You’ve got a marketer working on ad campaigns, another focusing on SEO, a social media manager on your LinkedIn presence, and a graphic designer making everything look great. With all these people on board, your marketing strategy should be set, right?
Maybe not. While everyone may be doing great work, you might still have a problem if they aren’t all aligned and working towards your corporate goals.
What Is an Integrated Marketing Strategy?
Integrated marketing is a strategic approach that ensures all marketing efforts across different channels work together to achieve overarching business goals. By aligning marketing and sales activities, it creates a cohesive plan that maximizes impact rather than relying on isolated tactics.
How Do You Get Started With Integrated Marketing?
Integrated marketing starts by understanding the overarching business goals then looking at how functional goals in areas like marketing and sales ladder up to help you achieve the corporate objectives. Without this top-down view, you’re just executing on a bunch of disparate tactics.
Let’s say you want to get in better shape. What would you do?
Maybe you eat more vegetables, start an exercise class or drink more water.
Each of these things might help you get in better shape, but maybe not as fast or as effectively as you want.
It’s when you come up with a plan to incorporate everything – dietary changes, more physical activity, better sleep, etc. – that you become significantly more likely to achieve your health and fitness goals.
This is how integrated marketing works to achieve company goals.
With an integrated approach, you’ll cover the full marketing and sales funnel – from brand awareness to lead generation and qualification to customer acquisition and retention – to ensure that each piece is working together to reach the same result.
Why Consistency is Critical For Your Integrated Marketing Strategy
One key component of an integrated marketing approach is consistency and coherence across all channels. For example, a person who sees your company on social media should find similar messaging and branding when they get to your website. And if a website visitor asks a chatbot a question, they should get a similar answer to someone who asked a real person at your company that question.
How to Build Your Integrated Marketing Strategy
Now that we’re on the same page as to what an integrated marketing strategy is, let’s delve into how it works.
Building an integrated marketing strategy starts by looking at the bigger picture – your overarching business goals – and then working down to ensure that each marketing activity ladders up to support those objectives. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you craft a strategy that connects the dots across channels, teams and tactics.
Step 1. Define Your Business Goals
Before diving into the tactics, ensure your business goals are clear and measurable. Ask yourself: What are we trying to achieve at the highest level?
This could be increasing market share, driving new revenue growth, launching a new product and/or expanding into new verticals.
Your marketing strategy should be built around your business objectives.
Step 2. Align Marketing and Sales Teams
It’s essential to get marketing and sales working together, not in silos.
Align both teams around a shared set of goals and metrics.
A common mistake is having marketing focus only on lead generation and sales on closing deals without a unified approach. Start from the top and ensure both teams are part of building the strategy.
3. Identify the Right Marketing Channels
You need to be active on the right channels to cover the full funnel. Look at where your target audience spends their time and decide which channels make the most sense for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
For example, LinkedIn may be ideal for brand awareness, while email marketing might work best for lead nurturing.
Don’t forget to ensure messaging and branding are consistent across all touchpoints.
4. Create Cohesive Campaigns
Now it’s time to craft campaigns that tell a unified story. Every marketing initiative – from social media posts to paid ads – should support your key business objectives.
Make sure your campaigns build on each other so customers experience a seamless journey from awareness to conversion. Consistency is key here.
5. Use the Right Tech Stack
Marketing automation platforms, CRM systems and integrated analytics tools will help you execute your strategy at scale.
These tools allow your teams to stay coordinated, track performance and optimize campaigns in real-time.
They’re essential to ensuring your integrated marketing efforts are efficient and data-driven.
6. Track and Measure Performance
Finally, measure what matters. Keep an eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals.
This might include tracking how your SEO efforts impact lead generation or how well your ABM (account-based marketing) campaigns move key accounts through the funnel.
Use integrated analytics to get a full picture of how each channel contributes to your success.
The Components of an Integrated Marketing Strategy
An effective integrated marketing strategy ensures that every aspect of your marketing and sales efforts is aligned to meet your corporate goals. This approach connects business strategy, functional strategy and delivery tactics in a seamless way, allowing all teams to work in harmony toward a shared vision.
But what are the components of an integrated marketing strategy?
How do all of your marketing pieces fit together?
Let’s break it down:
1. Business Strategy (Corporate Goals)
At the core of your integrated marketing strategy are your corporate goals.
These define the overarching objectives of your business, such as revenue growth, market expansion or customer retention. Without clear business goals, your marketing and sales efforts will lack direction and coherence.
Every functional and tactical decision should ladder up to support these central objectives.
2. Functional Strategy (Marketing, Sales, Customer Success)
Surrounding the corporate goals are functional strategies for different departments, such as marketing, sales and customer success.
Each department has its own goals, but these must align with the corporate objectives.
Here’s a closer look at how each function plays a role:
- Marketing: Responsible for brand awareness, lead generation and nurturing prospects.
- Sales: Focused on lead qualification, outreach and closing deals.
- Customer Success: Works on customer retention, building relationships and upselling existing clients.
