Integration is the key to marketing success

With the advent of digital, many organisations and brands make the mistake of piling all of their marketing resources (dollars and effort) into one area – namely their website or instagram page. For some this may work and if so, great, but for the majority this is an exercise in marketing naivety where you are not capitalising on opportunities to create brand awareness and drive people to action.

One of our clients refers to their past marketing planning and implementation as ‘marketing seizures’: they’d see a great idea and implement it, without the research to back up why they should use it, the alignment with their target audience or the reassurance that it will get the results they were looking for. This client has a modest marketing budget of less than $200k a year to spend.

We took on board what marketing and brand assets they had and what they were doing, but started from scratch on analysing their clientele/database and built a marketing campaign around integration. One of their main marketing issues was low awareness, so we set out to change that. Being based in one suburb made it easier to create a targeted campaign. For brand awareness we chose three main channels: Radio, local targeted Outdoor, targeted Letterbox and local Cinema. For direct calls to action we chose Google Adwords. For low cost marketing (word of mouth) we adopted facebook content and PR. The organisation has a website but it is more of a reference not a driver of clients. By creating a clever campaign and driving this through a variety of channels, we’ve seen clientele increase by 20% – that’s a big difference on their daily/monthly turnover as the clients each pay a fee.

Integration is the way for people to see your message multiple times – and they need to for brand recall.

So what do you do if you only have a very small marketing budget? Well you can still integrate! Here are our top 7 ideas for integration:

  1. Signage – all organisations and brands can create signage to promote themselves, be it a pop up banner, A-frame, car signage etc
  2. Email – harness the power of your database and email your prospects and existing customers
  3. PR – create publicity on something newsworthy you are doing
  4. Social media – it doesn’t cost you anything to create brand awareness.
  5. Digital – you can’t afford not to have a web presence but think of other ways that search engines can help you – think Google Shopping, Ebay, Google Maps, Youtube etc.
  6. Direct Mail – getting something in the post is original, tailored, personal and stands out from the crowd.
  7. Events – get your target audience to experience your brand