What Is The Importance Of Integrated Digital Marketing?

I was always passionate about digital marketing and started my digital marketing journey in 2017 with my blog. When I started learning about digital marketing, then I realized that each module is an ocean. It is difficult for an individual to become an expert in each module. Thus, it is important to execute digital marketing integrated rather than be an expert in each module.

Hence, here we will discuss how digital marketing executed in an integrated way can get you exponential results and how you should approach it.

What is Integrated Digital Marketing?

It is an art of using all the digital marketing methods so that each digital marketing channel compliments the other by playing its strength rather than trying to reach the goal of increasing revenue on its own.

Content is the backbone of integrated digital marketing and makes the best use of all the digital marketing channels through combined marketing campaigns. Integrated digital marketing acts like a team where content is a leader.

Why is Integrated Digital Marketing important?

Nowadays, visitors become your customers through different channels. They might become aware of your brand through engagement on social media, get attracted to your content through search results, know about your offers by clicking on PPC ads, sign up for your email list to access your freebies, and become your customer after a series of email nurturing.

Since buyers no longer learn about products and services from a single channel, it is important to ensure they get a consistent message about your brand wherever they encounter it. Integrated digital marketing will use each member’s strength and produce greater results than each member’s achievement.

Common digital marketing methods include:

• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing (SMM)
• Email Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Lead Generation
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Website Design

Let’s know more about each in detail to give you more clarity on each module and what their strengths are.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is the marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to appeal to and retain the target audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action. It can be in blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, social media posts, emails, videos, podcasts, and other media. It helps to promote brand awareness and keeps your business at the top of the mind of the customers when they make the purchase.

To use it effectively, you will need to deliver the right content at each sales cycle stage, from awareness through consideration to purchase. Here’s how businesses use content marketing in each stage of the sales cycle to engage and sell their products/services.

Awareness Stage

This is the first stage of the sales process where your content should focus on your audience’s top concerns. Writing about their pain points and challenges gives you the best chance to engage with them. Content at this stage should be educational, how-to-advice, etc.

The best content for this stage includes articles, blog posts, e-books, newsletters, and videos.

Consideration Stage 

In this stage, content should be a mix of helpful information and marketing. It should educate the reader about the features or functions and how these features address customer needs. It should also talk about what your business offers to your audience.

The best content for this stage includes case studies, how-to articles, how-to videos, checklists/worksheets

Closing-Stage

Content Marketing plays a major role when a prospect is about to make a purchase. You can focus on sales at this stage, where your central message should be your expertise, knowledge, and USP of what you sell.

The best content for this stage includes case studies, user-generated content, buyer’s guide, product video, research report.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing is so tactical that it is proven to work and provides a competitive advantage.

• Businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than other companies.
• 47% of buyers view 3 to 5 contents before engaging with a sales representative

Content is the heart of integrated digital marketing, which drives the entire marketing campaign. People use the internet to find information and do transactions. When a consumer wants to purchase anything, they just go online and find reviews of products. 

Thus, before making the purchase, consumers collect data and information to help them decide.

Information comes before the transaction; hence, it is better to educate the customer about their needs and present the product or service before them. Once they are convinced that you are the best in the market, they will naturally buy from you.

Such information can be given through content marketing via blogs, web content, social media networks. Compared to paid advertising, content marketing looks like a free model because you are not paying for the traffic but creating quality content that costs a lot.

Having a full-time writer in-house to publish blog posts will cost a lot of money but the investment in content marketing is worth it since it produces long-term returns. Content without marketing is of no use, and that’s where other digital marketing methods can help.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing refers to social media networks to market a company’s product and services. It provides a way to engage the customers and reach new prospects. It allows marketers to connect and interact with potential customers where they hang out: LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.,

There are five key pillars of social media marketing:

• Strategy – This helps determine the goals, the social media channels to be used, and the type of content shared.

