Too many small businesses make a common mistake when it comes to their marketing efforts. Are you one of them? You are if you separate your marketing efforts into silos. Sure, you have marketing plans for your business and/or website that may (should) include search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, content marketing, mobile solutions, SMS (text) marketing, voice search, video, events, and social media, but often they’re independent of one another.
This may sound simplistic, but your marketing should not be siloed. You need a holistic, integrated, cohesive marketing strategy that connects your various marketing channels and platforms.
How do you develop an integrated marketing plan?
Step 1. Define your customer
Do you really know who your ideal customer is? There are so many factors that go into the profile of your ideal customer, including demographics (age, gender, level of education, race, income, where they live, relationship status, if they have kids, etc.) and psychographics (which looks at characteristics like emotions, values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices).
Take this information and craft a customer profile or buyer persona. Once you have a better idea of who your customer is and what motivates them, it’ll be easier to create marketing campaigns that connect with them.
Step 2. Define your objectives
The objective of marketing is not just to sell stuff. Marketing helps you:
- Build brand awareness.
- Explain and inform what you do and how you do it.
- Attract customers.
- Form relationships and alliances.
- Increase sales.
- Improve customer engagement.
This contributes to the most important reason businesses market themselves: to build trust among customers.
That’s your overall goal. But you need to have incremental goals, which can include the elements previously listed, or others, such as expanding into new markets, attracting strategic partners, launching a new product/service, etc.
Once you identify what you’re hoping to accomplish, create a realistic plan that is specific to that goal and measurable. It’s not good enough to say, “I want more customers to come to my restaurant.” Instead, perhaps you want to attract more families on the weekends.
Step 3. Conduct smart marketing
At this point you should know whom you’re targeting, what message you’re sending, and how you plan to reach your customers. Not all marketing channels are equally effective. But if you craft the right message to the right channel, your chances of success will be higher. Delivering a consistent message is important to building your brand, but you can swap out photo assets and some wording to more finely target your intended audiences.
If you’re driving consumers to sign up for your email list, it’s smart to send them to landing pages where the marketing message is amplified.
This is where the integrated approach comes into play. Siloed marketing efforts might involve multiple marketing channels, but the efforts are not coordinated or integrated. They don’t cross promote. Think about how much more effective your marketing would be, for example, if you amplified your direct mail messages with a follow-up email marketing campaign.
Step 4. Measure and repeat
Another mistake small businesses often make is not measuring the results of their marketing efforts. All the social platforms offer some type of analytics. So does your search engine. There are third-party tools that also offer analytics. And of course your marketing should include some type of measurement device, like A/B testing. Experiment with splitting test subject lines, email designs, templates, images, body copy, call-to-action text, and so much more. It can make all the difference in your email marketing efforts.