Five Key Factors To Your Marketing Strategy Being Integrated To Your Business
In today’s complex and fragmented landscape, ensuring your business has the right marketing strategy in place demands more than surface-level audience targeting and focus in specific channels. It requires an integrated understanding of your business’ whole ecosystem.
Over 73% of UK shoppers engage with brands across multiple environments before purchasing, highlighting the need for strategies that transcend isolated campaigns. By breaking down silos within your business and aligning marketing with broader business objectives, you can unlock efficiency gains of 15–20% through integrated campaigns throughout your business, not only in marketing, while fostering brand loyalty for success in competitive markets.
Mapping The Full Customer Journey
A siloed approach risks overlooking critical touchpoints, meaning that your business could be missing out on traffic and recurring revenue from repeat and loyal customers. Understanding your customer’s behaviour and creating a map of their journey from the data signals available to you, enables a wide, intelligent view of how your business can respond to their needs.
Did you know that 72% of UK consumers expect consistent messaging across platforms? They expect it… To a customer, you are one brand, not multiple departments or channels.
Get it wrong & 58% will abandon any purchases they were considering if they feel a disjointed experience. That’s more than half!
By analysing and understanding journeys from a customer’s initial discovery and awareness, right through to post-purchase engagement and how you can build a relationship for ongoing loyalty, your business will be able to allocate the right resources to create high-impact at all stages, whilst maintaining a strong experience for the customer.
Aligning With Your Business Objectives
Marketing must directly fuel business goals.
Otherwise, what’s its purpose? However, there’s plenty of scope and capability across the marketing mix to begin combining micro-conversions and goals that drive towards the core business vision and objectives.
Keeping it simple with three common overarching business objectives.
- Brand awareness
In B2C, brand awareness is often the first step in building a loyal customer base, as well as the opportunity to share what the core of your business is about – its purpose, its mission).Channels that enable content and messaging to hold high engagement whereby customers can watch, comment, save and share are ideal. Video content is noted as the preferred choice for consuming messaging so use this format to tell your brand’s story.
- Lead or revenue generation
As consumers learn more about your proposition and offering, strengthen their engagement with it, and show strong intent signals, it’s critical that you’re present and clear with your products or services.Prospective customers won’t necessarily convert in a one-step behaviour, so smart and value-adding retargeting strategies are fundamental to your success, reporting to bring an additional 40% revenue.
- Customer retention
As we all know, it’s a lot more efficient to retain customers and grow their loyalty to your business, than it is to constantly need to acquire new ones.Your CRM capabilities here are critical and can often be over-looked by acquisition strategy and technology capabilities. This is your 1st party data and is not only incredibly valuable to your business, it can be very powerful!
Make sure you’re leveraging automation, personalisation, and loyalty techniques to sustain engagement between leads or sales, and build a strong relationship with your customers that critically adds value for them.
Data-Driven Resource Optimisation
Resource, what!?
Strategies that are integrated and genuinely connected throughout your business reduce wasted spend, time and efforts by identifying high return and performing channels.
A UK study found companies using cross-departmental data improved campaign ROI by 22%.
I see this as one of the most common pitfalls that siloed businesses fall into. Each department has its own KPIs, targets and objectives, but nothing is knitting it all together to enhance the broad business performance; it’s all running individually.
Two simple example tactics to start with include:
- Gaining a unified view of your business’ insights and analytics, tracking metrics such as customer lifetime view (CLV), and metrics such as cost per acquisition/retention include the full business cost and not only a marketing cost.
- Consider budget flexibility to enable reallocation to shift spend from underperforming areas to emerging channels, markets and trends. Get agile!
Consistent Brand Experience
Customers want consistency. Disjointed messaging erodes trust. You’ve just spent all that time, effort and potentially budget in creating a strong brand story that resonates well with your customers.
Then inconsistencies emerge, whether that’s in message, offering or even experience, and all the previous effort is eroded, even if it’s a loyal customer – 67% of UK consumers cite inconsistent branding as a reason to switch providers.
Starbucks’ UK success stems from seamless integration of in-store experiences, app personalisation, and sustainability storytelling. A true multiple-channel, multi-platform customer experience that’s personalised and connected to the customer’s convenience.
Additionally, brands with a consistent message and experience see a 23% increase in their overall customer retention value.
Cross Department Collaboration
Breaking down the silos within. business… Every business has them. Whether they stem from the way in which the business supports its operations, whether from a specific culture, or whether it is simply from a lack of awareness that they exist.
Removing as much silo from your business unlocks insights for everyone to discover. That’s right, they’ve been there all along, but with each lane running its own race, they have truly been discovered and unleashed.
For example, UK retailer ASOS credits its 18% revenue growth to integrating customer service feedback into social media ads. Two departments that customers will see as one point of contact, and by blending and collaborating across the two, the business can grow.
My top tips would be:
- Shared KPIs across department to aid a collaborative approach to reaching the goal. Align marketing, sales, and product teams on metrics like conversion rates, as each department has its own part to play in the success.
- Implement collaborative tools for full transparency and visibility of work going on across the full business that supports specific objectives. Use platforms like 365 & Teams, Monday.com or Trello for real-time updates and sharing, and avoid housing different elements in different tools.
By embracing the five key factors in this blog, your business can ensure it is leveraging a truly integrated approach when it comes to its marketing strategy.
Businesses can cut through market noise, allocate resources strategically, and build enduring valuable customer relationships, while creating brand awareness and expanding their business to new audiences and/or markets in a collaboration way.
In a time where 64% of UK consumers engage with 3 or more channels or platforms before making a commitment to buy, sign-up or book, integration isn’t optional—it’s the key to sustainable growth for your business into the future.
Ready to integrate your business into your marketing strategy?
Contact me today for a free consultation to discuss your business goals and explore how working with me to build your strategy can help you achieve your future success.
Let’s go on the adventure together…