Let’s take a journey back in time—to summer 2023. Back when no one and no place was safe from the “Barbie” movie’s reach. When every other ad, cereal box, social media post, and department store was pink-washed, blonde, and undeniably Barbie. 💁🏼♀️
Though she was a household name long before “Barbie’s” marketing team was blessed with a dreamhouse-worthy budget, the film still serves as a masterclass in modern-day marketing strategies.
The attention to detail, sustained hype, and inescapable presence of “Barbie’s” months-long promo campaign translated into crushing box office success. This integrated marketing masterpiece showcased the true influence of consistent messaging served across multiple channels to a wide range of audiences.
And by the time you’re finished reading this blog, you’ll have the tools to do the same.
Luckily, you don’t need “Barbie’s” $150 million marketing budget or years of preparation to reap the benefits of a successful integrated marketing strategy of your own. All you need is two weeks. 🏆
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about integrated marketing and break down the basics into an actionable two-week timeline. Follow step-by-step and week-by-week to see your strategy come to life.
This Article Contains:
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat is an Integrated Marketing Strategy?
Integrated marketing—or integrated marketing communications (IMC)—takes a holistic marketing approach and refers to any campaign that includes marketing channels or media to tell a single story or reach a specific target.
Therefore, your integrated marketing strategy is your game plan for creating and aligning that messaging across each channel.
Integrated campaigns pull in all areas of marketing—from brand, demand gen, customer and lifecycle, email, and product marketing. It creates a vision that ideally tells your brand story in a consistent, easy-to-follow manner with some level of personalization to tackle the particular channel and the customer’s lifecycle stage.
Whether you’re looking to generate product buzz, newsletter signups, or meaningful sales leads, teams repeatedly rely on integrated marketing strategies to diversify audiences’ experiences with their brand while telling (and reinforcing) a consistent story with each interaction.
Tanya Littlefield, a Fractional Growth Marketing Leader, finds it takes between six and eight touchpoints on average to generate a B2B sign-up or sales request. That’s why “running a campaign on one channel or focusing solely on top or bottom-of-funnel campaigns won’t cut it,” she says.
To stay top-of-mind and keep up with the ever-changing ways buyers identify and purchase solutions online, marketing teams need to create programs that both drive demand and tell their story—even before a consumer is ready to buy.
“Nothing does this better than coordinated, multi-channel campaigns, which are the backbone of integrated strategies,” Littlefield explains.
Integrated marketing strategies are often tied to a single campaign. Even though you’re tapping multiple channels at a time, your integrated marketing assets should be released in tandem to deliver a cohesive message to your audiences, regardless of how or where you find them.
Let’s recap. To carry out a successful integrated marketing campaign, simply:
- Prioritize consistency (consistently)
- Present a united front across multiple marketing channels
- Measure your success as you go
Pretty straightforward, right? Well, kind of. The challenge lies in maintaining your attention to detail and effective cross-functional collaboration.
Bringing various channel owners into the mix means you’ll need to align your integrated marketing campaign across multiple departments and teams, including (but not limited to) social, content, sales, design, and web to ensure seamless execution.
Integrated marketing communications take all key players and their established processes into account, allowing ample time to identify the campaign’s overall objectives, message, KPIs, involved marketing channels, deliverables, project timeline, resources, and more.
Think of it this way—the success of a social media post and a blog aren’t measured by the same metrics, but successful integrated marketing campaigns will address these differences early on.
The lift required to pull off an effective integrated marketing campaign may sound daunting on paper, but the impact is well worth the effort and the benefits are nearly endless.
What are the benefits of integrated marketing?
First and foremost, integrated marketing is extremely effective for boosting potential leads and strengthening your brand image. Targeting a diverse range of channels with a consistent narrative gives potential customers more opportunities to interact with your product.
And with a rock-solid strategy steering your campaign efforts, these interactions are bound to be positive, recognizable, and memorable. AKA, the marketing trifecta. 🙌🏼
A consistent story and experience throughout your marketing efforts generate stronger customer awareness of your brand. Like that commercial jingle on replay in your head, you want your integrated marketing campaign to anchor your company in the consumers’ minds—but in a good way. Sorry jingle-writers.
Without coordinated campaigns and cross-functional collaboration, a marketing team would be lucky to capture customers at just one stage in the buyers’ funnel. However, with a robust and detailed plan, a single campaign could support the entire lifecycle.
What other benefits can you expect from an effective integrated marketing strategy?
