Let’s face it: in today’s day and age, most people are completely desensitized to brand messages, and understandably so. People are inundated with advertisements every single day. They see them on billboards and bus stops as they’re commuting to and from work. Plus, it’s nearly impossible to escape them at work or at home, since they’re on Google and on their social media News Feeds. Therefore, it will take a lot more than creating an advertisement or publishing a piece of content to gain attention from your audience. How can you better market your business to attract new customers and entice them to stay?
Two words: integrated approach. An integrated approach requires a holistic understanding of all the pieces that make up your business strategy. It’s simply not enough to create a beautifully designed, responsive website and then create a lackluster marketing campaign, or vice versa. Instead, an integrated approach involves connecting your design, development, and marketing strategy at every step of the way.
When creating your website, your Web designer and developer should not only be thinking about mobile compatibility and user flow, but also considering best SEO practices and your marketing demographic(s). Similarly, your digital marketing team should be analyzing user behavior on your website and determining the best landing pages for advertisements. Gaining true customers requires a lot of strategy, research, and effort. However, taking an integrated approach will positively impact your brand’s digital presence. Here are three successful results that an integrated approach can produce for your business.
Meaningful and long-term customer engagement
Although there is nothing inherently wrong with campaigns, the word “campaign” itself implies a one-time marketing effort meant to achieve a singular goal in a short amount of time. For example, when you run a PPC campaign, your Google rank and impressions rise, but what are those clicks actually getting you? Your business endeavors should go beyond creating a campaign that gets you deceivingly high results but low-quality leads.
Focus your efforts on building brand loyalty with your customers. Your campaign shouldn’t just approach the problem from one side. Instead, an integrated approach creates a meaningful and useful experience for your customers at every step of the buying process, from the Google ad that raises brand awareness, to the social media post that increases brand loyalty, all the way to your website’s landing page that promotes purchases.
Strong and consistent brand voice
One of the most important aspects of building your business is maintaining a consistent brand voice across all platforms, and an integrated digital approach will help you achieve that. Brand consistency starts with you and continues to your website, advertisements, social media posts, customer service, and anything else associated with your brand.
Remember that U.S. Airways blunder from a couple of months ago, when someone from the company posted a highly inappropriate tweet as a response to a dissatisfied customer? That’s an example not only of poor customer service but also inconsistent branding, where their Twitter presence was not aligned with their professional demeanor on their website. An integrated approach ensures that this type of mistake doesn’t happen. Everyone on your team will know how to accurately represent your company in any type of situation, and customers will know what to expect from your brand, regardless of whether they’re on your website or Twitter page.
Greater SEO value
What do you think of when someone says SEO? Although best SEO practices of 2014 are trickier than they were five years ago, SEO is not just about good meta description tags, authoritative back-links, or a strong social presence. Your Web design, development, brand content, and social media presence all factor into how you rank on Google; therefore, an effective SEO strategy must take into account all of these on-site and off-site elements in order to garner lasting success.
Google’s crawlers must be able to easily find and identify your brand while being readable, relevant, and interesting to your human audience. Therefore, you need to think about your on-site architecture, content, HTML, and content, in addition to your off-site backlinks, social reputation, and link shares. All of this requires a collaborative effort from your entire digital team to structure your site and advertise your brand in accordance to best SEO practices.
An integrated approach gives your business maximum impact for minimal cost. When you design an SEO-friendly website that takes into account your target audience and marketing goals, you’ll have an easier time advertising your brand and selling your products than if you did each piece one by one. Instead of rewriting your website’s content and meta-tags and trying to supplement a poorly designed website with a strong social presence, an integrated digital approach avoids all this hassle and yields great results the first time around.