Integrated marketing campaigns can be challenging to execute, however, when they are done well, these synergies can lead to marketing success.
In this episode of the award-winning Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Brian Weiss explains why and how integrated marketing campaigns can be superior to single-channel efforts.
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
Resources
Transcript
Eric: Hey, everybody. Eric Enge here. I’m the Principal of the Digital Marketing Solutions business unit at Perficient. With me today is Brian Weiss, who is the Lead Acquisition Marketing Strategist for the Digital Marketing Solutions business unit at Perficient. Thanks for joining us, Brian.
Brian: Thanks for having me.
Eric: Sure. Brian, why don’t we start by having you talk a little bit about how you define an integrated marketing campaign versus a single-channel effort?
Brian: Sure. Let’s say you’re running a military campaign with the Army, Navy and Air Force. You would probably want those groups to be in communication with each other, sharing intelligence, not getting in each other’s way, trying to support one another. It would be kind of crazy not to do that, although there are probably times when they don’t, right? I think that’s what we see in large organizations as well. It’s easy for these silos to develop where you have an SEO team, a paid media team, an email team—and they don’t always coordinate efforts or look for synergies between their activities.
Eric: Yes, I’ve seen a lot of that as well. So, what do you do to foster that process and get those synergies to develop?
Brian: To start off, you want to have a campaign manager who understands the strengths and weaknesses of each channel, and when it’s going to make the most sense to be investing in different activities. For instance, SEO is going to take some time to get going. If we’re launching new pages, it may be three to four months before they start to get any traction. With paid media, we can almost immediately start testing different messaging, different audiences, different offers, and we can see what works.
Eric: Right. So, once you learn what messaging gets the biggest response, you can work that into your other channels.
Brian: Exactly. And at the most basic level, just sharing the learnings in a timely way can help to accelerate efforts. Another great way to start a campaign is by doing a joint venture or affiliate offer to someone else’s email list. If you set the deal up the right way, you only pay them for conversions. It’s basically a risk-free way to start getting some sales and collecting data about what types of people are buying from you. And if you get enough sales that way, you may be able to start setting up lookalike audiences and avoid a big learning curve on the paid side.
Eric: So that’s another great example of how sharing information is vital, but are there ways that different channels can impact each other’s performance more directly?
Brian: Sure. For example, let’s say you’re running paid advertising to an offer that’s converting reasonably well, but you aren’t doing anything to follow up with new customers after they purchase. If you add an email follow-up sequence with complementary products or services, you might be able to double your average 90-day customer spend. After you’ve done that, you can afford to spend twice as much on advertising because the value of a conversion has just doubled.
Eric: Right. And you’d want to think about how that applies to the investments you make in SEO and other channels as well.
Brian: Absolutely. There’s also what I would call the omnipresence effect—the more times and the more places that people see you, the more likely you’re going to be able to get their attention. One example is a new eCommerce site that I was working with. They were running quite a lot of display advertising, and it wasn’t getting a great ROI, but when they would turn it off, they would see their SEO traffic go down. So, people were seeing the display ads, they were actually searching for the brand directly because of those ads, but they were also more likely to click on the site when it was showing up in organic results because of the established familiarity. So those are the types of interaction effects that you want to look for with these multichannel campaigns.
Eric: Right. Another part of your organization where there can sometimes be a disconnect is between marketing and PR. If you have a PR team that’s able to get you some major media mentions, maybe even some links to your campaign, that’s another type of broad visibility that juice everything else you’re doing.
Brian: Definitely. Ultimately when we’re talking about being present in all these different places, we’re talking about building the strength of your brand, which of course, is going to give you a huge boost in SEO. It’s going to lower your CPCs and give you all kinds of other second- and third-order impacts.
Eric: Yes. Let’s say you’re working with an organization, and there are only one or two major traffic channels that they’re currently investing in. How can they get started building something like what you’re talking about here?
Brian: First of all, if any single channel is accounting for over 50% of your traffic, there are probably major channels you’re under-invested in. Maybe the one exception is direct traffic, which might just be a sign of a really strong brand. But if you’re looking for ideas, you can try and see what your competitors are investing in. There’s a number of different tools that will help to show where their traffic is coming from and what kind of advertising they are running on different platforms as a starting point.
Eric: So, of course, the goal is to do better than your competitors, right? And you’re always going to be a little behind if you’re just trying to keep up with them.
Brian: For sure. And I think one of the benefits of working with an end-to-end marketing consultancy is, number one: they’ll have a bigger perspective to be able to look at your program and see where the low hanging fruit is, and number two: they’re not going to have the industry blinders on.
Eric: That’s a great point. Sometimes trying things that have worked in other industries that haven’t caught on in yours yet can be a great way to start putting you in the seat where your competitors are trying to catch up with you.
Brian: Definitely. And with all these channels that you work on, testing different things out and having a culture of continuous improvement ensures that you will continue to evolve and stay ahead of the pack.
Eric: I couldn’t agree more.
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
