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Do you want content marketing that costs less and delivers better results? If so, you should consider switching to integrated content marketing. With an integrated content strategy, you can convey a consistent message via multiple communication channels, including your website and social media.
If your message is consistent across every channel, you can avoid contradictions or mix-ups that confuse and put off your target audience. Keep reading to learn more about integrated content marketing and how it can benefit your brand.
Integrated content marketing involves using multiple communication platforms to deliver a cohesive story for your brand. Depending on your integrated content strategy, you can leverage communication channels like email, social media, and even traditional marketing channels like TV, billboard, and print media.
An integrated content strategy is ideal if your company has several departments involved in marketing. For instance, you may have offline and online marketing teams and external PR teams reaching out to your target audience on behalf of your brand. One team may put out a message that contradicts or undermines another team’s communication, leading to confusion among your target audience.
Such a mix-up may frustrate your content marketing goals by triggering doubt or hesitation among potential and existing customers. A successful integrated content strategy can help prevent such mix-ups. How? It will ensure that your marketing, PR, sales, and ad teams always put out a cohesive message when communicating with customers across multiple channels.
Targeting your audience with consistent, engaging, and clear marketing messages will help boost customer confidence and brand awareness. Other benefits of using an integrated content strategy are:
According to Data Reportal, Facebook and YouTube have over two billion active users. Instagram has almost 1.5 billion users, while TikTok has a billion active users. These figures indicate that social media has a huge potential for reaching new customers in different parts of the world.
Instead of relying on one communication channel, an integrated content strategy will allow you to reach people via multiple social media platforms. Besides social media, integrated content marketing can facilitate communication via email, blog posts, and other communication platforms. Communicating via multiple channels will enable you to reach, engage, and convert more people in more markets.
Integrated content marketing will deliver a better return on investment (ROI) than publishing uncoordinated marketing messages. That’s because you can reach more people with a consistent and convincing message. Integrated content also improves cost efficiency by helping you avoid the expense of creating different content for different communication channels.
Every individual has their preferred social media and communication platforms. Since an integrated content strategy relies on multiple channels, it can help you connect with potential customers via their preferred communication platforms. Connecting with customers via their preferred platform will increase engagement, leading to better marketing results.
Sending out a clear and consistent message across your communication channels will help prevent buyer confusion. Eliminating buyer confusion will enable customers to make decisions faster, leading to more closed sales in less time.
An integrated content strategy will not work without complete collaboration between your digital and offline marketing teams and other departments. The collaboration will ensure that every marketing team member knows the correct and specific message to share with your target audience.
Besides identifying the right message to share, integrated content marketing requires that your teams identify:
If any of these elements are missing, integrated content marketing may not succeed. An example of integrated content is content for your Top of The Funnel (TOFU) – the starting point of a buyer’s journey.
At the top of the funnel, your brand’s communication should educate and provide value to potential buyers. You can do this by answering customer questions in a friendly manner and communicating how your product can add value to a customer’s life. Doing this will help prospects trust your brand and build relationships.
When a prospect trusts you, they are more likely to convert. However, if TOFU communication isn’t cohesive, clear, or convincing, you could end up confusing or alienating prospects.
If you would like to create an integrated content marketing strategy that delivers results, follow these steps:
What do you hope to achieve by executing an integrated content marketing strategy? Your answer to this question will help you create a strategy that yields tangible results. For some businesses, the goal is to get more people to join their mailing lists or follow them on social media. For other brands, it could be getting the audience to buy a product or share their content.
Regardless of what your goal is, it should be measurable and realistic. If the goal is not tangible or measurable, you may have trouble measuring the success of your integrated content campaign. Also, every integrated content you create should positively contribute to your brand awareness, authority, and leads. Otherwise, the content will not add value to your company.
Your target audience is the group of people you hope to attract and convert with your integrated content. Knowing your audience will enable you to create content that’s most likely to resonate and engage with them. For example, targeting working adults with content created for children will likely lead to low engagement.
You can start identifying your audience by creating the ideal buyer persona. The buyer persona should feature the traits you want your ideal customer to possess. These traits may include the customer’s age, gender, location, language, occupation, income, and more.
After creating the buyer persona, you can search for prospects that fit the description. You can then research to discover your target audience's preferences, goals, and pain points. Your research will provide valuable data for creating content that can engage and convert your target audience. You will also get insights into your audience’s preferred communication channels, so you can start making content for those platforms.
Your integrated content should convey the same message and details to your target audience. Since integrated marketing requires sharing the same content on different platforms, your integrated content must work on multiple platforms.
For example, if your content is a long article, you cannot use platforms like YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram. Besides being compatible with your chosen communication channels, your content should be engaging, entertaining, and useful. If you have trouble coming up with fresh content ideas, you can try user-generated content.
Metrics are invaluable for measuring the success of your integrated content campaign. Some of the most useful metrics you can track include:
You can also use content testing to identify your posts with the most promising engagement and conversion metrics. You can then modify your underperforming posts to perform like your top-performing content.
Now that you have answers to what is integrated content marketing and understand its benefits, are you ready to try it out? If so, you don’t have to go through the trouble of creating and launching an integrated content marketing strategy yourself.
At Cohley, we offer fully managed services that help brands save money and achieve marketing goals more effectively. Avoid the inconvenience and expense of taking a trial-and-error approach to integrated marketing by letting our experts handle the entire process for you. You can count on us to provide you with an integrated content strategy tailored for your brand’s niche, audience, and goals.