Integrated marketing communication (IMC) incorporates consistent messaging across both digital media and offline channels to target audiences based on unified first-party data.
This is the premier approach used by enterprise and mid-sized businesses to both build brand awareness and orchestrate bespoke lifecycle messaging across channels to customers:
Ecommerce companies leverage consumer insights (e.g., recent products or services viewed, items added to carts) to create on-brand, omni-channel customer experiences (CX) to generate new business, repeat buyers, and greater customer loyalty.
Car rental agencies deliver personalized website experiences and deals to visitors that can both convert prospective vehicle-bookers during their sessions and inform their retargeted ads and remarketing emails to those individuals later on.
Bricks-and-clicks retailers collect known and anonymous contacts’ data from online and offline sources to enhance those individuals’ customer profiles, inform individualized offers on various channels, and improve the efficiency of your marketing.
Before you can launch this approach, though, there are many pieces of the integrated marketing communications puzzle you must put into place to establish your strategy.
The first one to prioritize? A single source of truth that provides rich customer profiles, the coveted single customer view, and, in turn, customer identity “confidence.”
Without a central system that facilitates the flow of customer data in your martech ecosystem, implementing impactful integrated campaigns and relevant messaging to contacts based on actions and behaviors across multiple marketing channels will be tough.
And there’s one technology, in particular, data-driven organizations across industries use to accelerate their integrated marketing strategies today: the customer data platform (CDP).
What exactly is integrated marketing communication? A breakdown
Prior to onboarding a CDP to get your integrated marketing (i.e., lifecycle orchestration) efforts off the ground, though, it’s important to understand the intricacies of the promotional technique and how you can marry it with your existing marketing mix with ease.
“Where online and offline become one.” That’s how one business strategist framed the promotional approach for CMSWire. A succinct, but nonetheless accurate IMC overview.
The modern integrated marketing communication definition boils down to this: A seamless, holistic marketing method that blends first-party data from all systems and sources and results in bespoke customer experiences across all channels through consistent, targeted messaging
Sound familiar? It may be a marketing technique you already employ. Ask yourself: Do we ensure that all messaging in our marketing efforts is based on real-time data access and insights, persistent across channels, relevant to contacts, and shared at the most pertinent places and times?
If the answer is “yes,” you have an integrated marketing communication strategy.
What you may not have, though, is an integrated marketing plan that revolves around ideal customer profiles that consolidate identifiers and profile properties from across databases into one, unified system of record for your business.
Breaking data silos vital for IMC success
Too many organizations today still have dreaded customer data silos.
The negative ramifications of failing to sync first-party data into a primary database for eventual integrated marketing activation are well-known (all too well, for some businesses):
Inability to promote the most applicable products or services to one’s audience
Insufficient understanding of customers’ buying patterns and browsing trends
Ineffective personalization capabilities due to fragmented customer profiles
Given 61% of marketers indicated breaking down silos to provide greater data access companywide and enable better data-driven (see: integrated) marketing was a top objective, it’s evident siloed data is the biggest deterrent to successful IMC programs.
Syncing data critical for integrated marketing
The best way to eliminate these silos (and, in turn, obstacles to growing your marketing ROI)? Connect all your principal marketing and business technologies and ensure all customer data from those systems flows into the aforementioned single source of truth.
As Google VP, Media Platforms Sean Downey noted for Harvard Business Review:
“Marketers who use rich insights, cross-functional collaboration, and integrated technology are best positioned to break through the clutter.”
To commence your IMC efforts, it’s critical to couple all your martech: from your CRM software and email service provider to customer journey analytics and experience tools.
Once all solutions “speak” with one another, you and your team will be able to improve all aspects of your marketing communication by carrying out more fruitful integrated campaigns and conveying your uniform messaging across customers’ lifecycles.
What’s more, with all worthwhile customer data (i.e., cleansed, quality-hygiene first-party data) merged in a central database — preferably, a CDP — you can rest easy knowing incomplete profiles are a thing of the past and you’re set up for marketing success.
The benefits of integrated marketing communications (and technologies)
As noted, chances are you and your team have many, if not most, of the core components required for an effective integrated marketing plan today in place for your business:
A robust online presence: Strategies for search engine optimization, social media engagement, demand generation, email nurturing, and similar digital marketing tactics
A strong offline program: Print advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing activities to engage prospects and customers in the real world
But these activities won’t lead to the return on investment you (or your C-suite, for that matter) desire if they don’t work in unison to deliver a compelling, uniform CX.
Statistics from Econsultancy’s recent study on the pros of advanced customer experience strategies show just how much companies can benefit from syncing CX technologies:
“Leading” marketers are 52% more likely than their “mainstream” counterparts to build fully integrated martech stacks that connect all marketing solutions.
Marketing professionals with integrated technology stacks are 45% more likely to use first-party customer data to offer a personalized CX to their audience.
Companies with leading marketers are 60% more likely to develop and optimize customer experiences in real time by leveraging analytics rather than mainstream marketers.
Translation: Leading marketers become such by optimizing, analyzing, and executing integrated campaigns with integrated marketing technology stacks in which their data coalesces and, in turn, increasingly improves their promotional efforts.
Just ask marketing experts and MIT Sloan Management Review contributors Matt Lawson and Shuba Srinivasan, who relayed the pros of integrated marketing technologies:
“It’s crucial to consolidate data to not only visualize the customer as he or she moves across channels but also connect those insights back to enterprise data, analyze and segment it, and apply those insights to meaningful and profitable actions.”
And what better system in which to consolidate customer data — and use to create a seamless customer experience — than the CDP: a platform that offers this data unification, analysis, segmentation, and activation — all in a single user interface.
An integrated marketing example to inspire your communications strategy
It’s one thing to learn about a concept like integrated marketing in the abstract. It’s entirely another to discover how the conversion-enhancing approach can be executed.
Consider one of our retail customers.
A California-based retailer has both a popular ecommerce store and brick-and-mortar locations. Many of the fast-fashion retailer’s customers buy via both sales avenues.
Thus, it made sense to piece together all that online and offline purchase and intent data to better understand its shopper audience (e.g., clothing companies bought most, frequency of site visits, etc.) and provide bespoke customer experiences to them.
The implementation of a loyalty program helped point-of-sale associates capture shoppers’ email addresses during purchases. Once BlueConic’s CDP was onboarded, the company was able to merge that offline buyer data with online engagement data and into unified profiles.
In conjunction with our CDP’s advanced capabilities (e.g., predictive CLV and RFM models), the business has crafted an omnichannel CX strategy — and, thereby, an integrated marketing communication strategy — that delivers more value and increases loyalty.
Building your company’s integrated marketing communications plan
Of course, the integrated marketing communications method — and the customer data platform — isn’t something only retail and ecommerce companies can benefit from.
Countless companies — membership organizations, media and publishing companies, and finance and investment firms, among others — use the customer data platform to augment integrated campaigns through more efficient segmentation, more advanced personalization, and more actionable audience insights.
In fact, it’s how so many companies form and refine customer engagement strategies that distinguish their messaging, and organizations at large, from competitors.
When initiating your integrated marketing communication strategy, consider what you already have in place and what finishing touches are needed (e.g., revised messaging, more effectual martech) to supply a stellar CX to your customer base.
Once those IMC-related gaps are filled, you will be on your way to far more efficient cross-channel marketing — and have the foundation for true customer data liberation.
Learn how you can take your customer engagement and cross-channel marketing efforts to new heights with our CDP. Request your BlueConic demo today.