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Far beyond the realities of January 2010, here at the beginning of the 2020s, technology traverses all aspects of external communications and outreach. Today’s capabilities are advanced and sophisticated, making traditional domains of media relations, brand storytelling, prospecting and lead generation far more complex than with past methods and practices. The new rules compel a strategic, integrated approach that ensures consistency and demonstrates industry leadership.
The unprecedented rate of industry change we’ve become accustomed to throughout the 2010s will only continue, and perhaps even accelerate, in the ’20s. Over the next few months, I’ll be offering a series of articles exploring some practical but often overlooked questions of what marketing leaders must pursue to build a successful and manageable plan for this disruptive environment. Let’s start with some foundational ideas.
Assess Your Approach To Integration
An integrated marketing approach blends facets of marketing communications for consistency of message and user experience. This cohesion can boost the ROI of your marketing initiatives, a critical measure that can no longer be ignored.
Begin by assessing your current ecosystem of assets. Knowing exactly what you have will reveal what you still need. How well are these assets working together? Do you have metrics or market feedback to assess their efficacy? If not, you’ll need some to correctly target your efforts and spend.
Next, focus on solidifying the right teams and workflow for executing an integrated strategy: content, creative design, social media, digital marketing and PR. Before embarking on any initiative, start with SEO tools that can analyze the best keywords to frame your message. Tools like SEMrush can give insight into what’s relevant now and suggest interesting topics and innovative ways to manipulate keyword bundles. They may even reveal what your competitors are writing — or not writing — about.
When you have some topics identified, start the workflow. In an integrated flow, no one team is ever holding the ball all by itself. Let’s take a simple example of publishing a thought leadership piece to promote your business.
• The content team reviews the topical suggestions, selects what is most relevant and produces a first draft of the asset. They verify content accuracy with the resident SME, who may suggest edits.
• It’s then handed off to the creative design team to make an associated eye-catching visual. In tandem, the digital marketing team runs the copy back through the SEO tool and sends feedback to the content team for more refinements that will optimize the asset for search.
• Meanwhile, public relations staff are crafting the strategy for generating media attention. And the social media experts prepare to amplify exposure.
• Shortly after publication, digital marketing runs analytics to see how the asset is performing. The content team may need to make more refinements to tune the piece for more effective search placement.
• This cycle repeats for a reasonable period of expected market attention, perhaps four to six weeks. When the next asset is published, this first one goes static but remains online for potential future interest.
The nuance in this process is applying human expertise to capitalize on the feedback and insights the digital tools deliver. For instance, a tool may assess the asset’s readability score in a way that’s not necessarily appropriate for your target audience, so the content team needs to make the call. Or, analytics from various platforms like SEMrush, Hootsuite and Google Analytics don’t always line up, so a digital expert needs to make an informed judgment.
With broad digital capabilities and expert practitioners working together, new prospects can be tracked from earliest engagement through the sales funnel to direct revenue attribution, quantifying successes (and failures) of various channels and tactics while guiding future marketing investments.
Of course, getting to this “well-oiled machine” state still requires fundamentals like consistent, corporate-approved brand standards and messaging. It also requires centralized oversight to keep efforts across the company in check.
Analyze The Right Big Data To Inform Your Strategy
Big data is now the critical underpinning of successfully integrated marketing decision-making, yet it remains perhaps the least understood of currently available tools.
The power of big data analytics lies in the informed design, collection, storage and analysis of disparate datasets across multichannel initiatives. Done well, it provides marketers with unprecedented insights to inform their efforts.
The challenge is that big data is, well, big! Large amounts of data can yield all sorts of insights, but which of them are truly valuable to you? It’s important to be clear about your specific goal when you undertake analysis, or you’ll get buried in the minutiae.
For instance, suppose you want to target a message to technical executives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You set a goal of 70 clicks on a particular post. Three days after publishing, you see you got 200 clicks. But look closer, and only five were in your target market. The other 195 were in places you’re not targeting. This tells you that something in your post needs to change, and you must run it again.
Make such analyses part of your marcom planning process. Think through how you’ll measure your initiative waypoints. How will you know which particular initiatives are working or not working? How will you distill all the data you collect down to the two or three data points you actually need? Big data can be very cumbersome, so it’s critical to understand your goal and work with skilled experts who can help you extract it.
Of course, all of this takes teamwork. Balance and blend your resources. Whether your business chooses one vendor or a dozen for external marketing services, an integrated plan driven by the marketing team will keep everyone aligned to the same goals and messages that make your business shine.
In my next piece, we’ll look at some specific channels to incorporate into a successful integrated marcom program.