The key to success is ensuring that each function isn’t working in isolation but in sync, supporting a unified strategy.
3. Delivery Tactics (Channels and Tools)
To execute functional strategies, you need effective delivery tactics. These are the specific activities, tools and campaigns that put your strategy into action across channels. For example:
- Marketing Delivery Tactics include branding and creative efforts, inbound content marketing (like blogs, research, webinars and SEO[search engine optimization]), and outbound campaigns (such as paid media, website strategy and email marketing).
- Sales Delivery Tactics include CRM (customer relationship management) systems, sales outreach tools and business development efforts that help move leads through the funnel.
- Customer Success Tactics involve tools like customer stories, case studies and testimonials, which act as social proof, help retain customers and build trust.
Every tactic should connect back to your functional strategies and, ultimately, to your corporate goals.
4. Reporting and Optimization
No integrated marketing strategy is complete without continuous reporting.
Measuring performance across marketing, sales and customer success efforts ensures that you’re staying on track to meet your corporate goals.
Through integrated reporting, you can identify which areas are working well and where adjustments are needed, ensuring all teams are aligned and maximizing the effectiveness of their efforts.
Integrated Marketing Strategy Timeline
Part of the power of an integrated marketing strategy comes from understanding that different strategies and tactics deliver results in different timelines. You’ll be working on the long-term goals at the same time that you’re filling out your sales funnel for next quarter.
If you aren’t starting from your business goals and thinking about your entire funnel over time, your strategy isn’t going to deliver the results it might.
Here’s how different strategies deliver results in different timelines, and how covering them all simultaneously puts you in the strongest possible position:
Immediate: 1-3 months
The focus is generating and qualifying bottom-of-funnel leads that are ready to buy, using tactics like paid media and sales outreach.
This year: 6-12 months
Here, the focus is on targeting and building trust with the right accounts for strategic growth. Strategies may include an ABM program to grow your pipeline as well as ongoing social media engagement to build a following.
Next year: 18 months - 2 years
This is about building a foundation to identify and nurture the most qualified leads – organic ones – who will be ready to buy in the near future. This means a focus on SEO, which takes time to build but has serious payoffs once the snowball effect kicks in.
Looking ahead: 2-3 years
Here, you’re positioning your subject matter experts as thought leaders in your space. The conversation isn’t about sales or products or services. It’s about where the industry itself is headed and the role your organization will play in driving it forward. This is where speaking engagements, industry research reports and contributed articles driven by a robust PR strategy come into play.
The future: 5+ years
Five or more years might seem far away, but the focus here is about building what we call “market leadership” – going beyond individual thought leaders to position your company as a pioneer. Consistency in your thought leadership strategy over a number of years turns your company into an industry leader. There’s no way around it; this game takes time. That’s why it’s important to be thinking about this today to set your company up for success in the future.
The Pitfalls of Siloed Marketing
Siloed marketing may help you reach individual metrics but will likely miss the mark on those big goals. Common issues with siloed approaches include:
- Disjointed customer experiences
- Inefficient use of marketing and sales resources
- Missed opportunities for cross-channel alignment and growth
- Slower pipelines
- Reduced outcomes & lower ROI
Let’s say you’re tackling paid media in a silo, separate from organic social, content, email or other activities. You might get good clicks and even drive some conversions. But you’ll reduce the potential impact you could have had, resulting in lower quality leads, a longer sales cycle or distractions in the form of vanity metrics.
And how does working in silos impact your company resources?
Are you creating new graphics for each ad, social post and content piece?
Does each team conduct its own market research when that research could be used in multiple ways?
Are the same leads being touched too often because one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing?
Silos are not conducive for either the team or customer experience.
What Are the Benefits of an Integrated Marketing Strategy?
There are several benefits to an integrated marketing strategy including increased efficiency, unified objectives, and better marketing ROI. The real power of an integrated strategy is built over time. That’s another reason why consistency is key when it comes to integrating your marketing silos.
Here are just some of the benefits of an integrated marketing strategy:
1. Unified Objectives
An integrated approach ensures that all marketing activities are aligned with the business objectives. This creates strategies that deliver a cohesive brand experience.
A great example is the marketing for the Barbie movie. The goal was not only to promote the movie but to build brand awareness and cultural relevance. In addition to traditional tactics, Barbie was promoted across reality TV and through more than 100 brand partnerships. Pink was everywhere. And the campaign was successful: Barbie became the highest-grossing worldwide release for Warner Brothers and pulled Mattel out of a financial slump.
2. Increased Efficiency
Coordinated efforts reduce redundancy and ensure that resources are used effectively. With integrated approaches, work can be shared across your team and content can be adjusted to fit different goals and platforms, instead of starting from scratch for each activity.
CenturyLink, a global telecommunication services provider, had eight separate organizations under their name, making it difficult to create coordinated marketing campaigns. They used marketing automation tools to create one central, shared marketing center. This helped create broad, multi-touch campaigns with consistent messaging. In just one year, this approach influenced about $2.6 million in revenue while saving over $1 million for its consumer and business segments.
