From awareness to action: The power of an integrated marketing strategy
How can you create meaningful and lasting impressions on your target audience?
One of the most powerful ways to achieve this is through integrated marketing – a strategy where all marketing efforts across different channels work together to tell a consistent message.
The goal is to reinforce the same core message across multiple touchpoints. Whether your audience encounters your brand on social media, through an email, or on your website, the message, tone, and branding presents as unified.
Why integrated marketing matters
Count on your customers to do their research. Content consumption is a driving force behind purchasing behavior, with nearly 50% of B2B purchases being self-service. Integrated marketing creates the seamless, personalized experience customers look for. It ensures that your brand delivers the right content at the right time, across every touchpoint, guiding potential buyers and validating their decisions even before they reach out to your sales team.
The roadmap to successful integrated marketing campaigns
Any marketing campaign needs to fit into your overall marketing strategy and align to your broader objectives.
1. Understand your audience
Who are you trying to reach? What are their job titles, demographics, pain points, and preferences? What channels do they engage with the most? The more you know, the more effectively you can tailor your message to meet their needs.
It’s also important to understand internal audiences. In many cases, you may run joint marketing campaigns with partners or hyperscalers. You’ll need to understand who the campaign is meant to support. What do they care about? What are their pain points? What does success look like for them? How do they engage with customers?
For example, Mercer-MacKay is often asked to build marketing campaigns for new sales motions that enable co-selling across multiple companies (think hyperscaler, ISV, SI or GSI). This means we need to understand the value of the combined sales play, how it affects quotas for each organization, and what experience the various teams have co-selling a combined solution. Some organizations are mature co-sellers, some have never done it before.
2. Deliver clear messages
Each message should align with your company’s overall narrative as well as address the unique needs of each customer segment. What is the core message you want to convey? How does your campaign extend this message across different channels?
When working with multiple partners or audiences, it’s crucial to blend messages carefully to ensure they remain cohesive while addressing the specific needs of each stakeholder.
We typically work with high-level messages that an organization is trying to promote (for example: “intelligent cloud”, “securely managed” or “data-driven decisions”) and then map out use cases that demonstrate how these messages show up in the day-to-day life of the audience.
3. Set goals and KPIs
Establish measurable goals for your campaigns. What metrics will determine success? No matter if you’re tracking the number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), or pipeline growth, having clear objectives help guide your efforts and measure progress.
The sales cycles for complex or mission-critical technology implementation tend to be lengthy – often ranging from 6 to 18 months before a decision is made. This means that KPIs need to map out the full journey because it is likely that achieving the ultimate revenue target will take longer than the length of the campaign. But knowing that MQLs have increased by X, SQLs by Y, and opportunities by Z enables informed decisions about where to invest marketing efforts and funds.
4. Select the right marketing channels
Choosing the right channels is critical to ensuring your message reaches the right people. Regardless of whether you’re focusing on social media, email, paid media, or in-person events, your channel mix should be determined by where your ideal audience is most active. For B2B technology companies, LinkedIn is often a strong platform, but it may also be valuable to consider content syndication, webinars, or even direct mail campaigns for better engagement.
We always look at where we can get additional traction with clients through partnerships. For example, if you’re an SI promoting a hyperscaler or ISV solution, can you create a blog post that could be featured on your partner’s website? Possibly they can include an email outreach to promote what you are doing. Write social posts for your partners and leverage the power of their platforms and connections. Marketing channels should be a mix of paid and organic; this works best when coordinated across broader outreach efforts.
5. Develop a content plan
A well-thought-out content plan is the backbone of an integrated marketing strategy. Create a content calendar that outlines what type of content will be produced for each channel. Your content should not only be informative but also aligned with the customer’s journey – from the awareness stage to the consideration and decision-making stages.
For example: blogs, case studies, and thought leadership pieces can help build trust during the awareness stage. Whitepapers, demos, and customer testimonials can be used to nurture leads further along the funnel.
Consider using third-party content as well. One of the tactics we often include is to share public domain research and then offer an opinion on it. This works well on LinkedIn, but it can also be included in blog posts. But be sure to check the publication rules on the research paper – many organizations want you to share their content as long as you attribute it to them, while others have much stricter guidelines.
6. Determine the channel execution plan
If you’re reliant on multiple marketing functions to support execution (even across different organizations), how will this work? How will you go to market cohesively?
This can be a black hole if it is not well defined. For example, if you are planning an email campaign, but the email engine is hosted by another department or third party, it may be difficult to access the metrics needed to measure and optimize results.
One of our clients provides us all of their metrics every month, compiled from a variety of internal and external people and processes. We compile them, analyze them, and then provide a monthly overview to the executive team. We detail what the results mean, where we’ve been successful together, and what we need to improve.
7. Leverage automation and tools
Many tools are available to help manage content distribution, measure performance, and report on KPIs. In complex campaigns where these tools may not be integrated, you’ll need a plan on how to bring the data together.
With mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence, marketing tools are becoming more sophisticated, providing greater insight into the success of your efforts. We are always looking at the newest marketing technologies and determining which ones can help our customers. Many of these technologies we test on ourselves to determine their viability before including them in a campaign with any of our customers.
8. Align across teams
An often-overlooked aspect of integrated marketing is internal alignment. Ensure your marketing, sales, and customer service teams are all working from the same playbook. It’d be a good idea to consolidate all your plans into a single strategy document. Tight collaboration across departments helps ensure a unified experience for your customers.
Your sales enablement kit might include a battlecard, FAQs (including the impact on quota and commission), two or three slides to present to customers, an offer sheet, sample emails and social posts, links to additional resources, and contact information for overlay sales specialists.
9. Execute and monitor
Regularly track the performance of your campaigns across all channels. Analyze what’s working and where improvements can be made. Integrated marketing is a dynamic process – be prepared to adapt your approach based on real-time data.
The key in the execution stage is to optimize. It is unlikely that your campaign will be perfect, but it will provide useful insight. For example, if you find that one message or piece of content has a high CTR, consider offering expanded content on that specific topic. Write an eBook, run a webinar with an expert speaker or customer, create a series of blog posts, or join a Podcast aimed at your ideal audience.
10. Engage and interact
Use two-way communication with your audience through social media, email, and customer feedback channels. Customer interaction is crucial for refining messaging and improving campaigns.
We often bring in our BDR tele-sales team to help our clients at this stage of the campaign, following up leads, reaching out to existing customers, conducting customer surveys, and booking appointments for sales teams. All of these activities build human connection, accelerate opportunities, and increase the likelihood that a customer will ultimately choose you when they are ready to buy.
11. Review and adjust
After the campaign, review the results against your KPIs. Use these insights to fine tune future integrated marketing strategies for better outcomes.
Find an integrated marketing partner
Delivering a truly integrated marketing experience can be complex – especially when your goal is to successfully execute joint campaigns with your partners.
An integrated marketing partner can be a strong addition to your team, helping to align multiple objectives, get the campaign into market, and ensure success.
One of our core strengths is building strong three-way integrated marketing programs. By crafting meaningful thought leadership content for multiple channels and continually optimizing campaign performance, we bring together all essential elements of successful integrated marketing. Our deep understanding of the tech industry allows us to tailor solutions that meet the specific needs of your business and your customers, driving results that move the needle.
You can read about how we helped NetApp build a measurable and profitable Microsoft Alliance program for Azure NetApp Files.
If you have a campaign in mind or want some guidance on who you could connect with to launch a joint program, please reach out.