Traditional meets Integrated: how collaboration produces results.
We witness integrated marketing strategies every day alongside the traditional strategies. But what is it that makes Integrated Marketing better than Traditional Marketing?
Different produces results
“It is good to be better, it is better to be different” — Sally Hogshead
Integrated Marketing alone is not better than Traditional Marketing, however it provides a different approach that can help to maximize the success of a campaign through collaboration.
But first : what is Integrated Marketing? To put it simply, Integrated Marketing is creating a cohesive experience and appearance for your brand both on and offline. This cohesiveness can be created through a number of ways. One of the most famous examples is that of the Apple company. The company has established a specific appearance and experience across all of their platforms. Whether you are scrolling on instagram, walk into a store, or happen to see a billboard, the perception is all the same. This is what Integrated Marketing aims to achieve in collaborating on each social, digital, and traditional platform. While this technique is different from traditional techniques, it produces results in a refreshing and productive way.
Cohesive and Collaborative: Traditional and Integrated
One of the main benefits to Integrated Marketing is the ability to correlate business success with marketing strategy. Running a digital campaign alongside a traditional campaign allows us to see the success rates of each platform. For example: if I am promoting company A through billboards, blogs, instagram ads, and youtube commercials, I can see through the provided analytics how each campaign is bringing in consumers. The benefit of running the campaigns all at once is not only the 360 approach, but the process of elimination in analyzing success. Digital platforms come with analytics, traditional techniques may not. If I can see that YouTube brought X amount of people to our website, I can then use process of elimination to assume if the rest visited the site from our traditional campaigns. This product of using both strategies not only helps to measure success, but also to help build efficient future campaigns.
There is also the benefit of building credibility. People often believe what they hear or see the most. In creating an integrated marketing strategy, you are creating the most coverage & credibility for your company. Whether someone sees a billboard, then sees an instagram ad, or the other way around, they will assume your product is credible because of the coverage it has in their online and offline lives. This is why the introduction of Integrated Marketing to Traditional Marketing is so significant in marketing and business strategies.
Plan for the future : using analytics
As Integrated and Traditional approaches can help measure exact success, it can also help to establish a formula for a company’s future campaigns. Should a past campaign show more success in a newspaper ad and instagram ads, a company can use that information to target those particular markets, or every market but in their next campaign.
The analytics of integrated marketing serves as a major tool in measuring the success of a campaign. If you have marketing materials in the newspaper and on three different digital platforms, but only had visitors from instagram and twitter, improvements can be made to the other materials on the remaining digital platforms and the newspaper. Perhaps you can choose to narrow your marketing down to one particular platform for your next campaign, or widen your campaign while strengthening & targeting your materials for the other platforms.
Integrated Marketing is the most productive way in measuring the success of a marketing campaign, as well as the success of a company’s brand. Using Integrated Marketing with Traditional Marketing can only maximize a company’s ability to succeed, or learn how to succeed.
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