What You Need to Know About Integrated Media Planning

Having an integrated media plan is important for your marketing strategy. An integrated marketing plan will combine multiple channels such as content, email, display advertising and social media in order to promote a cohesive message to an audience. Although an integrated campaign sounds expensive for a small business, it is a powerful marketing strategy that can help businesses of any size generate more traffic, engagement, and sales.

What is Integrated Media Planning?

Integrated media planning is a combination of media formats and channels that a brand would use to share information with audiences. This means that a campaign would include print, broadcast, digital and point-of-sale in many of their forms. a powerful marketing strategy that can help businesses of any size generate more traffic, engagement, and saleThe marketer’s aim is to make the brand ubiquitous for a period of time so that all possible members of the target audience can be reached in some way. Integrated marketing focuses on consistent messaging across platforms as opposed to multichannel or omnichannel marketing which target different segments on different marketing channels.Integrated marketing involves one or a combination of three types of media:

1. Paid (including direct marketing, scheduled broadcast ads, physical advertising, and internet advertising)
2. Owned (such as on-site UX, customer service, social media, and direct messaging through smart phones and email)
3. Earned (traffic derived by content marketing, organic search, influencer, and public relations)

Each industry is different so it should be mentioned that integrated campaigns may also include a sales strategy. An integrated campaign could include both above- and below-the-line elements. Below-the-line advertising is a strategy where brands are promoted in ways that do not include mainstream media advertising. Below-the-line (BTL) advertising campaigns could include direct mail, trade shows, catalogs, and SEO.BTL could also involve product demonstrations and samplings. For some markets, BTL marketing with direct consumer outreach works best. If budget is an issue and the brand desires a guaranteed consumer connection, BTL often has better return on investment.Incidentally, some marketers consider ATL and BTL outdated terminologies as digital media has almost broken these boundaries by addressing both simultaneously.

Benefits of Integrated Media

Adopting an integrated media strategy will improve your efficiency by providing a streamlined process. The company’s cohesive message is carried across various channels without being repetitive. This benefit is not just for consumers; it also benefits internal communications by ensuring the same tone of voice, style, and content of your message throughout various departments of the company.Naturally, the most obvious benefit of an integrated campaign is that it allows your company access to a larger audience and therefore widens your reach. The probability of reaching your target audience and attracting consumers to your brand is much higher.Although an integrated or omnichannel campaign sounds expensive, it actually an save money and time by removing the need for replication of content. Your campaign will have common elements across all platforms and media such as visuals like photos and design work.An integrated media plan helps to build consumer trust. It encourages brand recall by using consistent messaging which is integrated across several channels. Consumers will resonate with a brand when it hits the intended target audience with consistent messaging across various channels. A disjointed brand message will not resonate.Your company’s branding must be the same across all channels, all the way from your social media voice to your website backstory, and your offline brochures. Your communications need to support the same image. So, while you can create bespoke campaigns for different audiences and products, everything must link back to what makes the brand unique. Integrated marketing is difficult to get right every time. All the big brands try it, but not all succeed. Even billion-dollar corporations make mistakes. When websites and social media channels do not match in terms of messaging, it creates an incohesive message that is confusing for the consumer and can be damaging to the brand. Integrated media planning means hitting the right balance between tailored content for different platforms and a cohesive and recognisable look and feel across them all.

Constructing an Integrated Media Plan

An integrated media plan is based on buyer personas, competitor analyses, reviews, and social listening. By paying attention to all these inputs, the planner can determine the best course of action to reach the marketing and business goals. The planner must ask “Who is the target audience?” and “What medium will best reach this audience?“. For example, when targeting millennials, Instagram and Twitter will be your go-to social media platforms for your media plan. When trying to reach Generation X, you might try radio and Facebook. A thorough analysis of the platform or medium’s targeted demographics is necessary.Having a comprehensive understanding of your target market means knowing what is important to them, what their life is like, and what their problems are. You need to know who you want as a customer so that you can deliver personalized content.This does not mean that you have to confine your marketing to a specific audience, it really means that you are tailoring it to each audience. Advertising or marketing content may be tweaked for each platform or target audience for maximum engagement.The strategy involves integrating the different promotional tools, strategies, and materials that your media planner already uses, so that they are synthesized as a “branding suite”, instead of a loose collection of ideas. When your company marketing elements work together harmoniously, it is better for the company, and your customers.Using integrated media planning, potential and existing customers can encounter your brand through social media like a YouTube video, an Instagram post, a blog, etc. Each one will address a different aspect of what your brand is about, thereby increasing the chances that it will resonate with a viewer. Any company can improve their marketing by using integrated media planning.Today’s media planner needs practical marketing strategy tools which are supported by expert theory and real-life case studies to ensure their marketing success. With a well-planned and executed integrated marketing communications approach, you can aim to build your business into a house-hold name.An experienced digital marketing team will know what people search for, how to track search engine rankings, how to be top of Google rankings, which site factors need tweaking and what are the main factors that determine ad quality. What are you waiting for? Get in touch with KEY27 Marketing for help with these Google ranking factors and so much more!