Integrated Marketing Tools for Local Businesses

Consumers rarely make a purchase or conversion after viewing a single ad from your business. In the vast majority of cases, it takes a number of brand interactions before those customers convert—and even then, additional marketing touches may be needed to achieve repeat purchases and long-term customer retention.

These interactions will likely occur across multiple marketing channels, including search, social media, display, mobile, digital video, and other channels. Building a brand presence across these channels is important—but it’s also important that your brand maintains consistent messaging across these channels so that customers receive a clear understanding of the value your business offers.

To achieve this, your business needs to create an integrated marketing communications strategy.

What is Integrated Marketing?

Integrated marketing is a communications strategy that unifies your messaging and other branding across all other channels, ensuring a consistent experience that gives customers a clear understanding of the value your business offers.

Without this marketing integration, your brand’s marketing communications run the risk of sending mixed messages to customers that confuse them about your target consumer audience and the value your business offers. It can lead to general confusion about the products or services offered by your business, which can become a significant obstacle in acquiring new customers.

Inconsistent messaging occurs when campaigns are created and managed in silos, without any oversight to make sure emails, social media, paid search ads and other marketing campaigns are making the same points and speaking to the same customers and challenges. By setting up an integrated marketing plan, you can constantly verify alignment across these channels, which will improve your marketing ROI.

5 Integrated Marketing Tools to Elevate Campaign Performance

The best integrated marketing results are achieved when your business implements the right software and processes to manage this integration across all of your campaigns.

The right tools can give your local business cost-efficient capabilities that will improve marketing consistency while reducing the manual labor involved in managing this integration. Here are five key tools every small business should consider:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

Power all of your marketing campaigns using the same customer data stored in a centralized location. A CRM solution is an indispensable tool for sales teams and your overall marketing strategy, and it shares the same customer data across all of your digital marketing channels.

For audience targeting, personalization and other marketing campaign strategies, a CRM platform is an easy way to achieve integrated digital marketing in all of your campaigns—and once your business is set up to share that data with other marketing platforms and tools, it won’t require any extra effort on your part.

2. Marketing Automation for Search, Social, and Other Digital Channels

Coordinate consistency across your brand’s social presence, as well as search and email campaigns, for streamlined campaign management and better performance.

Social automation tools can help you plan and schedule posts across your social accounts, viewing them alongside one another to make sure the messaging is aligned. Meanwhile, paid search campaigns can use automation to manage keyword bidding and other aspects of campaign performance, ensuring alignment with your integrated digital marketing strategy.

3. Integrated Analytics and Reporting

Channel-specific marketing campaigns may be launched and managed on an individual basis, but their performance is tied to your overall marketing strategy. Performance insights from one channel or campaign can be helpful in refining your strategy for other marketing channels—and trends identified across multiple campaigns can be used to adapt your marketing strategy for better results.

Integrated analytics and reporting tools will help your business fully understand its marketing performance—including whether misalignment between marketing channels is hurting your overall performance. This integrated approach also streamlines the reporting process so you can efficiently evaluate campaign performance and coordinate refinements to your marketing strategy.

4. Cross-Channel Audience Targeting

Each advertising and marketing channel has its own tools for defining and targeting an audience. Lookalike audiences and other audience targeting tools can achieve greater consistency in the audiences targeting by each integrating marketing campaign, focusing brand interactions on the most relevant audience possible.

When integrated marketing can consolidate its resources around a consistent cross-channel audience, your marketing efficiencies and campaign ROI are bound to improve.

5. Integrated Content Management

When creating brand logos, display ads, digital video and other content, integrated content creation strategies can help you create integrated marketing campaigns while also realizing other business benefits.

Whether you use a content repository or rely on content partners to manage existing assets, content management tools will reduce the time and labor involved in creating branded content, creating production cost savings while improving the consistency for your integrated digital marketing.

Achieve Consistency in Your Integrated Marketing Campaigns

When marketing campaigns are created and launched independent from other advertising and marketing content, your business is at risk of reduced campaign performance, slower customer growth, and higher rates of customer churn.

A small business marketing consultant can help you implement tools and processes to streamline marketing integrations and strengthen your local brand through consistent messaging across all your marketing channels.

Cox Media’s experts can help you refine this messaging, develop integrated creative for each channel, and analyze campaign performance for better marketing ROI over time.

Ready to get started? Contact us today.