- Breaking down team silos: Bringing different channel owners together under a single campaign is a surefire way to get new team members talking. With the opportunity to pursue a shared goal, members across departments can strengthen working relationships, improve cross-functional collaboration, and make a greater impact through projects that extend beyond their typical scope
- Build trust with your target audience: An unwavering narrative and brand image across your marketing channels shows audiences what they can expect from your business—regardless of where they fall in the sales funnel. Whenever they scroll past an ad, read a blog, submit a sales form, or sign up for your product through self-serve, they’re greeted with the same messaging that pulled them in, to begin with
- Better metrics and data insight: No two marketing channels will share the same KPIs, though several will share the same goal. Integrated marketing provides multiple touchpoints for collecting deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences depending on where they reach your campaign, how they interact with it, and whether it leads to a conversion
- Optimized budget allocation: Integrated marketing strategies require teams to first identify the most effective channels for their campaigns, leading to better ROI overall and cost efficiency right out of the gate. Beyond planning, marketing teams can also get more bang for their buck through sharing and repurposing campaign assets between channels with minimal extra effort. I.e.—a certain campaign image may appear across all social media marketing, on a web page, and in an email
- Maximized impact: Whether you’re targeting a new segment or searching for new leads within your ideal audience, coordinated integrated marketing efforts will amplify your message by reaching a wider range of consumers and increase the impact of your campaign
Done well, integrated marketing is incredibly effective, and this list only scratches the surface of its benefits. Which begs the question—how do you launch an effective integrated marketing strategy of your own?
We’ll show you. 🙂
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Create an Integrated Marketing Machine in 2 Weeks
The more teams involved in your campaign, the more challenging it can be to get the ball rolling. While the planning phase is crucial to every successful integrated marketing strategy, it’s also where the campaign is most likely to lose steam or even burn out completely.
The first few integrated campaigns might feel uncomfortable, as each function may need to give up some of its standard planning processes to align with the bigger group. Once the teams see success in a few campaigns, this will come more naturally, as will the collaboration.
To avoid losing your next big marketing idea to the never-ending “pending” pile, we suggest creating and adhering to a tight timeline. Our suggestion? Two weeks.
While this seems like a fast turnaround, the proper action plan will keep the team on track—without burning out or cutting corners. Especially with the help of powerful project management software to handle the heavy lifting for you.
Project management tools like ClickUp are the essential first step of any productive marketing strategy or campaign. With built-in features for facilitating team collaboration, brainstorming, acting on your ideas, and documenting progress, it eliminates the busy work weighing down any process to help you focus on the work that matters most.
With your preferred project management tool on hand, you’re ready to hit the ground running.
The details driving different integrated marketing campaigns will vary depending on your product, goal, and audience, but the foundation will often follow the same structure.
Week 1: Gather your campaign R&D
Though two weeks can go by pretty quickly, it’s crucial to establish the who, what, where, when, why, and how right out of the gate. A majority of your first week will be dedicated to establishing the basics—especially solidifying why it’s necessary and what it will do to help reach your goals.
Similar to the way your favorite TV chefs will pre-portion their ingredients on the cutting board before the actual cooking starts, week one of your integrated marketing strategy heavily focuses on research and prep. Let’s get into it.
Step 1: Establish a SMART campaign goal
Day one is dedicated to figuring out what you’re trying to achieve through this campaign.
We will always sing the praises of goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. AKA, SMART goals. Having a goal in mind is the natural first step in creating any strategy, and integrated marketing campaigns are no different.
Maybe you launched a new product feature or entirely rebranded the company—these initiatives are the springboards that launch you toward your goal and justify why a campaign is worth the effort.
This will also get you thinking in the right direction when it comes to metrics and marketing KPIs. Knowing how you’ll measure the success of a campaign goal is essential to your integrated marketing campaign, and will be the deciding factor in whether or not it is successful.
Step 2: Identify your target buyer persona and key marketing channels
Now that you’ve established the reasoning behind your strategy and the problem it aims to solve, it’s time to determine who it’s all for.
At this stage, you might be still on day one or just beginning day two of building your strategy.
Identify the customer persona you’ll target throughout your campaign to guide your decisions going forward. Knowing the market you’re going after, the general behaviors of your audience, and understanding what matters to them will help you create more compelling and tailored content.
This stage is also where you’ll start determining the right channels to go after in your campaign. With a well-defined audience in front of you, you can isolate the marketing channels they frequent most to ensure you’re meeting them where they’re at, every time.
The good news at this stage in your strategy is that a lot of this research is likely already done. No one understands the goals of your company better than the company itself and no one knows your ideal customer better than you do.
In steps one and two, you’re simply collecting and organizing research and information you already have on hand to make the next steps in your integrated marketing process even easier.
Step 3: Get the right people involved
Welcome to step three! This step should coincide with day three if you’re keeping pace with our planned timeline.
Knowing what you’re trying to accomplish and who you want to reach in your campaign, ask yourself: Which internal teams do you need to connect with to make it happen?
TBH, there are probably more people involved than you think. Not just channel managers, but design teams, paid marketing managers, copywriters, PR, sales teams, and more.
And while you already understand the drive for this campaign, they might still be in the dark. That’s why marketing campaign planning templates are so essential to keep track of all stakeholders and partners.
These templates are perfect for setting up a new campaign. So, once you’ve identified everyone who needs to be involved, you can better prioritize getting them in the same room (or on the same call) as quickly as possible.
