose the advantage to beat them at their own game. Also, if you’re really in their weight class, chances are they’ve been analyzing you this entire time.
One size does not fit all.
While content is king for any kind of marketing effort, recycled content is the court jester. If you’re using nearly the exact same verbiage across your emails, social media accounts, blogs, ads and everything else, you’re going to come off as a joke.
Not only is that going to make your brand seem one-note and incredibly repetitive, but it’s also going to give away that you’re lazy — to both the competition and your clients. No matter what industry your brand or client is in, it’s either already competitive or swiftly on its way there. In the digital realm, what you produce is really all you have to back up the legitimacy and quality of your brand.
At the center of every campaign should be a core message, but the different channels you choose to market with should convey that message differently. Your social media content should be expressive and affable, easy for potential customers to want to engage with — that’s how you’re going to get them to convert through a social media channel. Your email marketing and ad strategy can be blunter. Customers will expect that kind of tone from those avenues of marketing since you have a much shorter window of time to get your message across and hopefully win the sale.
Integrated digital marketing means making sure the same message flows throughout all of your different channels. But integrated does not mean identical.
The idea of integrated digital marketing is to guide your audience members from one channel to the next. For example, through social media or ads, they can become part of your email list. Upon receiving your emails, they could be guided to the conversion points on your website. Through a CTV or OTT ad, they could Google you and come across your website. What you want to do is create pipelines that will lead to all points of your integrated strategy so that once they’re in your web, they’re there forever.
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