CEOs and other executives are charged with asking themselves, ”How do we define success for our business?” Depending on company goals, success metrics may differ. Where one company may aim to generate a specific amount in revenue, another may be laser-focused on growing the organization internally.
All businesses should pay attention to how they’re perceived by the public. A company’s public communications and actions shape brand perception and influence how target audiences—consumers, potential employees, investors, and more—engage with your brand. More than any other business function, integrated marketing efforts paint a picture of your business in every situation.
When you get your brand communications right, you create a valuable engine to generate success for just about any business goal. Read on to gain insight into a few ways businesses can make the most of integrated marketing to support a variety of success goals.
Promote Brand Values
Brand values are guiding principles that influence your organizational actions and develop your personality as a business. They’re the “why” behind every decision the company makes and what drives brand success. If you don’t make the effort to embody and publicly promote your brand values, you leave a ton of brand equity on the table—a whopping 82% of shoppers want a brand’s values to align with their own, according to a 1,000-person Harris Poll survey commissioned by Google Cloud.
Marketing teams hold an important role in effectively communicating brand values. They’re built of strategists and writers who are experts in weaving stories into your public campaigns that illustrate your brand values, making them front and center on your website and other communications, and using them to influence your social media posts and direct communications with customers. Integrated marketing teams—or those who leverage marketing PR, sales and advertising—are masters of establishing exactly why you’re different from competitors and better relate to your target audience across all areas of brand communication. Done effectively, promoting brand values ultimately helps to generate increased sales, drive employment interest and better engage current internal stakeholders.
Manage Your Reputation
If you’re running a business, you will likely run into your fair share of dissatisfied customers and uncomfortable situations. How you handle these roadblocks can break or build public trust. This is pivotal because more than 80% of consumers consider trust a deciding factor in their buying decisions. Consistently using the PR arm of your integrated marketing team for reputation management can help your business gain and maintain this all-important trust.
Reputation management with PR should be both proactive and reactive. While many companies activate their PR strategy only when a crisis occurs (or, when they’re reacting to something), you should always be proactively telling your brand story through press releases and nurturing media relationships with outreach for coverage. PR gives you the power to share and keep brand promises and maintain transparency in your business transactions. Consistent, proactive reputation management leads to increased consumer trust and helps to soften the landing in the event of crisis arising.
Strengthen Community Engagement
Another crucial function of integrated marketing is building community relationships and establishing your business’s position as a local contributor.
Businesses should activate community engagement by reaching out to other organizations to establish relationships, participating in local events, and generating press about any volunteer or community work they participate in. These activities can lend to a strong local presence and a brand narrative within the community that your business contributes to local wellness and growth. They also signal simpatico and increase brand affinity with larger and non-local audiences who similarly value investing in the wellbeing of your own backyard—such as an investor who is looking for a community-oriented brand to add to a portfolio.
Cross-apply Your Marketing Material and Efforts
An active online presence is a necessity for modern businesses of all sizes. Distributing integrated marketing material across digital channels allows you to amplify your brand message and create an echo chamber (the good kind) to keep your business top of mind with target audiences.
When your business generates integrated marketing activity—such as distributes a press release, earns coverage in a magazine or online publication, publishes a thought leadership byline or records a podcast interview—make sure you’re sharing it on social media, your website, in email newsletters, at key points in the customer journey, on internal communications channels and wherever else you connect with stakeholders.
Placing your marketing material into all channels of communications that envelop your brand builds an echo chamber around it that reverberates your brand story—a prospect who sees you shared a company blog in a social media post may visit the website to read it and increase their awareness of the benefit of your products or services, allowing you an opportunity to sell to that potential customer then or retarget them with ads after leaving your website. That same customer may receive outreach from a sales rep in the next few days who shares the same blog to nudge them in their customer journey, which reminds them of seeing it earlier in the week and prompts the prospect to reconnect with the sales rep.
Successful businesses aren’t faceless entities in charge of empty financial transactions—they’re trusted resources who help individuals find essential solutions to life’s myriad challenges. Strategically leveraging your integrated marketing team and resources has great power to establish your reliability and utility for all stakeholders, driving long-term success along the way.