• Planning and Publishing – Businesses should draft the plans of what type of content they want to post and when it will be put out on the platform.

• Monitoring – This may require a social media engagement tool to monitor what users are saying about the posts, brands, and other business assets.

• Analytics and Reporting – Social media is important to know how far the posts are reaching; hence, reports on reach and engagement are important.

• Advertising – Running ads on social media is a great way to promote and develop the brand.

Why is Social Media Marketing important?

Social media has become one of the most important aspects of integrated digital marketing that helps to reach millions of customers worldwide. Social media channels help you to attract the right customers with the right information at the right time. Being in social media networks enables you to understand customers’ habits which can help you create some major leads.

Here are the five reasons why it is important in business:

• Cost-Effective – Anyone can do social media marketing even without investing huge costs. It is the most effective way for advertising your brand. You can sign up for free on any social media platform and promote the brand at no cost. It helps you to invest money in other marketing campaigns.

• Customer Engagement – One of the reasons for you to market on social media platforms is that your audience are already spending time on these channels. It is a good way to interact with your audience on a personal front. By communicating and interacting with your customers, you can win their attention and convey your brand message. This way, you can reach out to more people and build your brand in the market.

• Improves Brand Loyalty – Having social media presence makes it easier for your customers to connect and engage with you. Social media presence will help in customer retention and loyalty. Since building a loyal customer base is one of the major goals of any business, social media could be your strategy. A customer considers this to be a service channel where they can directly communicate with the business.

• Increases Traffic – One of the major reasons for social media is it helps to increase website traffic and by sharing your content on social media, you allow users to visit your website for more information. The more quality content you share on your social media account, the more inbound traffic will generate while making conversion opportunities.

• Increases SEO Ranking – Social media presence is becoming an essential factor in calculating the ranking of any website. It is no longer enough to optimize the website and blog regularly. Successful brands have social media presence that acts as a signal to the search engines that your brand is valuable and trustworthy.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the process of sending mass emails to educate and promote products or services while building relationships with potential customers. Email marketing can include newsletters with updates about the company or promotions of sales and exclusive deals for subscribers. At its best, it allows businesses to keep their customers informed about their marketing messages.

It helps increase brand awareness, boost sales, build credibility, drive more traffic to your website, and much more.

There are different types of emails that include:

• Welcome email – When a customer interacts with a company for the first time, the business typically sends automated emails explaining more about the organization and its products. These are highly targeted mail based on the offer they interact with. For example, a software company that offers a free trial for its software will send informational links to help the consumer get the most value out of the tool. At the end of the trial, they may send emails focused on converting the customer.

• Newsletters – These are general emails sent out regularly, typically containing company updates and links to blog content or other material. It is a low-cost way to stay in contact with many people. When a customer interacts with any of these emails, for example, downloads an eBook, the business can add them to a more targeted email sequence.

• Email Reminders – Businesses may send email reminders to customers who haven’t finished a task they started. For example, if someone looked at a product on an eCommerce store but didn’t make the purchase, the store can send an email reminding them to complete the transaction.

• Transactional email – When a customer makes the purchase, they can send a series of emails telling them more about the product. Transactional emails such as post-purchase emails are essential for increasing customer loyalty. For example, if your product is subscription-based and the customer finds value in the service, he keeps paying for it. Post-purchase type of emails can also be used to upsell other products.

• Nurture Emails – Prospects get targeted content as a nurture email based on the problems that they face. Email nurture can be in the form of links to blog posts, whitepapers, or video guides. The nurture email aims to provide the prospect with useful information that keeps your company in mind and ultimately turns into a new customer.

• Cold emails – Businesses sometimes send cold emails to people they haven’t interacted with yet. These messages are the least effective form of email marketing, but they may work for B2B sales when highly targeted and sent from a personal account.

• Promotional emails – Email marketers use promotional emails to inform existing or potential customers about special offers, seasonal deals, or other promotions.

Why is email marketing important?

