The purpose of integrated marketing is to provide consumers with a seamless brand experience across all channels, including paid channels and organic ones. Integrated marketing strategies, therefore, rely on brand identity being communicated with consistency, using channels and techniques that complement each other and form a unified, integrated whole.
Clearly, there are plenty of moving parts in a successful integrated marketing strategy, but when it works, the results are impressive. Following are four examples of brands that have done outstanding work with integrated marketing.
1. Apple’s Immersive Website and Storefronts
Few companies in the world have the level of brand recognition of Apple, and the company has provided a consistently high level of brand integration no matter where consumers encounter it. Have you noticed how every Apple storefront offers a look and feel that is almost identical to that of its website? Few companies are able to do such a thorough job of integrating the physical location with the online presence, offering consumers an identifiable customer experience wherever it takes place.
2. Chicago’s Field Museum Brings Art into the Urban Core
Brands can be cultural as well as commercial, as the Field Museum showed with an integrated marketing strategy that brought art to people to increase special exhibit attendance. Digital paid media and traditional advertising (such as on billboards) worked alongside social media posts announcing surprise “pop-up” art locations, and many videos were captured of people interacting with exhibits, creating a 360-degree marketing experience that left people wanting to visit the museum to further quench their cultural thirst.
3. Domino’s Helps People Order from Anywhere
The ubiquitous pizza chain named their ordering software “AnyWare” to highlight the ease of ordering wherever a customer may be. The key to making it work was the Pizza Profile, established to save customer information and expedite ordering. With this data, people could order online, by text, via tweet, or even using a smartwatch. Getting the word out about AnyWare involved an integrated marketing strategy encompassing press releases and television as well as digital and social advertising, with a goal of one-half of all orders being made digitally (which they reached handily).
4. Southwest Brings Transparency to Airline Tickets
People tend not to expect airline ticket prices to make sense, but Southwest doesn’t think it should be that way. To that end, they created an integrated marketing strategy they called “Transfarency” to entertain and educate consumers about airline fees, and in some cases, how to avoid them. This was a way for Southwest to set themselves apart by emphasizing their straightforward fee structure while showing customers multiple convenient ways to pay for things like flight changes and onboard snacks. Their “we’re different” approach made it ideal for social media, where it generated significant buzz.
One thing all these successful integrated marketing strategies have in common is that they are fueled by customer data. Think about it. If you are a museum, you are not going to go to the trouble of setting up ancient terracotta warriors on a downtown plaza without having the data telling you it is likely to attract selfie-takers and lots of foot traffic.
Since your integrated marketing efforts are based largely on your customer data, you need a customer data platform that cleans and unifies your data and that manages that data in the best possible way. That’s where Leadspace comes into the picture. If you would like to learn more about how Leadspace can help your sales and marketing teams contact us.