Not long ago, an integrated marketing campaign involved hitting your leads with phone calls and direct mail – integrated marketing agencies didn’t really exist.
Today, thanks to the internet, it’s easy to reach your prospects and leads where they hang out online with relevant content.
83% of B2B buyers say that treating them like a human being is the key to winning their business so understanding how to create a holistic marketing campaign is critical.
But what is integrated marketing and how can you find an agency to help you create an effective strategy to connect with your leads?
What Is Integrated Marketing?
Integrated marketing has become a huge buzzword over the past few years as digital marketing has expanded your ability to reach leads on different platforms across the internet.
In essence, an integrated marketing campaign involves creating a seamless experience or journey for each lead – no matter where they are online at any given moment.
Let’s say someone visits your website and downloads an eBook. You would use information you know about the lead to reach them with PPC adverts on other websites they visit, case studies as sponsored social media posts, and relevant event invites through email marketing – for example.
Consumer brands like Old Spice, H&M, and Always have each nailed down a successful integrated marketing campaign.
An integrated marketing agency should understand and prioritize a few things such as
- Accurate data collection on leads and prospects
- Your brand guidelines like voice and tone
Both factors are critical for creating and promoting the right kind of content to the right leads and making sure your brand is represented consistently.
7 Features You Need from an Integrated Marketing Agency
Lots of companies will call themselves an integrated marketing agency. Keep the features below in mind as you browse their services to make sure you’re making the best decision for your brand.
1. Human Lead Verification
Accurate data is essential for all integrated marketing. Unfortunately, 62% of businesses are building marketing strategies with data that’s up to 40% incorrect.
The first steps are getting rid of forms and employing human lead verification. When you use forms to collect email addresses, this leaves the door open to fake leads and bad intel.
At Hushly, for example, we ONLY collect verified business email addresses and a country location. From there, our system cross-references the information with public data on LinkedIn to build lead profiles like so:
2. Automated Email Marketing
Email marketing is an awesome retargeting tool because it’s easy to personalize every piece of communication and content.
Plus, email seems to be every marketer’s favorite personalization channel with 75% already using it for this purpose.
With email, you can segment your audience by firmographics like company and job role. You can also easily incorporate data and create automated campaigns for onboarding, welcoming, case studies, and more.
Any integrated marketing agency you choose to work with should have a solid grasp of how personalized email marketing works in B2B.
3. Effective Retargeting
Retargeting is a vital part of every integrated marketing campaign – but it needs to be done right.
First, you’ll want to make sure you’re targeting your leads on the right platforms. For B2B, LinkedIn is a vital social media platform, for example.
But that’s not all. It’s also important to make sure you’re creating a seamless experience across multiple platforms. Did a lead consume an eBook tutorial on your website? Hit them with a sponsored case study post on social media.
Let your different platforms play off each other.
4. Combining Data from Multiple Sources
One major problem many B2Bs face is that their data is stuck in silos and inaccessible across multiple platforms.
An integrated marketing agency should make every effort to break these chains and combine your data. Pulling your data together will ensure that it’s as updated as possible so you can use it to create effective personalization strategies.
5. A Solid Personalization Strategy
Personalization can’t be an afterthought anymore – it needs to encompass your entire strategy.
85% of B2B buyers say they’re willing to write off a brand that doesn’t personalize the very first point of contact.
In other words, everything from your website landing pages down to your social media posts should be 100% personalized. If you’re employing an account-based marketing strategy, your personalization efforts need even more research.
Your integrated marketing agency should put personalization first and ask questions about your target audience and leads.
6. A Deep Understanding of Content Marketing
Personalization and content marketing go hand-in-hand. Your personalization strategy lives inside your brand’s content.
Considering that leads complete between 57% to 90% of the sales process before they ever speak to someone on your team, content is key.
Landing pages, case studies, podcasts, blog posts, and eBooks are all vital for helping your leads self-nurture and educate themselves before your sales team has a chance to communicate with them.
7. A Customer Management Strategy
Finally, an integrated marketing agency should strive to create a strategy that helps you build customer loyalty.
You have so many tools at your disposal for connecting with your customers – email, SMS, social media. It’s critical that you build relationships with them and continue promoting your personalized content for them. If you don’t, they could switch brands.
According to Salesforce research, 65% of buyers say they would consider switching vendors if a company didn’t attempt to personalize communications.
Source: Salesforce
Create an Effective Integrated Marketing Campaign with Personalization
An integrated marketing agency should also help you personalize every page on your website for every visitor – whether known or anonymous.
Hushly can help you create the unique personalized experience that your leads expect. Using features like content bingeing, personalization algorithms, self-nurturing landing pages, and human lead verification, you can help leads nurture themselves at their own pace – all without forms! The result? 51% more lead conversions.
Read this eBook to learn more about why lead forms are dead and what you can use instead.