Here’s Why You Should be Integrating Your Marketing Campaign

Your customers move freely from the real world to the digital world and back again. And if you want to connect with them, so should your brand.

An integrated marketing campaign allows your brand to move as freely as your customers. It aligns your message across many channels, with all the parts coming together according to a high-level plan. Whether the medium is email, television, video, flyers, social media, radio, or in-store signage, your customer  knows who you are and hears what you’re saying.

At Prospect Media, integrating campaigns is our specialty. As a media and marketing services company focusing on retailers, we use our expertise with data to create multi-channel plans for our clients. By integrating point-of-sale information into our analysis, we’re able to help our clients target their actual customers, rather than who they think their customers are. That sets us apart from more traditional agencies.

Why Should You Integrate Your Campaign?

We think it’s important to understand the “why” behind integrated marketing campaigns. Implementing this approach requires company-wide buy-in, and if everyone understands the reasons for a less siloed approach, they’re more likely to embrace it.

For retailers who were born in the bricks-and-mortar era, the challenge may lie in integrating what they already know about their real-world customers with what they’re doing to reach those same customers, plus many new ones, in their online efforts.

Digital startups may face the opposite challenge. They’re adept at tracking online customers, but haven’t yet figured out how to talk to hyperlocal audiences for emerging bricks and mortar strategies. But whether your brand is more experienced at getting to know its customers online or in real life, an integrated strategy should be the goal. Here’s why:

1

Integrated Marketing Has Greater Impact

Integrated campaigns can deliver a higher return on investment than the sum of the unaligned parts. That’s because the effort you make in one channel can boost results in another.

For example, one of our clients, a home furnishings retailer in Ontario, saw 13.8 per cent more store visits, week over week, in an area where they ran an integrated campaign. That’s almost nine per cent more than the increase in visits to stores in areas where a print-only campaign was in place. Those stores saw only a five per cent increase in visits.

2

Smart Strategies Work at Any Scale

Integrated campaigns can be customized to fit any business and any budget. Whether your expected spend is a few thousand dollars to support one store or a couple of million to boost your brand’s cross-country retail footprint, an integrated campaign can be effective. It all starts with good data and an intelligent strategy.

“It all starts with good data and intelligent strategy.”

3

Marketing Resources Will Go Farther

Your marketing activity will be more efficient when teams work together to execute parts of a cohesive strategy. A centralized marketing plan means you’ll avoid waste and maximize impact. No more duplication of work or conflicting messages from one channel to the next.

4

Smart Strategies Work at Any Scale

Advertisers in today’s landscape are accustomed to collecting and analyzing online data to create a digital strategy. But in our view, a truly integrated marketing strategy is built on analysis of both offline and online customer information. That’s why we use point-of-sale information, along with many other more traditional metrics, when we create strategic plans for our clients. Whether your business is firstly e-commerce or bricks and mortar, the data collected in one world can be transferred to the other. A holistic view of your target market can help you find your most valuable customers and inform offline and online strategies for talking to them. Knowing exactly who you’re talking to also allows you to better evaluate your campaign’s effectiveness.

5

Customers will thank you

Integrated campaigns can deliver a higher return on investment than the sum of the unaligned parts. That’s because the effort you make in one channel can boost results in another.

Integrated campaigns can deliver a higher return on investment than the sum of the unaligned parts. That’s because the effort you make in one channel can boost results in another.

Using data to make decision

We think it’s important to understand the “why” behind integrated marketing campaigns. Implementing this approach requires company-wide buy-in, and if everyone understands the reasons for a less siloed approach, they’re more likely to embrace it.

For retailers who were born in the bricks-and-mortar era, the challenge may lie in integrating what they already know about their real-world customers with what they’re doing to reach those same customers, plus many new ones, in their online efforts.

Digital startups may face the opposite challenge. They’re adept at tracking online customers, but haven’t yet figured out how to talk to hyperlocal audiences for emerging bricks and mortar strategies. But whether your brand is more experienced at getting to know its customers online or in real life, an integrated strategy should be the goal. Here’s why:

Email Dave Mathews: dmathews@prospectmedia.com

Give Dave Mathews a call: 416-576-4076

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