Integrating across these tactics can be really challenging, especially in a larger firm where different teams may manage different platforms or where different ad agencies handle different aspects of marketing, such as content marketing, paid, and social. But, integrate you must to achieve true digital marketing success.
A big part of conversion is frequency and unless efforts are coordinated, you lose out on frequency.
Let’s talk about how you go about integrating across these tactics that contribute to digital marketing success.
Strategic planning
The first step in integration is to have a strategic plan. Don’t have one, here’s a link to creating a digital marketing plan.
Coordination comes from strategic elements such as messaging, but even elements such as mission and goals help integrate efforts by creating an umbrella under which teams create posts, infographics, and the metrics used to assess them.
Creative meetings
Bringing everyone together is important. Everyone should have time to share elements they’re working on and get input from the group about ways to extend a particular effort across multiple platforms and creative efforts.
Having a style guide is a must. In the style guide, list the color palette, fonts, and approved variations so there’s consistency across your marketing efforts (including traditional advertising). Copies of various sizes and types of logos, images of the leadership team, and other graphic elements may be part of the style guide.
A master plan
There needs to be a point person in charge of digital marketing success and that person is key to coordinating efforts across teams. Some organizations have an approval process where the top person must approve everything before it goes live. I’m not a big fan of this approach because it can slow the process down and, unlike traditional advertising, digital media is a fast-flowing river where putting in a dam causes the flow to back up and allows accumulation of a lot of flotsam and jetsam, which is both stinky and further jams the pipeline.
A better strategy is to use a digital master calendar or another device, such as an app, to allow everyone to post what they’re working on, the assets they plan to use, and when the creative effort will go live. But, it’s not enough to post plans, but everyone should be required to check this master calendar every day to see where their plans fit into those already in the works.
For instance, reusing a graphic created by another team not only saves time and money, it creates a visual that helps consumers (customers and potential customers) associate the two efforts–and increases frequency.