Digital marketing allows you to reach customers across a multitude of formats and channels. However, with so many opportunities, many businesses fail to capture the attention of consumers effectively.
Without a solid marketing integration strategy, communications can easily turn into a hodgepodge of ineffective messaging – spraying out random snippets of information across many platforms and levels of awareness.
As you can imagine, this type of scatter marketing leads to disaster.
Effective digital marketing strategies integrate communications and create a unified message. By combining digital marketing tactics like SEO, PPC, social media marketing, and email marketing into one cohesive strategy, you can create a smooth customer journey that nurtures prospective customers at every step.
In this blog post, we list 17 digital marketing integration strategies that you can use in 2024 and beyond. Implement these strategies to stop confusing and start converting.
Strategies to Integrate Digital Marketing
Modern digital marketing is complex and can have many moving pieces.
But don’t be intimidated!
With the proper strategies in place, you can take the headache out of your marketing process and build your customer base with confidence.
Here are 17 strategies that you can implement today to integrate your digital marketing efforts:
1. Map Out the Customer Journey
Mapping out your customer journey will give you a better idea of where, when, and how to reach your ideal customers. The customer journey stages are typically called awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. Write down how your customers interact with your company at each one of these stages so you know what kind of communication you will need for each stage.
2. Get a CRM
A customer relationship management system (CRM) tracks, stores, and organizes all of your customer’s information. CRMs are becoming essential in digital sales and marketing as they act as a central hub for your customer communications. CRM systems these days have robust integrations with apps, software tools, and analytics platforms that operate across all levels of the customer journey – allowing you to pinpoint your marketing communications.
3. Chop up YouTube videos and Post them on Social Media
Chopping up and reusing your content is a good way to stretch your content marketing efforts and integrate across platforms. While YouTube videos perform well in the 7 – 15 minute range, Instagram reels do better when they’re 3 – 90 seconds long. Record your YouTube video first, chop up the highlights into 3 or 4 clips, and schedule them to post on social media over the next few days.
4. Post Google Reviews on Your Website
Testimonials and reviews are a great way to boost your retention and advocacy marketing as well as increase the perceived value of your product or service. Strategically integrate your Google reviews onto your website to leverage the power of social proof across platforms. Many content management systems have plugins or add-ons that can make this integration happen seamlessly. Sales pages, contact pages, or anywhere you want to inspire action in your users is a good place to display your Google reviews.
5. Make a Brand Strategy
The brand strategy acts as a compass to unify and integrate how your marketing communications are done. Your brand strategy should outline the feel of your brand – what customers think and say about your brand behind closed doors. Some of the most common elements of a brand strategy include brand purpose, brand vision, brand values, brand personality, brand voice, and market positioning.
6. Make a Brand Standards Document
A brand standards document is similar to a brand strategy in that it helps make a unified marketing strategy. But while a brand strategy defines what your brand should be, brand standards outline how your brand should be. This document should include aspects such as logo, core color palette, typography, and imagery. Make your brand standards document an integral part of any communications to integrate digital marketing strategies at a high level.
7. Have a Clear Mission Statement
A mission statement guides a company in all actions throughout all departments. Therefore, it is very important to have a clear one to integrate your marketing strategies. A good mission statement should be succinct, memorable, unique, realistic, and current. Once this statement is completed, make sure everyone in all aspects of your organization knows about it so they are all on the same page. This way, marketing tasks will all tie back to the mission and work together to accomplish the same goal.
8. Set Marketing KPIs
Marketing KPIs will give a dimension of accountability to your marketing strategies. When solid KPIs are set and agreed upon, there is a much higher likelihood that they will get done. Additionally, you can start to use your marketing tools to come up with creative solutions to complex problems – ask yourself how each communication channel can be leveraged to achieve the KPIs set for that platform.
9. Turn Video Transcripts Into Blog Posts
One good way to integrate content marketing strategies is by repurposing content into different formats. An easy way to do this is by transcribing YouTube or social media videos into text. Publish this text as a post on your website and voila, you can rank on both YouTube and Google for the same topic.
10. Setup Cross Domain Conversion Tracking
Cross-domain tracking integrates event tracking from your website onto other platforms – typically booking software. With cross-domain tracking, not only do you have better visibility into user behavior across the full customer journey, but you can also use these metrics to feed back into other marketing channels such as ads.
11. Use Ad Remarketing Campaigns
Ad remarketing campaigns show your ads to users who have already been exposed to your brand. This allows you to create one cohesive customer experience across channels and have more control over messaging segmentation. A very common remarketing campaign structure is using the Facebook pixel to show ads to people on Facebook or Instagram who have visited your site.
12. Create Company-wide Email Signatures
Company-wide email signatures make a world of difference when it comes to making a consistent brand image. Make sure the colors, typography, and logo are all consistent – you know, the things that are outlined in the brand standards document. You can make massive marketing integration strides by managing this important touchpoint across all internal and external communications.
13. Integrate with Traditional Marketing Strategies
With so much enthusiasm for the digital world of marketing, sometimes it’s useful to take a step back and remember your roots. Print advertising, magazine ads, and signage are still integral parts of a full marketing mix. Ensure that these aspects of your marketing strategy utilize the same brand strategy and standards that your digital communications are subject to.
14. Use SMS Marketing Tools
As you integrate your digital marketing efforts, it helps to maximize the value of every touch point possible. One unique way to reach customers is to reach out by text message. This tactic can be especially useful for reminding existing clients, patients, or customers that it’s time to book another appointment.
15. Add Prospects to Your Newsletter
When you start communications with your prospects, you never know where the conversation may lead. Adding prospects to your newsletter is a great way to integrate your sales prospecting efforts with the rest of your content marketing strategies. Newsletters can expose prospects to your brand and “warm them up” while they decide on whether to move forward with a purchase.
16. Promote Sponsored Content with Informational Content
Content marketing is typically divided into two categories – paid and free. Paid content involves paying for ad space or sponsoring a post on an influencer’s platform. Free content is organically spread through social media or on your website. It’s tempting to segment these content types into “selling” content and “informational” content. However, you can integrate these strategies into one by publishing content that revolves around the same topic and exposing users to it over time. This strategy will help integrate your digital content marketing efforts and increase the conversion rates on your media spend.
17. Use Attribution Modeling
When you’re running multiple ads and marketing communications, it can be hard to determine what truly caused a conversion. That’s where attribution modeling comes in. Attribution modeling measures how much each customer touch point impacts the ultimate decision to make a purchase. Using more complex attribution models other than “last-click” attribution (the most common model by default), you are effectively integrating your marketing analytics across different stages in the customer journey.
Final Thoughts
Digital marketing is a vast and complex field with endless possibilities. Once you start building out a digital marketing framework for your business, it can easily start to become fragmented and ineffective. For this reason, you must start integrating your digital marketing strategies right away.
Hopefully, one of these digital marketing integration strategies resonates with your situation. After all, each business is unique and the same recommendations won’t work the same in every instance. Fortunately, with a little experimentation and persistence, you can start to build a well-integrated digital marketing machine that takes your business to the next level.
