The Marketing Wheel for Integrated Digital Marketing

What is Integrated Digital Marketing?

In short, integrated digital marketing is getting the word out online in a way that’s consistent across every platform.

A campaign that is not “integrated” would have different messaging, strategy, and timing on social media compared to paid social, your website, and your email campaign. A lack of integration dilutes the impact of any given campaign, resulting in wasted effort and advertising budget.

An integrated digital marketing campaign is one where every piece of marketing works together towards the same goal. Explore these examples from Hubspot to see how integrated digital marketing works in action.

The Marketing Wheel

Big Marlin Group invented the marketing wheel to represent the value of integrated marketing. The spokes of the wheel each represent a marketing channel. While you could treat paid social like it’s distinct from television and radio advertising, this misses the bigger picture. They influence one another because they’re part of a larger whole.

The marketing wheel visualizes how every marketing channel is related in integrated digital marketing

The direction of your marketing is determined by the combination of every channel. An integrated approach steers you smoothly toward your goal, navigating new challenges and opportunities effortlessly.

But there is one channel with a larger influence on your marketing–the website, which encompasses your entire digital presence.

Why is a Website Important?

The website is more than just another channel, it is the center of the marketing wheel.

  1. It helps (or harms) your conversion rates. Almost every ad is connected to your website, directing traffic toward landing pages or form fills as a way of capturing leads. The quality of each landing page, and the website overall, affects each channel’s conversion rate.
  2. It’s essential to branding and credibility. Your website is many customers’ most important impression of your business. Tell your story well, and they will remember you and understand your value. Miss this opportunity? At best you will be forgotten, and at worst you will seem unprofessional and hurt your credibility.
  3. It’s a source of organic leads. Finally, by investing in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), your website can attract new prospects. This organic traffic does not require an ongoing investment, making it a valuable investment in long-term lead flow and overall business stability.

Not sure where your site stands? Here are ten components of a successful website.

The Spokes of the Marketing Wheel

For many businesses, paid digital is the most reliable source of short-term lead flow. It involves paying social media or search platforms, like Instagram or Google, to show your ad to prospective buyers. Ranging from simple search ads to full-funnel paid social campaigns, paid digital relies on scroll-stopping creative, strategic targeting, and careful budgeting to be successful.

Social Media

Organic social builds your audience without the financial investment of paid advertising. It requires a commitment to entertaining and informing your audience, so more playful brands tend to perform best. It’s also an important factor in credibility, showing off the human element behind your organization. And if a post performs exceptionally well, boosting organic content is an opportunity to achieve paid digital results with a smaller financial commitment.

Email Marketing

Building an email list is an investment in customer loyalty and repeat business, reaching your audience more reliably than most other channels. Similarly to organic social, your audience is sticking around because they find value in what you have to say—so make sure each email is worthwhile.

In other cases, email can be a way to guide new prospects through the buying funnel or reinforce your value to a new customer.

While print advertising is not a form of digital marketing, it can improve its performance. For example, geotargeted paid digital can be layered with location-targeted mailers. Multiple touchpoints create a greater chance of success through higher frequency and more conversion opportunities.

Learn how Big Marlin Group put this principle into action in our case study about hyperlocal campaign targeting.

TV, Radio, Billboards

These traditional media channels build brand awareness with a broad segment of the population, providing unparalleled reach. While more difficult to track than many digital advertising channels, investing in tv, radio, or billboards provides a boost to results across the board.

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is the art of using drama or surprise to grab attention. It leverages word-of-mouth to turn a temporary event into long-term brand awareness. In today’s interconnected digital world, guerrilla marketing is spread by social media, reaching viewers far beyond those who originally experienced the event.

Community Involvement

This channel is especially important in the nonprofit sector. An organization’s relationship with its community is an investment in branding and credibility. By giving back or engaging in charity, your audience feels better about where they to spend their hard-earned money. It can even double as a guerrilla marketing opportunity or lead to local television coverage.

Loyalty & Referral Programs

An often-overlooked aspect of marketing is customer retention. Because acquiring a new customer is so expensive, repeat business saves time and money. But what if your customers were marketing for you? By building a reliable referral system, you diversify your marketing, building a reliable foundation.

When getting the word out, email marketing is often closely intertwined with both loyalty and referral programs.

How to Integrate Traditional and Digital Marketing?

Like the marketing wheel, every advertising channel is interrelated. While it may seem like a different approach on the surface, traditional marketing can do a lot to improve digital marketing results.

While the days of building an entire business on newspaper ads are over, print marketing still has value as part of a larger integrated digital marketing strategy. In an increasingly digital world, holding physical collateral can make a far bigger impact than scrolling past another ad.

Print marketing may come at a high price point. Taking advantage of layered campaigns, as well as careful targeting and messaging, will make the investment worthwhile.

Everything Leads Back to the Website

To maximize your impact, direct traditional advertising toward a well-designed landing page. This improves trackability, improving your understanding of each campaign’s impact. Landing pages can also increase conversions by addressing objections and showing additional social proof, giving prospects a final push toward their purchase.

Try Something Unique to Stand Out

Traditional marketing doesn’t have to feel old school. From personalized printing to augmented reality experiences, blending traditional channels with modern technology creates a powerful impact. Even something as simple as a QR code can reduce friction, providing audiences with a smoother experience.

