Integrated Digital Marketing is really simple. It relies on our ability as marketers to look at experiences across channels and optimize for more traffic to our sites, and more conversions. In addition, we also need to evaluate how visitors travel to our site from different devices and how those devices work together. Let’s look at some data:

Statistics

86% of shoppers will use at least 2 channels before they convert.
Multi-channel shoppers spend 3 times more than single channel shoppers.
Adweek cites the website as the most important touchpoint in a customer’s journey (87%) followed by 68% citing email, 61% citing mobile, 54% social media, and 53% search engines.
90% of consumers jump between screens during the course of the day.
Companies that employ omnichannel marketing retain 89% of customers on average versus 33% of companies that have a poor omnichannel strategy.

Visitors are utilizing multiple devices and multiple channels to convert from casual visitor to customer in the course of their user journey. How will we remain in front of them with the right content?

Clearly the importance of having an integrated digital marketing strategy is extremely important in the rapidly changing online world.

Measuring Current Digital Marketing Performance

Before we can set up our integrated marketing strategy, we need to measure our current performance.

Social traffic: Start by measuring your social media presence. How many followers/fans/likes do you have? Do these fans comment/share/favorite/like your posts? Do they visit your site from social channels? Do they convert on your website (fill out a form or buy a product, for example)?
Organic traffic: How much of your traffic mix is organic traffic contributing? What are your top landing pages? How long do visitors spend on the site, and how many pages do they view? What keywords are you ranking for?
Email traffic: How much of your traffic mix is from email? What are your most successful campaigns? Did customers purchase or fill out a form after viewing an email? How many people opened your email? Did they click the link to your site?
Direct traffic: How much of your traffic mix is coming from direct traffic? What are your top direct traffic landing pages (these will be pages that visitors know by heart, or have bookmarked)? Is traffic growing or shrinking over time (brand lift or brand decay)? What external marketing activities could influence direct traffic (billboards, signs, fliers, radio, tv, trade shows, sponsorships, etc.)?
Referral traffic: How much of your traffic mix is coming from referral traffic? What are the top sites that are referring visitors to your site? Are they relevant to your niche? Are they sending qualified traffic that convert into customers?
Paid traffic: How much of your traffic mix is coming from paid traffic? What percentage is coming from paid social, PPC, or display? What traffic converts higher? Where do your ads get the most clicks that lead to visitors becoming customers? What is your average CPC? What is your best performing ad copy? What are your top performing keywords? What are your target keywords? Are you boosting social posts or running paid social ads?
Lastly, what is the ROI (return on investment) 0f your digital marketing activities? After you take out ad spend, salaries, tools, and content, what revenue gains did your marketing make? Again, we need to have a clear picture of current state before we can start measuring a new plan.

Planning Your Integrated Digital Marketing Strategy

Once we know how our current digital marketing ecosystem is performing, we can create a plan of what we will keep, what we will change, and how we’ll change it.

Step 1 – Know Your Target Users/Personas: Understand what types of content are most important to your target audience. And, most importantly, map the different types of content to the stage in the funnel. Create broad and general top-of-funnel content, (such as blogs, infographics, images, how-to guides, etc.) that can be used to get a potential visitor’s attention. Next, create middle-of-funnel content once you have interest (this can include deeper guides, webinars, service overviews, etc.). Finally, don’t forgot to include bottom-of-funnel content. This will push potential customers into converting (this can include webinars, case studies, promotional offers, etc.). Not all types of content will work for all traffic. You wouldn’t push an organic visitor who has landed on your homepage for the first time into a webinar. That’s a middle-of-the-funnel/bottom-of-the-funnel piece of content.

Step 2 – Set Up A Strategy for Each Channel: Plan your content distribution for different channels and look for how each channel will influence the other. For example, if someone visits your website and submits their email address for a newsletter, take that list of email addresses into Facebook and target those visitors with middle-of-funnel content. By doing this, you are moving them down the funnel and you are staying in front of them with content. What does your email sequence look like? Are you staying in your visitor’s mailbox? By having a plan in place of what content will live where, and how will the content be promoted, you will set yourself up for success.

Step 3 – Get Inter-Department Buy-In: Having a strategy for integrated digital marketing is extremely important, however, without having the stamp of approval and internal cooperation. Set up how each team will be responsible for the finished piece of content and lay out what success for each team looks like so you can measure results, and everyone has visibility into this process.

Step 4 – Track and Analyze Your Results: Once we have this new strategy in place, it’s time to start measuring our success. Hopefully you have Google Analytics correctly set up and configured to be collecting data. Mine that data! Dig deep and try to understand why visitors are taking particular actions on your site. Google Analytics contains a wealth of information that we can use to measure the results of our integrated campaigns.

Integrated Digital Marketing is a continually unfolding new world that is constantly in flux and changing. The choice is ours as to whether we choose to embrace these insights and meet our customers where they are, or if we will choose to try and fit our customers into a model that they will refuse and that will make difficult to successfully grow a business? This is the choice we all make.