3. Improved Brand Recognition
Consistency reinforces a brand's identity and makes it more recognizable. While you can tweak the wording and design for different audience segments or platforms, the heart of the message should stay consistent.
You may have heard of the Rule of 7, a marketing principle that says customers need to see a brand at least seven times before making a purchase decision. But for this to be relevant, the audience needs to recognize that it's the same brand that they’re seeing seven times. And don’t be fooled into thinking this is a B2C issue – 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions and 2/3 of B2B buyers start the buying process with a web search.
4. Better Customer Engagement
A unified approach to your marketing strategy enhances the customer experience and encourages greater engagement with the brand. Integrated marketing campaigns that have consistent branding can drive customer engagement across platforms.
PFL, a provider of print sales-enablement services, had siloed marketing strategies which lead to discordant messaging across platforms. They implemented an integrated approach to make their messaging consistent, which translated into better engagement with their email campaigns, where they found a 204% increase in response rates.
5. Stronger Performance Tracking
Another benefit of integrated marketing is holistic analytics. Integrating data from various channels provides a more comprehensive view of campaign performance and ROI. Research suggests that marketers with integrated analytics tools were more likely to outperform on revenue goals.
Let’s say you launched a campaign around a new service offering. When you look at the Instagram analytics, you see that the engagement is significantly lower than you were aiming for. If this is the only data you have, you may decide that you should change everything.
However, a more comprehensive view might inform you that your overall strategy is working well, but you need to adjust your targeting on this channel (or perhaps this channel isn’t a fit for your audience at all).
The benefits of integrated marketing are clear.
But it’s not always easy to get started.
Here are some roadblocks your team might run into as you get started.
The Challenges of Implementing an Integrated Marketing Strategy
Implementing a truly unified strategy isn’t without its hurdles. Many companies face speedbumps when trying to bring everything together. But being aware of these challenges upfront can help you navigate them more effectively.
1. Aligning Teams Across Departments
One of the biggest challenges is getting everyone on the same page. Marketing, sales, customer service and product or R&D teams often have their own priorities, tools and ways of doing things.
To create an integrated marketing strategy, you need strong collaboration across departments.
This can mean breaking down departmental silos and ensuring that everyone understands how their work fits into the larger business objectives.
How to address this challenge: Ensure there is clear communication about your business KPIs to keep everyone aligned. You might consider working with an experienced integrated marketing partner to facilitate cross-department collaboration and to keep everyone moving in the same direction.
2. Maintaining Consistent Messaging
When multiple teams are working on different campaigns or across various channels, keeping the messaging consistent can be difficult.
It’s crucial that every customer touchpoint – from social media to sales emails – delivers the same core message.
Without a centralized strategy and clear brand guidelines, you run the risk of sending mixed messages to your audience.
How to address this challenge: Create a unified brand and messaging guide and centralize content creation and review to keep your messaging cohesive across all channels.
3. Managing Marketing Data Across Platforms
An integrated marketing strategy relies heavily on data to understand how each part of the funnel is performing. But with multiple platforms and tools in play, managing and consolidating data can be a major challenge.
Investing in the right marketing technology stack that integrates well and provides a “single source of truth” is key to overcoming this barrier.
How to address this challenge: Change management is hard. But having crappy data is harder. Invest in marketing automation and CRM tools that integrate across departments, or collaborate with a partner who can help streamline your data systems for seamless performance tracking.
4. Staying Agile
Marketing trends change quickly, and while integrated marketing requires long-term planning, it also demands agility. The challenge here is balancing your long-term goals with the need to adapt and optimize your strategy in real-time.
Whether it's shifting customer behavior or a change in the competitive landscape, the ability to pivot without losing sight of your overall objectives is critical.
How to address this challenge: Build flexibility into your long-term strategy by scheduling regular reviews and optimizations.
5. Resource Allocation
Integrating multiple channels and aligning teams often requires more resources – time, budget and talent.
Ensuring you have the right people and technology in place to execute your strategy effectively is a common challenge. It’s important to regularly assess whether your current resource allocation is serving your strategy or if adjustments are needed.
How to address this challenge: We get it. Not everyone can do everything. Prioritize resources based on business goals and ROI potential. Now might be the perfect time to consider onboarding an integrated marketing partner to expand your capabilities without overextending internal teams.
6. Measuring Success Holistically
Measuring the success of an integrated marketing strategy isn’t as simple as looking at individual campaign results. You need to track how all channels are working together to move prospects through the funnel.
This requires a holistic approach to analytics, where you can see the bigger picture of how each part of the strategy is contributing to overall business goals.
Without integrated analytics, it’s easy to miss critical insights that could improve performance.
How to address this challenge: Use integrated analytics platforms to track multi-channel performance and optimize campaigns in real-time.
Are You Ready to Build Your B2B Integrated Marketing Strategy?
Integrated marketing leads to more efficient use of company resources and better customer engagement. Moving away from siloed work can be a challenge, but it’s very much worth the effort: an integrated approach will help your company reach both its long- and short-term goals quickly and more effectively.
What are you waiting for
