Although often overused as a term, there can be no denying that integrated marketing campaigns are established as the best way to engage with the high street consumer. Multi channel, multi-discipline campaigns ensure that you deliver your message in the most relevant, timely way to each individual customer, and this philosophy is equally relevant when it comes to marketing to businesses.
Employing an uncoordinated multi-channel campaign will achieve a limited response at best and is more likely to damage the brand than generate any positive response and long lasting goodwill. Indeed, integration is the next challenge for all B2B marketers. following the steps below will help you to understand what needs to be done in order to offer truly integrated campaigns.
Your website is your most powerful communications tool. Placing email at the heart of your contact strategy is one of the most effective ways of generating web traffic. Therefore the challenge is how to maximise response rates and proactively drive customers to your website.
B2B related marketing collateral tends to be less flashy and incentive driven than B2C, relying more on the relevance of the content to the recipient. It must however still create sufficient interest to encourage the recipient to follow the path to your web site where they can find out more.
Moreover, tailoring the message to the individual dramatically increases the interest to the recipient and significantly improves response rates. Feedback from web analytics is a great way of showing you which parts of your website generate the most interest. Having identified a prospect’s interests, you can then uniquely tailor future communication to promote further dialogue. Closing the loop in this way tightly links your email and web marketing, and improves the effectiveness of both.
Direct mail is still an important channel for generating initial interest despite the recent bad press and scare stories surrounding junk mail’. Following up direct mail with an email is a highly effective method of reinforcing your message and will enhance the return on investment from the direct mail with only the relatively small additional cost of the email.
Relevant direct mail pieces can have a long lifespan, staying on the recipient’s desk for future reference. With email, you have the opportunity to send a series of reminders, and should clearly reference the direct mail piece you are referring to. Use the same imagery and wording in the email as you used in the direct mail to make the association obvious, and make the same information easily accessible online. The same call to action should be available online and offline, giving customers the choice to use whichever channel they find most convenient.
Rarely is email used alone in B2B marketing, it’s used mainly to drive people to your web site. To get the best from your email, you should send reminders to peoples’ mobiles. After all, if what you have to say is worthy of an email, a gentle reminder is acceptable. With the capabilities of most mobiles, the restriction to 160 characters of text is less of a concern these days, but is still a point for consideration. Even with rich content, a mobile isn’t ideally suited to long messages and links, so leave these for email and use the mobile as a prompter, referring specifically to the email you sent and focusing on the benefit to be found from reading it.
In summary, any confusion you cause when communicating across different channels will be to your detriment, so focus on consistency and coordination, within one campaign and across different departments.
You won’t realise the full benefits if you simply replicate what has been successful across additional channels. You must tailor your message to each channel, and most importantly, consider how they interact with each other from the recipient’s point of view.
These are only some of the initial best practice guidelines, but they will provide you with a good foundation to build upon. Successful channel integration goes lot further, so as with all digital marketing, test and measure your strategies to identify what works best with your particular audience.
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