Are all of your marketing efforts at odds with one another—or do they work together, seamlessly, machine-like, toward a common goal?

For far too many business owners, the answer is somewhere closer to the former than to the latter. That’s because it’s easy enough to have a website built, to throw up the occasional Facebook post, perhaps even to send out a company newsletter every so often. But developing a robust marketing blueprint—one that encompasses your website, your social media, paid ad campaigns, search engine optimization, and all the rest—is ultimately more time-intensive, painstaking, and difficult work.

Then again: It’s also more rewarding. Though you will have to put in an effort to construct a marketing machine, the benefit is a setup that’s efficient, goal-oriented, and ultimately good for your bottom line.

With integrative marketing, you can have a lasting structure for bringing in new website traffic, then converting that traffic into paying customers, building brand awareness all the while—and isn’t that what marketing is all about?

Knowing What You Want

But how do you pull all the pieces of your marketing strategy together? How do you build something that is, indeed, both systematic and integrative?

An important first step is to ensure that you have a sense of where you want your marketing to take you. What are your goals, and how will you measure them? Think of your integrative marketing strategy as a kind of road map; before you put the map together, you need a sense of the destination.

Part of this will encompass knowledge of your target audience. Who are you trying to reach through your marketing efforts? Have a sense of who you’re talking to, and keep them in mind across your marketing channels—whether it’s tweets or PPC ads.

Hubs and Channels

More often than not, integrative marketing plans will employ a business website as a kind of centralized hub. Your website can educate your leads and guide them down the sales funnel, which means the rest of your marketing efforts need to point traffic back toward the website. That’s the hallmark of almost any good, integrative marketing approach.

And this leads to another important point: Once you determine where you want to go with your marketing, you may have a better sense of what you do and do not need in order to get there. You may decide, for instance, that your target audience just isn’t receptive to Pinterest, or to email marketing, but that PPC ads and Facebook posts are the way to go. A marketing approach can be integrative while still excising unnecessary channels. In fact, that level of efficiency is pretty pivotal.

Reusing and Repurposing

Once you have the right channels aligned toward the proper goals, the key point is consistent content creation. A good way to approach content creation is with repurposing in mind. Create content that you can use more than once, in other words—content that you can easily adapt to work across a variety of channels, reaching different people in different venues but directing them all back to the same place.

That’s what integrated marketing is all about, in the end—different methods working toward the same purpose. To continue this conversation, we invite you to contact our team at your leisure. We’d love to discuss what an integrated marketing campaign might look like for your brand.