Integrated digital marketing is a digital marketing strategy that prioritizes business outcomes and uses multiple distribution channels in tandem to reach a target audience. Having trouble picturing that? Think about an orchestra conductor. The Dictionary of Music and Musicians¹ describes conducting as “the art of directing the simultaneous performance of several players or singers by the use of gestures.”
As a digital marketing agency, we are your conductor. With a wave of our hand, we direct the simultaneous performance of several integrated marketing tactics. Instead of music, our output is a harmony of content over various marketing channels. When marketing music is at its best, it helps clients achieve goals, like earning more leads and raising brand awareness with potential customers, ultimately improving business outcomes.
What are the benefits of an integrated digital marketing strategy?
Besides making great music metaphors, integrated digital marketing offers numerous benefits. In short, the approach answers the somewhat rhetorical question, “Why opt for just social media management, creative content marketing, or digital advertising when you can have it all?”
As we mentioned earlier, the overarching benefit of a digital marketing campaign is that it can help companies achieve business goals. Need more recurring revenue? Paid content campaigns are robust lead-generation machines. Want to interact with more potential customers? Social media campaigns get eyeballs on content and visitors to websites.
Integrated digital marketing efforts also confer other benefits along the way to those business goals. By definition, integrated marketing activities are a holistic endeavor. They force brands to develop a consistent tone and voice across all channels. Messaging consistency is especially important for long-term goals, like search engine optimization results and market share of voice.
As companies develop multi-channel digital strategies, they’ll also realize some economies of scale. Rather than creating one visual asset specifically for a Twitter campaign, companies can instead develop assets that they can easily repurpose, whether for paid media and advertising, an inbound email marketing campaign or any other channel.
Consistency with marketing efforts also lends itself to establishing brand authority, a harder-to-measure but no less important benefit of an integrated digital marketing strategy. Authoritativeness is a crucial component of SEO work. Authority also helps attract recurring customers. By educating people and demonstrating industry expertise, brands can become an information hub. Potential customers visit and revisit authoritative brands’ websites because those brands have earned their trust.
What does an integrated digital marketing strategy look like in action?
Any integrated digital marketing plan starts with research and analysis to establish a baseline. Say your company sells an AI platform with high uptake in the energy sector, and it wants to build a customer base in other industries. Research and analysis allows us, as your conductor, to understand what your current audience size is in a given industry so that we can compare growth as the campaigns kick off.
From there, we can build a measurement framework. Let’s say you’d like to see more website visits, and you’d like those visitors to stay on the site longer, especially when they arrive on landing pages about AI in specific industries. You also want to earn a larger share of voice — often measured in the number of articles about a company — in target industries. The framework we establish ties integrated digital marketing campaign-level KPIs to business objectives. More site visits translate into more leads, which eventually become more paying customers.
With a framework in place, we develop strategies that leverage existing strengths. For example, we might run a social media campaign highlighting your company’s success in the energy industry. Simultaneously, we can run paid advertisements discussing your product’s differentiators, describing how they’re applicable to any industry. We’ll also pitch company spokespeople to industry publications in areas you’d like to expand.
While each of these campaigns is in motion, and after they’re complete, we’ll measure your share of voice relative to competitors, website session duration and any other KPI we agree upon before launching the integrated marketing campaign. A quarterly report might include measurements, such as:
- 100% increase in share of voice, year-over-year, compared to benchmark
- 20% increase in site session duration, quarter-over-quarter
- 400,000 social media impressions
- 15 articles in industry publications
This is just one example. It outlines how we might tackle any client challenge through an integrated digital marketing approach.
I hear a symphony
Whether they’re presiding over Swan Lake or Beethoven’s 5th, a good conductor meshes every part of their orchestra together seamlessly. They add musical phrasing and shaping to match emphasize musicians’ strengths and engage their audience. And whether we are working with you on email marketing, social media, SEO, paid media or anything in between, our job is the same as that conductor’s job. Fuse disparate parts — in our case, different channels, as well as data, insights and creativity — to create a cohesive vision. When everything comes together, it’s a veritable symphony of measurable results that provide a positive impact to your business.
Learn more about our integrated digital marketing services or drop us a line if you have any questions.
¹Dictionary of Music and Musicians: conducting – the art of directing the simultaneous performance of several players or singers by the use of gestures.
