What Is Meant by “Integrated Marketing Strategies”?
The goal of an integrated marketing strategy is to ensure that all of a company’s branding and marketing efforts are consistent throughout all of the company’s various marketing channels and platforms. Customers who engage with your company through digital channels (such as text, video, or social media) and conventional media channels (such as television advertisements, radio, or print) are exposed to the same branding, colours, messaging, and images in all of these interactions. Integrated Marketing Strategies guarantee that the experience your customers have with you is consistent across the many platforms and touchpoints.
Why is it necessary for you to implement an integrated strategy?
When you use integrated marketing strategies, you can improve the efficiency of your various marketing channels and campaigns while reaping the benefits of doing so. An integrated strategy simplifies the process and unifies your systems by avoiding the need to restructure or reestablish specific functions with each new campaign.
For instance, combining your marketing activities enables you to:
- Raise brand awareness amongst a wider audience.
- Create a sense of reliability (and a bond) with present and future clients.
- Save money by sharing or repurposing assets.
- Make more efficient use of the time you spend developing customised programmes for each marketing channel.
What Role Does Omnichannel Commerce Play in Integrated Marketing Strategies?
Integrated marketing strategies are ideal for meeting the expectations and requirements of omnichannel commerce because they eliminate the disconnect between the various marketing efforts. Customers are more likely to be satisfied with a company and recommend it if they can purchase with the same ease and convenience whether they want to do it online, over the phone, or in a physical store, owing to omnichannel commerce.
Your brand’s integrated marketing campaigns provide potential customers with a coherent, favourable picture of who you are and what you sell. When messages are consistent, they have the same effect. Using omnichannel commerce strategies may boost your company’s reputation as a dependable and trustworthy provider.
Is It Difficult to Implement Integrated Marketing Strategies?
Developing an integrated marketing strategy can be easy; nonetheless, it will demand careful preparation and meticulous organisation.
The first step in creating a successful marketing strategy is answering the following questions about your overall objective.
- Have you recently started up or rebranded your company?
- Are you releasing a brand-new service or product?
- If you want to attract a local, national, or international audience?
Once you have settled on your overarching goal, you can begin to break it down into subgoals for the various types of marketing you want to use, such as content marketing, email marketing, social media, and even personal interactions. To do so, you must have an intimate familiarity with your intended market, including who they are, what they value, and how they gather information.
Developing your marketing materials and content is the next stage. As before, you need to know your target market inside and out to address their problems. The next step is to provide your customers with a thorough rundown of how your product or service will help them, back up your claims with evidence, and provide unmatched assistance at every stage of the sales process. To attract customers and earn their confidence, it is essential that the messaging be consistent and well-integrated throughout all promotional platforms. Finally, it is critical to evaluate the results of each campaign and use those findings to shape future advertising initiatives.
Importance of ERP and How It Can Help
Your brand awareness and customer base will increase as you expand into more communication channels, marketplaces, social platforms, and e-commerce websites with a well-developed integrated marketing plan. To have the most significant potential impact, your team has to communicate with as many people as possible. You may find juggling orders from many different sources more complicated than you anticipated. When retailers offer their products through a diverse selection of web-based sales channels, they will discover that the client orders and shipping information will be as varied as the platforms on which they sell their items.
Your objective should be to limit the stress placed on the fulfilment team so that they can meet their deadlines and deliver orders on time. Your integrated marketing approach will create havoc for them if they have to manage all these additional orders. They want a simplified and uniform system for shipping to function well.
In that case, how do you plan on overcoming this obstacle?
One of the essential components of omnichannel retailing and other forms of integrated marketing is a solid enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Using software known as an application programming interface (API), each newly developed online platform possesses the capacity to transfer order data from its platform into a contemporary ERP. When a customer puts in an order, the relevant information may be imported into the ERP as a Sales Order immediately after completing the transaction. Given that the sales orders generated by the ERP are standard across all companies and that the fulfilment team is already familiar with working within the ERP to manage orders, the influx of new orders will be met with little resistance. Instead, the increased volume of these new orders will be seamlessly incorporated into the existing order structure.
Additionally, many online platforms nowadays are pretty stringent when securing their customers’ data. For instance, in the case of Amazon, retailers never gather buyer data. Protecting users’ “Personally Identifiable Information” (PII) is essential for many online marketplaces. This need will only grow in importance as people become more aware of the potential dangers of leaving personal information online. Prepare for these regulations by switching to an ERP that offers data pseudonymisation and archiving automation for customer records.
With an all-encompassing cloud-based ERP system like that provided by Cofficient and your team’s integrated marketing strategies and omnichannel commerce strategy, you can be assured that your customers will have a pleasant and positive interaction with your business.
