Building your own integrated marketing campaign is essential for
success.
Increasing brand recognition, familiarity, favorability and purchase intent are the key outcomes achieved by implementing integrated marketing. By synchronizing communication across channels, you secure greater returns than taking a segregated approach which would fail to synthesize your overall marketing efforts.
Integrated marketing requires a marriage of inbound and outbound strategies establishing consistent messaging to present your consumers with a harmonious path to purchase experience.
Let’s say you’re running a business that sells handicrafts or apparels, set up through an online shop. This can apply to any trade but for the sake of this article let’s consider the business of online apparels or fashion e-commerce.
After setting up your shop, deciding your pricing, and accounting for all the costs involved, you’re left with a certain profit margin with which you can do whatever you wish. You could keep it for yourself or you could reinvest it into your business. Now, after reinvesting in your business as much as possible, you reach a stage where you have more supply than your current demand provides.
To avoid any chances of inventory being leftover, you need to ensure your sales and cash flow are optimized. From a business point of view, the most obvious next step is to generate demand. With the remarkable advances in digital marketing over the last several years, there’s no better way to drive incremental traffic to your online shop and, in turn, increase demand for your products.
So this time around, instead of reinvesting your profits into manufacturing, sourcing, or a bigger office space, you set aside a significant percentage of that profit and invest it in an integrated marketing strategy.
This would involve leveraging marketing platforms and tools to generate new user demand by driving users through all steps of the marketing funnel in the most efficient way possible, all the while making sure you get the best bang for your marketing dollar. So you start off with several branding campaigns to generate awareness and top of the mind recall for your brand. Subsequently, you invest in engaging and innovative video creatives, and leverage the right digital plus offline mediums to promote them through.
After generating a higher degree of awareness for your brand, the next step is to get your users to visit your shop and check out your collection. To do this, you’ll run traffic campaigns and advertisements across FaceBook, Google, and various other publisher networks that serve advertisements to your most relevant target group. This would be a combination of demographics, gender, interests, and more, that closely resemble your average customer.
Now that you’ve gotten more users to consider your brand and check out your products, you start hooking them with offers to pique their interest and get them to show more intent to purposefully complete that final purchase. You run targeted advertisements across Google search, social media, YouTube, and display mediums leveraging the millions of inventories across the world wide web to get your products displayed to the end customer once more.
And here comes the tough part — research shows that over 70% of users are likely to abandon their cart right before a purchase. They may have multiple grounds for doing so, from wanting to think the purchase through and waiting for the price to drop to perhaps finding something more attractive on a competitor’s site.
That’s when your remarketing campaigns come into play, targeting each customer with static or dynamic advertisements at every step of the journey that they drop off from. If a customer dropped off after viewing a product, she probably didn’t like the t-shirt design or collection so you show her advertisements for your latest launches.
Some customers drop off after adding items to their cart so you issue exclusive limited time offers and sales for the products in their cart. If the user initiated a checkout but didn’t go through with the purchase, you provide ease of service by integrating as many payment partners and offers into your payment portal.
Then, finally, you get the user to purchase. Except it doesn’t end there. The mainstream rule of 80/20 applies more than ever in the business world. It’s true that 80% of your revenue is likely to come from the top 20% of your customers.
This is when you leverage Customer Relationship Management tools to get your customers coming back for more by keeping them up to date with the latest launches, products, offers, and more. Once you familiarize yourself with this practice, it becomes a simple workflow where you’re able to target the right customer at the right time at the right place to give them that final nudge to make another purchase on your platform.
Ultimately, you might be thinking you’ve exhausted most of your margins with these marketing activities. How did you save money?
Not only did you generate more demand for your products and get more users to visit your shop more frequently and purchase for more value, you improved your cash flows by clearing out the inventory you were unable to dispense.
For the clincher, when these strategies are effectively implemented, every quality customer you acquire for a dollar is likely to generate five to six dollars each for your business in their lifetime.