This will align the team on each member’s current bandwidth, see if others need to be looped in, and identify any major blockers right off the bat.
Another major detail you’ll need to iron out at this stage is who will have the final say on all campaign assets. Many promising integrated marketing strategies fall to the wayside simply because there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
It’s essential to have someone in the driver’s seat to coordinate with the leaders of each marketing function. A consistent meeting and deliverable process across each function is one way to get everyone on board, keep dates aligned, and solve challenges as they come up.
Eliminate the headache of never-ending back-and-forth approval processes by appointing one person with the power to make the last call.
Step 4: Brainstorm your campaign story and action plan
With your dream team in place, you’re ready to brainstorm and piece together your overall campaign story and game plan. Whether huddled over a conference table, on a video call, or entirely online digital whiteboarding software, the best team collaboration and ideation sessions happen in real-time.
At this point, there are no bad ideas. It’s just about getting a starting point down on paper. From there—and with the collective brainpower of your diverse and cross-functional team—you will solidify:
- All of the deliverables needed in the campaign
- The overall campaign narrative and a consistent message
- Where and when the campaign assets will go live
- Key due dates and a rough timeline for the following week
This might not happen in one 30-minute meeting. Allow the team time to think through their first round of ideas, gather necessary information, and regroup if needed. If you started this two-week timeline on a Monday, we suggest getting this meeting on the calendar by Thursday or Friday at the latest (days four and five).
Week 2: Setting your strategy in motion
You got all of your ducks in a row over week one. Week two is when the team is largely heads down in their work, bringing your campaign roadmap to life. Or in keeping with the chef’s example—when you finally start cooking.
Step 1: Create cohesive campaign assets
The biggest bottleneck in creating campaign assets often happens in the feedback and approval stages, so it’s critical to get “V1” in front of your campaign managers as quickly as possible. After necessary rounds of edits, this step might stretch from the start of the second week (day six) through day nine or even 10.
This doesn’t just apply to the design team. All written content including social media captions, quotes, hashtags, soundbites, web copy, and blogs can take just as long (if not longer) to set in stone. You want to dedicate as much time as possible to this step as it relates to everything your customers will actually see from your campaign efforts.
Step 2: Determine how you’ll measure success
Remember that SMART campaign goal you established in week one? It’s time to revisit it and think about it through the lens of each marketing channel. Identify the KPIs related to your larger integrated marketing campaign, then consider how each channel measures its own success.
These metrics might include:
- Leads generated from specific channels
- Views on a particular post or visits to a certain blog
- Newsletter or YouTube subscribers
- The number of new accounts created on your website
And more.
It’s incredibly important for integrated campaigns to not only have clear owners but clear KPIs and goals. Each function might typically look at only a few metrics, but integrated campaigns also require a focus on the top 1-3 KPIs across teams.
Though your team might still be in the process of putting pen to paper and drafting your campaign deliverables, the timeline keeps moving. That means you can continue finalizing your design assets as you’re working through step two in the background.
And since you’ve done such thorough preparation during the first week while researching your target audience and meeting with your channel owners, this shouldn’t take more than a day or two to solidify. We suggest starting this step on day seven or eight to stick to your two-week timeline.
Step 3: Launch, evaluate, and iterate as needed
You’ve made it to the final day in your two-week integrated marketing campaign sprint! That means you’re done, right? Absolutely not. But you’re close!
By the final day of your strategy action plan, you’re ready to let it spread its wings and fly. Your content may be live, or it will be in a matter of days. Either way, the heavy lifting is done.
All design meetings, approvals, rounds of feedback, and bottlenecks have been addressed and put to rest. All deliverables are finalized and any content that hasn’t been published yet is queued up and ready for you to hit “send.”
After a successful marketing campaign launch, it’s time to monitor its success and evaluate its performance over the following days, weeks, and months. Let the metrics and KPIs you’ve already established guide you when determining what “success” looks like for this campaign.
To ensure you’re staying focused on learning and growing from every campaign, hold a retrospective meeting with your integrated marketing team after the launch to discuss your key learnings including:
- What went well
- What could’ve gone better
- Key takeaways from the experience
- How you can improve future campaign strategies
With the knowledge you gained throughout planning your strategy and a timeline in place to oversee its success—then it’s time to celebrate. 🎉
Summarize this article for me pleaseStay on Top of Your Integrated Marketing Strategy in ClickUp
As you monitor the success of your ongoing integrated marketing campaigns, you’ll have the knowledge and insights to confidently adjust your campaign over time and tailor it to your specific needs.
Until then, let this action plan lay the foundation ahead of your next campaign. Follow along step-by-step and watch your integrated marketing strategy take shape in a matter of weeks! And to take this framework even further—plan and manage it using a dynamic project management software like ClickUp.
ClickUp is the only productivity tool with the power to bring marketing teams together, instantly capture ideas, and oversee progress from a single platform. Sign up for ClickUp today and watch your campaigns come to life.
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