Email marketing is valuable since it doesn’t cost much, yet it is very effective. It is the top digital media channel for customer acquisition and retention.

Here are some reasons for the importance of email marketing:

• Low cost – Email marketing is free other than the cost of the software. This means that you can have excellent ROI from email marketing.

• Effective – Email marketing targets people who have already expressed their interest in your products/service, which means they need less nurturing than those who have less knowledge about the company.

• Flexible – Email marketing is flexible since it can be used in any stage of the sales funnel. Prospects in the initial stage of the buying process can benefit from helpful information about their problem. Once they interact, you can focus the content on your product. Once they get closer to the purchasing decision, you can send them offers or discounts to buy the product.

• Own your list – Unlike social media account, which could be suspended or closed at any time, it is not the case with emails. You own your email list of those who have subscribed to you or shown interest. No one can take those leads out of you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving your website or a piece of content to increase its visibility when people search for products/services related to your business in Google, Bing, or other search engines. Because organic search is the most obvious way for people to discover content online and SEO helps to enhance the quality of traffic to your website.

Common tasks associated with SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks.

Here are six types of SEO that include:

• On-Page SEO – On-Page SEO is the process of optimizing the content on your website. This includes body copy, keywords, headers, meta title, meta description, images and more. It should be noted that even though search engines look at a website, the ranking is done on a page-level basis. That is why it is important to pay attention to the optimization of each page on your website.

• Off-Page SEO – Off-Page SEO is everything that doesn’t happen on your website. Off-Page SEO is about creating exposure and trust for your company, which ultimately will result in more visitors and sales. Most off-Page SEO is focused on link building, which is a practice of getting links back from relevant and authoritative websites.

• Technical SEO – Technical SEO is the process that helps search engines to crawl your website and enhance user experience (UX). It includes strategies to improve a site’s backend structure. The technical SEO efforts should address website speed, mobile-friendliness, and site structure.

• Local SEO – Local SEO focuses on a specific area rather than a national focus. It is about increasing your presence at the local level by promoting your products/services to local customers. Google often depends on how well you rank on your Google My Business profile. This is where you include your address, business hours, descriptions, photos, reviews.

• Mobile SEO – Mobile SEO refers to optimizing websites combined with flawless viewing on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. After all, more than 50% of internet users surf websites through mobile devices daily. Google already favours mobile-friendly websites.

• YouTube SEO – Many people don’t realize that YouTube is one of the most popular search engines, and it can make a big difference in how much traffic you are getting. Even if you rank for one of your videos for a standard Google Search, you can get a bigger boost. The video needs to be great and answer questions, solve problems and be more entertaining than what’s out there.

Why is SEO important in marketing?

SEO is the fundamental of digital marketing since trillions of people conduct daily searches to find information about products or services. Search is usually the primary source of traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels.

Users trust search engines and achieving the top spot in search engine signals that your site is credible. SEO is cost-effective and a great way to drive qualified traffic to your site without directly paying for it. Below are some of the top reasons why SEO is important in marketing:

• Visibility and Ranking – One of the most important functions of SEO is increasing visibility. Visibility is directly related to ranking, so the higher you rank on the search engine, the more people will click through your site, increasing your organic page ranking.

• Website Traffic – One of the main goals of SEO is to increase traffic. When you increase visibility and ranking, then you can increase the traffic to your website. Thus, following good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.

• Authority – Authority means that your website is trustworthy, high quality, relevant, and has something to offer. Page Authority (PA) is very important to search engines these days. Score range from 1 to 100, and the higher the number, the more authority your site has.

Lead Generation

Lead Generation is the act of gaining the interest of potential prospects to increase future sales. A lead is an individual who indicates interest in your product or service. So, focusing on lead generation can help drive traffic from high-quality prospects, and with them comes high-quality customers. With lead generation, you increase brand awareness, build relationships, generate qualified leads, and ultimately close deals.

