Whether a business wants to expand its products or services, or introduce new ones, success depends on how effectively it promotes itself via marketing. Marketing’ is all about deciding who your customers are, what they want and then developing a cunning plan to sell your products or services to them make money in the process. In the past, this primarily meant creating a brand name and promoting a product via print, television, radio and possibly direct mail campaigns if you had access to a database.
However, with the advent of the Internet, marketing has taken on a whole new meaning and business owners and managers now have the medium of “cyberspace” or the ‘world wide web’ at their fingertips. The best of both worlds–offline and online marketing can and should be combined effectively to drive sales higher. Cyberspace allows us to market online in a variety of ways: corporate websites, banner ads, email, blogs, Podcasts, RSS Feeds, and the many social media opportunities like Youtube, linkedIn, Twitter etc and of course….. search engine keywords–the list is virtually endless!
However, there is still a place for the standard offline marketing tactics, so it only makes sense to integrate marketing strategies to achieve your goals. Integrated marketing is really about allowing marketing decision-makers to view the entire marketing process from beginning to end, thereby providing insight into which combination of tactics will drive the highest returns.
Benefits of Integrated Marketing
1. Traditional advertising strategies merge with online approaches to market a product or service across all possible marketing domains and channels
2. Analysis of integrated marketing strategies allows you to use online mediums to measure offline advertising. Companies now have the ability to measure successful strategies and more importantly learn from the ones that are not.
The key to successful integration of marketing strategies is: Getting your customer engaged
The beauty of ‘search’ marketing as opposed to more traditional forms of advertising whereby you had to catch a prospects attention when they were doing something else like watching TV or reading a magazine is that by ‘definition’ they are ‘searching’. While this might seem obvious, potential customers when in ‘searching mode’ are looking for instant gratification. When they get to your website they want to quickly understand;
– What you do
– How you can solve their current problem
– What are your USP’s –
-Why should they choose you
If you or your company need assistance in creating an integrated strategy talk to us at www.wsioms.co.za or drop a line to me jamie@wsioms.co.za and we would be happy to assist with creating an integrated digital marketing plan for your business.