Steering the Marketing Wheel

Many factors that influence marketing strategy are outside your control. These range from broad considerations, like inflation and economic recessions, all the way to industry factors like seasonality and demographic trends. When these factors can be predicted in advance, they help you position each spoke of the marketing wheel to capitalize on the prevailing trend. On the other hand, when changes occur unexpectedly, they help you diagnose your results and avoid blaming irrelevant factors.

The marketing industry is constantly changing. From new SEO strategies to social media algorithm changes to shifting generational values, it’s easy to be left behind. These trends show you the nuances of how to improve performance each channel. By keeping up to date with these trends, you maximize the impact of each spoke in the marketing wheel.

Reporting

To understand the success of integrated digital marketing requires tracking its performance. Reporting is the feedback loop required to steer your marketing, measuring progress toward your goal. For this feedback to be effective, each metric must be both accurate and relevant. Once you have an effective reporting process in place, you can make informed decisions, optimizing strategy and shifting budget across each spoke of the marketing wheel. No matter what the numbers say, remember that no channel exists in a silo—isolate one component and it won't perform as well alone. Each spoke of the marketing wheel is influenced by every other spoke, forming an interconnected whole.

Integrated Digital Marketing FAQs

Integration in digital marketing refers to the process of combining different marketing efforts and channels to create a cohesive and seamless experience for customers. It involves aligning various strategies, platforms, and tactics to ensure consistency in messaging, branding, and customer experience across different channels such as website, social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and paid advertising. The goal of integration is to provide a unified and holistic approach to digital marketing that maximizes reach, engagement, and conversion rates.

Digital marketing refers to the use of digital channels and technologies for marketing purposes. It includes strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and paid advertising. Digital marketing focuses on leveraging digital platforms to reach and engage with the target audience.

On the other hand, integrated marketing is a broader concept that encompasses the integration of all marketing efforts, both online and offline, to deliver a unified and consistent brand message and experience. It involves aligning various marketing channels, such as traditional advertising, public relations, events, sponsorships, direct mail, as well as digital marketing, to create a cohesive marketing strategy. Integrated marketing ensures that all marketing activities work together to reinforce the brand message and achieve the marketing objectives.

In summary, while digital marketing is a subset of integrated marketing, integrated marketing is a more comprehensive approach that includes both digital and traditional marketing channels to provide a consistent and seamless brand experience across all touchpoints.

Integrated digital marketing activities involve the combination and coordination of various online marketing strategies and channels to achieve a unified and cohesive approach. Some examples of integrated digital marketing activities include:

Content Marketing: Creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content across various channels like blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, etc., to attract and engage the target audience.

Social Media Marketing: Leveraging social media platforms to promote content, engage with the audience, build brand awareness, and drive traffic to the website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing website content and structure to improve visibility and ranking on search engine results pages, attracting organic traffic, and increasing online visibility.

Email Marketing: Sending targeted and personalized emails to nurture leads, communicate with customers, promote offers, and drive conversions.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): Running online ads on search engines, social media platforms, or display networks to drive website traffic, generate leads, and increase conversions.

Influencer Marketing: Collaborating with influencers or industry experts to promote products or services, increase brand awareness, and reach a wider audience.

Landing Page Optimization: Optimizing landing pages to improve user experience, increase conversions, and align with specific campaigns or offers.

Remarketing/Retargeting: Showing targeted ads to users who have previously engaged with your website or shown interest in your products or services, increasing brand recall and encouraging conversions.

Data Analytics: Gathering and analyzing data from different marketing channels to gain insights, track performance, and make data-driven decisions to optimize marketing strategies.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Using CRM systems to manage customer data, track interactions, and personalize communication to nurture customer relationships.

These activities work together to create a cohesive marketing strategy, ensuring consistent messaging, brand experience, and goal alignment across various channels.

Integrated marketing is a strategic approach that combines and aligns various marketing channels and activities to create a unified and seamless brand experience for customers. Here's an example of integrated marketing:

Let's say a company wants to launch a new product. Their integrated marketing campaign may involve the following activities:

TV Commercial: They create a television commercial to generate awareness about the product. The commercial highlights the key features and benefits and directs viewers to their website or social media platforms for more information.

Social Media Campaign: Simultaneously, they launch a social media campaign to engage with their target audience. They create compelling content, such as videos, images, and infographics, and share it across social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The content is aligned with the messaging in the TV commercial and encourages users to visit their website to learn more and participate in a contest for a chance to win the new product.

Website Optimization: They optimize their website to showcase the new product prominently. The website design, content, and messaging are consistent with the TV commercial and social media campaign. They also implement lead generation forms for visitors interested in receiving updates or making a purchase.

Email Marketing: They send targeted emails to their existing customer base and newsletter subscribers to announce the new product. The emails provide more details, exclusive offers, and a direct link to the product page on their website.

In-Store Promotions: If the company has physical retail locations, they run in-store promotions related to the new product, such as offering free samples or hosting product demonstrations. They ensure that the in-store experience aligns with the overall campaign messaging and branding.

By integrating these various marketing activities, the company creates a consistent and cohesive brand experience across different channels. The TV commercial, social media campaign, website, email marketing, and in-store promotions all work together to generate awareness, drive traffic, engage with the audience, and ultimately, increase sales and adoption of the new product.

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