11/22/21

Planning an Integrated Marketing Campaign in 2022?

While there are surely marketing trends you want to capitalize on in the year ahead, an integrated marketing campaign optimized for your target audiences is the foundation you want to build your entire marketing plan on for 2022.

If you’re trying to determine how to spend your marketing budget for 2022, an integrated marketing plan can provide a helpful framework.

Five Fundamentals for Planning an Integrated Marketing Campaign in 2022

An integrated marketing strategy will help ensure your marketing spend generates satisfying ROI. Here are five fundamentals to keep in mind as you determine your integrated marketing mix for the new year.

#1: Know your audience

Understanding the concerns, needs, pain points, interests and desires of your target audiences is fundamental to planning a profitable integrated marketing communication strategy.

So often, CMOs and marketers want to jump right to social media marketing strategy or digital integrated marketing tactics.

We must take a step back and ground our marketing strategy and tactics in customer journey research. Do you know how your customers experience your brand?

At OBI Creative, we use customer journey research studies to examine the experience or interaction between a company and its customers from the customer’s perspective. This is critical, because businesses often assume their perspective of the buyer journey is identical to the customer’s actual experience. In reality, the two are often different.

A mix of qualitative and quantitative research reveals gaps between what you think you know about your customers and what is actually true. The following tactics and others can help find your target audience and provide a 360-degree view of your customer.

Audience segmentation
Database modeling and metrics
Secret shopper experiences
Customer and prospect evaluation, customer journey mapping
UX/UI
Internal and competitor messaging review

When you know who you are and why you matter to your customers, you have a firm foundation on which to position, message and present your brand to your ideal audiences.

#2: Know your goals

Now that you’ve defined your target audience, you are ready to create goals that will help you reach them. Make sure your integrated digital marketing goals are tied to your organizational goals.

Marketing goals should always ladder up and support company goals, so that your marketing spend allocation reflects the priorities you’re focusing on as an organization in the year ahead. Asking questions like the following can help you create goals that are designed to achieve company objectives:

What must our integrated marketing campaign accomplish?
Which specific organizational goals will it support?
Which new product or service should we promote?
What will help us generate leads and sales?

It’s easy to skip the goal setting process and dive straight into tactics. However, pausing to first set goals will ensure the tactics you choose drive the results your company expects.

#3: Know your message

The best way to make a meaningful connection with your customers is with effective messaging. After identifying your target audiences, understanding their interests and finding intersection points where they are most receptive to your messaging (more on that in the next section), you are ready to craft messages that motivate your prospects to take intended actions.

Be clear, concise and certain that your messages align with your brand strategy and customer insights gleaned during marketing research. Tie your messages to prospects’ consideration drivers and their stage in the buyer journey.

Monitoring placements throughout your campaign will allow you to tweak messaging as needed to achieve optimal results.

#4: Know your channels.

The number of channels on which to engage your customers seems to grow larger every day. Some of the avenues you must evaluate for your integrated marketing campaign placements include the following.

Digital display ads
PPC advertising
Pre-roll video
OTT ads
Digital audio and native advertisements
Social media platforms (including newer social media channels like TikTok, Snapchat and Clubhouse)
Outdoor placements (i.e., billboards, transit, airports, sports and event venues)
Print, radio and TV
Mobile search, in-app ads, geofencing and geotargeting

Make sure your go-to-market plan includes the right mix of tactics to reach your audiences where they are active online.

#5: Know your metrics.

Knowing how you will measure marketing success in 2022 is critical to nail down while it’s still 2021. Before you hit the ground running, make sure you know how you will track progress toward your goals.

Without this critical step, it’s difficult to prove value to C-suite members and others. It’s also more difficult to make adjustments to your tactics and integrated marketing campaign budget. If you can’t figure out how to measure success with a given tactic, you may need to seriously consider whether or not you should pursue that tactic.

For example, thought leadership is incredibly effective at building trust and authority with audiences, but it can’t be effectively measured. There’s no easy way to draw a straight line between the resources required to create and promote thought leadership content and the leads or sales it generates.

On the other hand, influencer marketing campaigns, search ads and other kinds of digital media buys can be more easily tracked. Pixels and landing pages can be used to track specific metrics like clicks, form submissions and purchases. It’s much easier to draw a straight line between a tactic and a result that impacts bottom line business goals.

Levers can also then be pulled up or down as needed to generate the desired number of leads or sales.

A final word

All successful marketing comes down to delivering the right message to the right people at the right time in the right format on the right channels. It can feel overwhelming, but by grounding your work in customer insight and tying your strategy to company goals, you can generate desirable results.

Are you allocating your marketing budget for an integrated marketing campaign in 2022? Let the marketing professionals at OBI Creative help you identify opportunities that align with your organizational goals.

Connect with us now to start a conversation about your integrated campaign needs!