How to Make Digital Advertising Fit in Your Integrated Marketing Strategy

Whether you’re just getting started in digital advertising or have been in the game for years, at some point you’ve probably wondered how to amplify the results of your work. This is where integrated marketing comes into play. A good integrated marketing plan will create synergy across multiple teams in your company, building upon each group’s individual efforts to ultimately drive more conversions.

First, it’s important to understand what integrated marketing is. Simply put, it’s the concerted effort across multiple marketing and advertising functions to achieve a common goal: user conversions. Since we’re discussing online marketing, we can use the term “integrated digital marketing.” 

Integrated digital marketing encompasses several broad disciplines: content marketing, web development/design, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing and digital advertising. The idea is to create multiple touchpoints at various stages of the user journey, thus cementing your place in a consumer’s mind and nudging them toward making a purchase. 

Now that we’ve got definitions out of the way, where does digital advertising fit into your integrated marketing plan? The answer to this question is a bit more complicated than it might seem. Depending on whether you’re running a brand advertising campaign or a performance advertising campaign, your ads could sit anywhere from top-funnel to bottom-funnel. 

For example, the primary goal of a brand advertising campaign is to create awareness and build mindshare among potential customers. Brand ads normally value impressions over clicks, and they tend to reside in the top or middle of the marketing funnel. In this position, they share the same lateral space as social media marketing, SEO and content marketing. In other words, these disciplines all share similar goals of generating and/or building consumer awareness of your brand. When put together as part of an integrated marketing strategy, they complement each other and generate results that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Performance advertising, on the other hand, tends to reside in the middle-to-bottom of the funnel. This is because performance advertising evaluates success based on clicks, leads generated and sales. Performance advertising is normally complemented by content marketing, social media marketing (performance campaigns) and web design. For example, performance ads will often direct consumers to landing pages that have content discussing the benefits of a product and an “add to cart” button. These pages are called “sales pages.” In this context, it’s easy to see the importance of good web design as part of an integrated marketing strategy.

Depending on whether your ads are focused on branding or performance, your campaign might benefit most from complementary social media marketing, a content marketing campaign, a well-designed website or something else entirely. But truthfully speaking, the most successful products find a way to incorporate all of these methods into a comprehensive, integrated digital marketing strategy. We recommend that you work with your team to do the same.

We hope you found this post helpful in your digital marketing journey! For more free digital advertising content, visit our blog.