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Especially as of very recent history, gone are the days when SEO tactics single-handedly defined a successful digital marketing strategy.
No matter the industry, the online market is growing bigger as everyday goes by which makes your brand’s approach to creating an online presence all the more challenging and important. To drive valuable traffic to your website and to see ever-improving conversion rates (be it an online sale, or enquiry form submission), it is paramount that multiple customer touchpoints are carefully considered, creating seamless and consistent brand experiences.
You want your business to grow, you want to win more customers and drive more sales, but how do you do that when budgets are tight and your time is limited? Some of your competitors have plenty of cash to throw around and make noise. They can run expensive offline marketing campaigns, and buy aggressive online newspaper spreads to build their brands. So how can you, the smaller business-owner compete?
The answer lies in an integrated marketing approach. Let’s explore through an animated example.
Our protagonist is Ben. Ben owns “Tours by Ben” – an independent travel company and the service offering is a one-of-a-kind travel package that a customer can purchase for their next holiday. Ben struggles to get his business-voice heard because he is not competing directly with the big travel companies.
He delved into basic social media platform usage and pushed out offline advertising too whenever he had the time to do so, however this meant that since there was no proper strategy behind this posting, his marketing was irregular and his messaging was inconsistent which meant that his brand never built any momentum. Being a problem, Ben decided to develop an integrated marketing strategy for his business.
How does this work?
Tours by Ben now publishes a weekly blog post surrounding travel. These could be travel tips, places of interest, travel news, culture interests etc. The posts are then promoted through social media and a monthly email newsletter which also features content from the Tours-by-Ben Youtube videos where customers are encouraged to upload videos from their holidays planned out by Ben’s company. In high season, the company also runs offline print and in quieter months, special offers and promotions. Once or twice a year, Ben also takes advantage of free media coverage in newspapers and magazines by publishing a survey and its reports.
With this example, a potential customer (or lead) now experiences Tours by Ben as an established brand, with a clear customer and brand centric focus, pushing out consistent messaging across a multitude of different marketing channels. Because each element of marketing is no longer working in isolation (due to tech), they thus serve to amplify each other. This means that Ben’s voice is now being heard and once the right voice is being heard across different channels, then a brand following and fandom is built. When fandom is established through customer acquisition, these people no longer remain merely customers, however they suddenly become brand ambassadors echoing your brand messaging to a wider audience.
The result?
Tours by Ben wins and retains more customers, creates more ambassadors and drives more sales.
The above scenario is merely an example of how a very basic integrated marketing approach can help drive your sales. The honest truth is that due to technology and innovation in certain business processes across all sectors, the possibilities of what integrated approaches you could implement are indeed endless. It is up to you whether you want to have complex systems put into place or basic ones. Remember that it is not necessary to always strive to reinvent the wheel – because realistically, you won’t … and that’s absolutely fine.
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