As the golden Rule of Seven goes, a customer must come across your brand at least seven times before taking the right action about your product. Hence, we often see businesses utilizing marketing agency services to promote their products across multiple sales channels, like:
- Social media
- Micro-websites
- Display ads
- Website content (esp, landing pages)
They combine all, or some of, the channels so that customers take notice of their presence.
Of course, combining different marketing channels and using them effectively requires a solid, sustainable plan. And the focus should be on sending your message across to as many potential customers as you can.
This, basically, is a general concept of integrated marketing.
Let’s discuss:
- What this concept means for B2B companies
- Why a B2B marketing agency should apply it
What is Integrated Marketing for B2B?
Integrated marketing has become an essential ingredient for B2B companies. It helps them:
- Drive more traffic to their pages
- Enhance their brand awareness
- Convert more leads
Most companies use multiple channels for marketing their products to a broader audience. This brings integrated marketing into existence. An integrated marketing agency helps brands share their message to the right business niches more effectively.
Sending a Unified Message
Essentially, integrated marketing makes it easier to propagate a unified message across different marketing channels. With due consideration to the critical success metrics for each channel, integrated marketing lets you design a strategy that can yield promising results for your business.
Integrated Content Marketing for B2B
Every business strives to generate quality by targeting the relevant audience to give themselves better chances of sales. However, when it comes to B2B sales, the majority of the businesses prefer quality over quantity, even though it seems counterintuitive.
While the type of marketing campaign plays a critical role in generating more leads, B2Bs have an obvious need for integrated marketing.
Critical Traits of Integrated Marketing Services
Think of the top brands that market their product through most digital channels. The key to their marketing strategy is to resonate with their message through different platforms, such as:
- TV ads
- Social media ads
- New branding campaign
For this purpose, you need a properly planned strategy that touches every channel. The objective is to:
- Acquire more audience
- Retain customers
- Create (or increase) brand awareness
This is why hiring the right integrated marketing agency can often deliver the right results. A quality B2B SEO company must ensure you the following essential traits:
- Make the most of all relevant offline and online channels and their combinations for your marketing campaigns.
- Using the critical technologies to the fullest, getting detailed insights from the customers to understand the market requirements and engage them better.
Why Integrated Marketing Plan is Great for B2B
It may take time for other businesses to buy your products and services. So, you must continuously be in the face of the customer, promoting and presenting your brand through every possible channel.
Ultimately, the customer is likely to interact with your product and take some action in response to your consistent marketing. But how do you make the customer take the action that suits you, i.e., buying your product? Well, customer engagement is only the start.
If you want to convert them into consistent buyers, you must interact with them over a long duration across at least five different channels.
Since the B2B sales process is much longer than a B2C, engaging the customer and making sure that your product suits them in every way is critical for generating more revenue. Especially if your product is similar to that of a competitor, you will need to add some extra benefits to ensure that the customer starts buying from you.
Here are the four main reasons to apply an integrated marketing strategy:
- You’ll have a bigger pool of potential buyers across multiple channels
- Approaching customers through multiple platforms will give you an edge over your competitors
- You can generate more leads
- You’ll have more opportunities to turn them into loyal customers
The Major Components of Integrated Marketing Strategy
An integrated marketing plan has immense potential for B2B companies, but it needs proper implementation to derive worthwhile results. To do that, here are some essential components that you must focus on:
Goal Identification
Understanding your marketing goals for a successfully integrated marketing plan is crucial. It’s not just about generating leads. Instead, your full-funnel success indicates the impact that you have created through your marketing plan.
Therefore, to target your audience more accurately, you must first identify your long-term and short-term goals. Then, it will help you to measure your results against these goals. Otherwise, it cannot be easy to analyze how well your integrated marketing strategies perform.
Focusing on the Right Customers
Every marketing plan is customer-centric, regardless of whether they are B2C or B2B companies. But how do you ensure proper focus on the customers? While viral campaigns and customer acquisition may seem the answer, it rarely adds to the profitability of your campaign.
True success comes from loyal customers who keep coming back for your services and products. But, more importantly, when you market to established customers, it’s much cheaper because they already know about your brand, products, and services.
Such businesses put their faith in the service providers to generate more revenue from them. So, while you’re targeting more businesses to avail your services or products, it is equally important (if not more) to design your marketing strategy around your existing customers.
Choosing the Right Marketing Channels
Integrated marketing is all about the multichannel propagation of your brand message. So, whether you have paid, earned, or owned channels, you must use all of them to make more businesses aware of your products.
Depending on your product type, your go-to channels will be different. Other considerations for choosing the right track include industry, buyer personas, brand, etc. Generally, the five most promising integrated marketing channels include:
- Websites
- Search Engines
- Online Ads
- Social Channels
Tracking and Measuring
Tracking your planned marketing tactics gives you better insights into your campaign efficiency. So, it’s important to use analytical tools to see how your current tactics are performing.
As a result, you can smoothly alter or continue your planned activities based on the results. Since closing a deal can take a lot of time for sales teams, minor adjustments to your integrated marketing strategy become a critical element in giving you a better chance of success.
Conclusion
Integrated marketing is a need for modern B2B companies. Since most businesses use multiple channel strategies for more fruitful results, integrated marketing plans can help you gain more loyal and recurring customers for your business. But if you want to do right, make sure to hire a professional integrated marketing agency to help you with your campaign.