The goal of the lead generation process is to guide prospects through the buyer’s journey to the end of the sales funnel. Content is one of the leading tools to generate leads. This may include social media posts, blog posts, live events, etc. You can use forms to capture the leads that engage with the content and add them to the lead nurturing email segment.

Why is Lead Generation important for business?

Without lead generation, most businesses will lack the sales and customer base, and it becomes challenging to maximize growth and revenue. Leads are important to the sustainability of your business.

Leads may be generated through word of mouth or phone calls, but online engagement, such as your website or advertisements, is the most common source.

There are two ways to approach the lead generation process:

• Outbound marketing – When you initiate to contact people to generate interest in your product or service is called outbound marketing. It could be through cold calling, direct emails, billboards, radio, TV, magazine, and newspaper advertisements.

• Inbound marketing – Drawing people’s attention by creating relevant content is called inbound marketing. You pull them towards your product/service through your content that aligns with their needs and interests.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is the process of using paid strategies to increase search visibility in a competitive marketplace. When a user types a certain keyword, SEM enables your business to appear in the search query, thus ensuring that your business products or services are visible on the search results pages (SERPs). The purpose of getting on the first page is to drive a higher volume of traffic, which you can then convert.

Let’s understand the concepts involved in Search Engine Marketing:

• Keywords – These are the terms that users enter the search engines that prompt a particular ad or search result to be shown to them. It is commonly a group of words or phrases and not an individual word. E.g., buy Nike shoes.

• Concordance – When setting up a campaign in Google Ads, you need to describe the degree of correspondence between the keywords you have chosen, and the terms people use when typing a query into a search engine. This is called ‘concordance’. For example, if you choose broad match, an ad will be displayed when the user searches for terms similar to the keyword.

• Text Ad – It is the standard type of ad shown in the search engines. Text ad usually includes a title, a visible URL, and a short description.

• Ad Groups – In Google ads, an ad group consists of several ads with the same keywords. This helps to find which of them are the most effective ones.

• Campaign – In Google Ads, a campaign is like an umbrella under which all ad groups with similar goals are organized. For example, If you supply school supplies online, one campaign could include ad groups as textbooks, and another could have backpacks and so on.

• Landing Page – Landing page is the webpage where a user is directed after clicking on the advertisement. The landing page should be optimized to get conversions and prompt users to take action for better results with search engine marketing.

• Impressions – It refers to the number of times an ad is shown to the users.

• Clicks – This refers to the number of times users click the ad.

• CTR – It is the percentage of clicks on total impressions.

• CPC – This is the average cost per click.

• Quality Score – This is the score that Google gives to ads and keywords, influencing your cost per click. This score is obtained based on the ad’s relevance, percentage of clicks, and the experience of the landing page.

Why is Search Engine Marketing important?

With an increasing number of people searching and shopping online, search engine marketing has become an important part of an online marketing strategy for increasing a company’s reach. The majority of new visitors visit a website by performing a query on a search engine.

In search engine marketing, advertisers pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for a company to utilize its money. Additionally, each visitor incrementally improves the website’s ranking in organic search results.

Since consumers enter search queries to find commercial information, there is already a state of mind to purchase. Thus, search engine marketing reaches consumers at the right time. It is the faster way to drive traffic to your website, and results are immediate.

Here are some of the reasons that Search Engine Marketing can help your business:

• Generates High Traffic – Generating traffic organically is a very long and tedious process where results can be seen after a long time. Search engine marketing enables you to accelerate this process and gets users to your website. It also assures you that the users are already interested in what you offer since they searched for it themselves.

• Generates Visibility – Search engine marketing helps your brand to appear in the top results of Google search and lets the user click on it.

• Greater Conversions – The goal of running Google Ads is to improve business results. To get results, you need to create a well-optimized landing page that puts users in the path of conversion.

• Spend only on results – It is suitable for all business sizes since the minimum investment is very affordable. In addition, you only pay for results in the form of clicks; hence you can be sure that your budget is used effectively.

