5 Steps to Integrating Your Cross-Channel Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is in a constant state of transformation, driven by engaging content easily accessible by consumers on the medium of their choice. Organizations that can generate this kind of content will be able to earn a huge leg up on competitors who can’t keep up with an increasingly fragmented audience.

Currently, just 14% of marketers can say they’re able to effectively integrate campaigns across all channels. To succeed and integrate digital channel efforts, marketers now need to understand what channels–and what type of content–perform.

Preparing for Battle

As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it; “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” You can’t anticipate everything our fast-paced digital world can throw at your brand; but with the right preparation you can be strong and flexible enough to endure any challenge.

In order for brands to win on the digital battleground, they must understand:

what digital channels perform best for their audience
what types of digital content engage their consumers
what kind of content marketing staffing and integrated marketing recruitment are needed to execute

Content and Digital: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Since the days of traditional advertising, most marketing “plans” haven’t been focused on actual performance. Today, marketers now have the luxury (and duty) of planning integrated digital campaigns based on proven data. 69% of senior marketers are currently committing their digital marketing resources to website content, development and performance optimization.It’s vital that all marketing executives are planning with performance and optimization in mind.

Digital advertising is set to become the fastest-growing global advertising segment over the next five years, with projected compound annual increases to 2018 of 15.1%, compared to 5% for TV (including advertising, out-of-home advertising, and cinema).

In today’s digital and content marketing economy, everyone is a publisher and anyone can publish content in text, image, and video formats. Paid, owned and earned media channels have converged with over $135 billion invested in digital content creation last year.

Determining the Optimal Channels

While digital marketing campaigns, departments and functions overlap, many businesses are still not running well-integrated campaigns. This is because their integrated marketing recruitment has been weak or nonexistent, and their leaders plan their digital marketing campaigns without first understanding which channels perform and what drives the most ROI.

For instance, organic searches alone account for half of all traffic to business web sites. Marketers that don’t put understanding digital channel performance like this before planning will struggle to find their optimal marketing mix.

Effective digital marketers now work harder than ever to understand content and digital marketing performance as their imperative– they then use this intelligence to build efficient, integrated digital marketing campaigns around channels that have maximum business impact. Smart organizations are now investing in digital marketing executive searches for experts in cross-channel analytics and content marketing staffing that’s capable of producing media for whatever avenue is most lucrative.

5 Steps to Designing an Efficiently Integrated Marketing Campaign

About two-thirds of companies claim to prioritize cross-channel digital integration. But less than half (43%) say they understand their customers’ journey and responsively adjust their marketing mix accordinly. There’s clear interest in omnichannel marketing staffing and execution, but most organizations still haven’t figured out how to make it all work.

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu outlined five critical steps to build an effective integrated digital marketing campaign based on understanding channel impact, utilizing content as the fundamental unifier and key driver of insights, strategy and performance:

1: Identify the highest-converting channels

Before you build your integrated digital marketing plan, ensure that you understand what channels are driving performance and business impact. Utilize technology and cross-channel attribution modeling from your marketing analytics staffing to also help identify where, how and when different channels impact each other.

2: Learn what motivates your audience

Understanding your audience means converting your data into a digestible format. Leveraging both historical and real-time data allows digital marketers to map out in advance what types of digital content will perform best.

3: Plot your digital strategy

Build an integrated digital marketing plan that takes into account the creation, distribution, curation, amplification and syndication of content that will work across all your digital channels. The most successful cross-channel digital marketing campaigns deliver consistent, complimentary content and messages through a variety of channels and media, including:

Organic search and SEM
Email marketing
Display advertising
Social media
Videos
Events
Speaking engagements
Websites
Blogs
E-books
White papers

And of course, that content must all be designed and optimized for consumption on any device at any time.

It’s also important to integrate on and offline campaigns to maximize reach and impact across traditional PR, TV, radio and print channels. Incremental scale can be built when digital and traditional marketing work in synergy.

4: Restructure your digital marketing talent and make strategic hires

Adjust your integrated marketing recruitment strategy to ensure that your internal departments and digital talent are structured and “optimized” to work in unison. Conduct an integrated marketing executive search to find an innovative coordinator for your myriad channels. Acquire well-rounded digital marketers and sharply-targetted specialists as needed to fill any talent gaps.

5: Execute, measure, optimize, repeat

There has never been a better time for digital marketers to take advantage of technology, analytical integrations and data to help measure the value of digital marketing. Measuring content performance with digital analytics staffing is a key part of this process that allows your business to produce smarter content and justify future investment in content and digital marketing.

Article source: Marketing Land