Your product might be great, but you’ll only meet your goals if you have customers. An integrated marketing campaign can help your B2B business capture the right attention. Here’s how it works.
What is B2B Integrated Marketing?
An integrated B2B marketing campaign is a comprehensive strategy combining multiple channels and tactics to reach a specific target audience. An effective integrated campaign creates a seamless experience for potential customers by delivering a consistent message across all touchpoints, including:
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Events
- Paid advertising
In short, an integrated campaign helps you appear consistently and effectively everywhere your potential customers may be.
The Advantages of Integrated Marketing for Your B2B Campaigns
If a multi-channel, seamless marketing effort sounds like a lot of work to you, you’re right. But the results are worth the investment. Here’s what you’ll get back from an integrated campaign:
- A wider audience. Targeting one channel at a time cuts out valuable segments of your audience. By covering all your channels with a consistent message, you cast the widest net you can to capture the type of leads you want.
- More touchpoints with your leads. Once someone interacts with your content — whether that’s an ad, a post, a blog — you need a system in place to keep your name and solution in front of them. An integrated campaign allows you to appear again and again, giving you more chances to pique the interest of a potential customer.
- Trust and recognition. Consistently appearing as an authority in your field goes a long way to build trust among your audience. If you’re providing good value even before someone has made a purchase, they’re much more likely to remember your brand and want to engage with you again.
- An agile, flexible strategy. By leveraging multiple channels, you have the option to adjust your approach if one tactic performs differently than expected. It also allows for greater creativity and experimentation, as marketers can test different messaging and tactics across various channels to see what resonates best with their target audience.
Of course, reaping these benefits all hinges on running a successful integrated campaign. Here’s how you can achieve that.
Checklist: Best Practices for Your Integrated Campaign
Thinking about diving in on a campaign that takes advantage of all these benefits? Here’s what you’ll need to get started on an integrated campaign.
Set Your Goals Up Front
Two golden rules: 1) don’t kick off a campaign without data and 2) don’t forget that there are more goalposts than just the number of sales.
It’s difficult to track the success of a campaign when you don't have baseline data or a clearly defined metric that you’re trying to improve. Before anything kicks off, decide what you want to measure — often, it’s leads, but it can also be pageviews, entries, etc. In many cases, you’ll want to keep track of multiple metrics to get a full picture of your performance.
You’ll then want to make sure you have some baseline data for each metric you’re going to track. If you want to see how many new leads a campaign drives to your contact form, for example, you’ll want to make sure you know what you’re starting at, and where you’ve been historically. For an integrated campaign, you’ll want to collect that data from all the channels you plan to use.
Research Your Audience
You know your industry, and you’ve likely already done some work on buyer personas. But with a campaign — especially an integrated campaign — you’ll likely want to dig a little deeper into the specific audience you’re targeting. There might be certain times of year or even month when this particular segment would be more receptive to your message, for example. Or, perhaps in this case you should be talking to a single decision maker within each company rather than multiple.
Strategically Pick Your Channels
Since your goal will be to meet your audience where they are, your research must also look into the channels your target demographic uses. Some industries are still thriving on Facebook, for example, while others have social media interest almost entirely based on LinkedIn. And for other industries and particular campaigns, social media of any kind might not be the best choice for your focus or ad spend. You need to understand your audience to know where to reach them — and where not to.
Beyond the clear cut options, like your website and social platforms, it’s also a good idea to check out platforms specific to your industry and think about whether they might be valuable to your campaign.
Make Your Messaging Consistent
When your marketing messaging is inconsistent, it can confuse your customers and, at worst, make your brand appear unprofessional.
Imagine you're reading a blog post that piques your interest in a company's product or service. You dig deeper and find their social media pages or website, only to find their messaging completely different from the blog post that drew you in. What started as your research journey to get more information has now left you with more questions than answers. Integrated marketing ensures that your brand's message is consistent across all channels, eliminating confusion and strengthening your brand identity.
Create Helpful Content Across Channels
Your customers can (and will) research products and services long before purchasing. Your campaign content needs to take this into account by including helpful content. Your customers likely won’t be ready to buy after downloading a single whitepaper, so a good integrated marketing campaign will focus on providing continued, helpful content to customers to keep them engaged and educated so that when they have learned what they need to, your solution will be top-of-mind.
Creating helpful content like this is also a great way to improve your chances of ranking on Google, so the article you write to nurture an existing lead may end up bringing in some more new ones — a nice bonus to keep your funnel moving.
Plan Ahead for Potential Leads
It’s a problem all marketers would like to have – too many leads. Leads are great, but they’re only valuable if you have a plan to move them across the sales line.
You can avoid letting good leads go to waste by taking a systematic approach:
- Start by segmenting leads based on their needs, interests, and behavior.
- Use a CRM tool to manage them efficiently.
- Develop a lead nurturing strategy that includes personalized emails, social media posts, and other marketing campaigns.
- Provide valuable content like whitepapers, case studies, webinars, and demos to address their pain points and showcase your expertise.
Whatever your business decides, it’s critical to take action with your leads and not let them languish.
Build on Experience for Your Next Campaign
The way you run integrated campaigns hinges on your understanding of your audience. As you do more and more research and kick off more campaigns, you’ll learn more and your subsequent campaigns will benefit from that experience.
However your first campaign goes, you’ll either come away with good information about how to handle your next one, so keep track of your performance, take notes, and analyze your results for insights into your next campaign.
Work With an Experienced Marketing Team
It can be challenging to handle B2B integrated marketing. Managing different channels and strategies and aligning multiple teams working on various aspects of a campaign can easily amount to the equivalent of a full-time job. Plus, success will require marketing skills and experience in a range of disciplines. Without a background already built up, you’ll have to learn as you go. If managing all the moving parts of a time-consuming campaign sounds intimidating, consider outsourcing your marketing to an agency. You’ll get a team on your side who already knows the channels, tactics, and best practices that make a successful campaign.
Coordinate Your Campaigns with a Unified Strategy
In a competitive B2B market, you can’t pass up increasing your reach to get more quality leads. That makes integrated marketing a major asset to the businesses who can make it work.
If you have the resources on your team to pull off a successful integrated campaign in-house, then you’re well on your way to generating quality leads. But if you’re not surrounded by marketing experts already, don’t worry — you’ve come to the right place. With experience across the B2B landscape, our team has the right people to kick off your next campaign so you’re set up for success.
Curious how running a campaign with us would look? Get in touch — we’d love to show you how we work!