• Measurable – Google Ads provides numerous campaign metrics to know what is working and what is not working. This way, it is easy to correct if needed to get better results.

Website Design

Website Design refers to the design of the website that can be seen on the internet. It usually refers to the user experience of website development rather than software development. It focuses on the appearance, layout of a website. Appearance relates to colors, font, and images used. Layout refers to how information is structured.

A good webpage is easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and suits the brand of the website. Many web designs are focused on simplicity to avoid excessive information and functionality that might distract or confuse users.

 Two of the most common methods of web design that work well both in desktop and mobile are ‘responsive’ and ‘adaptive’ design. In responsive design, content moves dynamically depending on screen size. In adaptive design, the website content is fixed in layout sizes that fit common screen sizes.

Preserving a layout that is consistent between devices is crucial to maintaining user trust and engagement. As responsive design can present challenges, it needs to be carefully worked upon how they appear.

Website design is different from website development which is actual coding that makes the website work. Web designers handle the creative part of designing the website.

Why is Website Design important?

The first impression matters, and if you don’t have a strong web presence, you are holding your brand back. It helps people to perceive your brand the way you want it to. By applying the right visual marketing strategy, your business will attract the right audience and convert them into customers.

Below are certain factors to be considered when designing a website:

• Aesthetics – Your brand’s identity reflects in your website’s aesthetics, and it must be well condensed in your web design. This means that your online presence should match your brand’s colours, styles, and feel.

• Usability – It means that your audience should be able to browse irrespective of their multiple backgrounds, ages, and speciality. Simplicity is one of the best principles to have in mind with fewer menus and options.

• Content Quality – Even if you have all the elements in place, visitors will not visit the website if you don’t have quality content. That is why many businesses choose content marketing to have quality content that people want to read and share. This requires making sure that your pages add value to your visitors by providing the right solutions.

• Speed – People will give up if your website does not load faster. Studies show that if your page load time exceeds 3 seconds, your bounce rate tends to rise by 38%. The loading speed involves finding the balance between all your elements and how it performs on your visitors’ browser and internet connection.

• Mobile Friendliness – According to a study, mobile devices account for 50% of all online traffic. If your website does not load properly on smartphones and tablets, you might lose half of the potential audience. To avoid that, your web design strategy should make your content mobile friendly. This means having pages that load to multiple screen sizes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an Integrated Digital Marketing campaign?

Integrated Digital Marketing, sometimes referred to as 360-degree marketing or omnichannel marketing, is the process of creating marketing campaigns across multiple channels that work together and complement each other to reach the same goal. The goal could include raising brand awareness, making consumers purchase the product/service, etc.,

Why does Integrated Digital Marketing works?

Integrated Digital Marketing campaigns are led by a single strategy that unifies the brand message across all channels. A strong strategy and integrated marketing efforts ensure that your goals are defined and consistent brand message. It maximizes the impact of your marketing efforts.

What are the benefits of deploying Integrated Digital Marketing techniques?

Integrated Digital Marketing helps in enhancing brand visibility, delivering a consistent message to the audience that builds trust, increases efficiency by having an integrated approach towards marketing efforts, and helps in getting more leads by reaching more audience.

What is the objective of Integrated Digital Marketing?

The main objectives of Integrated Digital Marketing include consistent leads, increased sales, brand building, less cost of customer acquisition, improved qualified traffic, online reputation building, and better local SEO.

What makes a well Integrated Digital Marketing campaign?

An effective Integrated Digital Marketing campaign looks at the strength of each channel and tailors’ message to each channel. It ensures that the brand’s message doesn’t go unnoticed and speaks to the right audience at the right time. After all, customers buy a product/service if they like the brand.

Conclusion

Integrated Digital Marketing can save a lot of time and money for your organization. In addition, it can lead to higher ROI and help to build trust in the audience. Adopting a holistic approach and maintaining a consistent message across channels will increase the reach and enable customers to take action.