How Can A Integrated Digital Marketing and Social Media Plan Help Your Small Business

By Cate Palmer

The world has become increasingly connected by technology, requiring companies to develop marketing campaigns in multiple media channels. Consumers are constantly plugged into their mobile and PC technology, which has enabled companies to be wherever they are. Building and maintaining a profitable online social and digital platform has become crucial if you prefer to grow your business. This includes leveraging the social networks, creating content, launching blogs, making social media profiles, building communities around your brand, and the list goes on. If you’re a small business owner, and you’re not sure where to begin, we are here to help you find the right way when it comes to marketing your product or service.

What is integrated digital marketing?

Integrated digital marketing puts the spotlight on the importance of a consistent, seamless, multidimensional brand experience for the consumer. This means that each branding effort is presented in a similar style that reinforces the brand’s ultimate message.

Take Apple computer for an example. It’s a fairly simple strategy – showcase a modern product that has surpassed its competitors by design and functionality, all packaged in tiny, white, minimalistic boxes. By branding their products as elite, intuitive, and futuristic, Apple was able to charge prices above those of their competition and dominate the market.

Consistency does not mean lack of creativity, though. Integrated marketing doesn’t mean to only use a single palette for all marketing efforts and spam one tagline over and over again, so you need to keep balance. The focus of integrated digital marketing is reaching the largest number of customers in your target audience and streamlining your messages to them across all channels in a way that makes the most sense for them (through data measurement and analysis).

What does a social media plan do?

A social media marketing plan is the summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business using social networks. It should be comprised from audits on where you stand today, to your future goals, and tools you’ll use to reach that goal. If you want your social media marketing efforts to have the biggest impact, it’s super important that they’re aligned with your overall company goals and values.

Goals and objectives guide your social media strategy to help you successfully connect with your customers. Look closely at your company’s overall needs and decide how you want to use social media to contribute to reaching them.

If you’re not sure about the goals you’re supposed to reach, here are some examples that align with your marketing efforts:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Driving more traffic to your website
• Generating new leads
• Boosting brand engagement
• Building a community
• Growing revenue
• Increasing press mentions
• Social listening

How can I use both to my advantage?

It’s common knowledge that implementing a social media strategy requires knowledge of your customers. When you know your target audience’s age, occupation, income, interests, issues, obstacles, habits, and goals, then it’s easier and cheaper to target them on social or any other media. The more specific you are, the more conversions you’re going to get out of every channel you use to promote your business.

The second step to having a successful strategy is to know your competition. You can do research by yourself and get to know your competitors in the market by searching for social networks they’re using and gathering information about their content strategy. The most important activity to look at is engagement. Even though page admins are the only ones who can calculate engagement rate on a particular update, you can get a good idea of what they’re seeing.

Many businesses create accounts on every popular social network without researching which platform will bring the most return. You can avoid wasting your time in the wrong place by using the information from your buyer personas to determine which platform is best for you.

As for integrated digital marketing – you can create wonders for your online presence. People usually make use of online channels to research about brands, products, and services. According to Harvard Business, they would go through an average of 6 touch points or channels before they make a purchasing decision. That means that your business has to have a presence in multiple channels in order to connect and engage with your targeted customers.

Consumers also constantly look for fresh and new content. With an infinite amount of information available each day, your customers need to get answers and solutions that are reliable and established. By providing new content, not only do you give your marketing campaign more chance of connecting with potential customers, you’re also building a better rank for your website and brand.

There are many ways in which you can induce more traffic to your website, but there’s nothing better than original, helpful and informative content. Research showed that as much as 80% of online traffic comes from natural search engine and other organic means. According to GWM SEO experts, that’s because original content is valued more by Google and other search engines.

An integrated digital marketing campaign can help you increase the possibilities of all applicable channels, which means that better and bigger results that you couldn’t possibly get from a single channel will be delivered.

Marketing your business nowadays can seem hard and like a daunting task, but if planned correctly, you can also create a perfect strategy for your small business. Here are some last tips that can kick you into gear:

• Align your social media goals to your company goals
• Break each goal into detailed tactics
• Prioritize your plan
• Assign tasks and set a time goal
• Be on the lookout the whole way through and adapt

  Back to Small Business blogs