Updated: November 21, 2024
Integrated marketing campaigns are an excellent way to engage with your B2B customers and drive sales. However, they can be cumbersome and complex to manage because they bring together multiple elements, each with its own requirements and potential points of friction. In this article, we’ll walk you through five steps to help you align all the moving parts and streamline campaign coordination so your efforts deliver the results you expect.
What is Integrated B2B Marketing?
An integrated B2B marketing campaign coordinates marketing efforts to deliver a cohesive brand message across different channels to reach and engage a target audience, driving brand awareness, generating leads and driving conversions.
Sounds a lot like omnichannel marketing, doesn’t it? Let’s take a quick look at the similarities and differences.
Integrated Marketing vs. Omnichannel Marketing
Integrated and omnichannel marketing both aim to provide a consistent experience across multiple channels. However, omnichannel marketing is a customer-centric approach that uses customer data to deliver a seamless and personalized shopping experience across all touchpoints, regardless of the channel. It follows customers across their buying journeys, adapting in real-time to their behaviors and preferences.
Integrated B2B marketing, on the other hand, is goal-focused and comprehensive, leveraging multiple channels and strategies to deliver a consistent brand experience across channels. Rather than focusing on individual customers, integrated campaigns prioritize consistency across channels. In B2B, integrated marketing is often used to build brand awareness and trust with multiple decision-makers over longer sales cycles. Personalization in integrated strategies typically involves tailoring content to specific segments, industries or roles rather than individual customer behaviors.
Creating a Winning Integrated B2B Marketing Strategy
Integrated marketing success requires a comprehensive strategy that aligns all your marketing activities and channels your business uses to achieve its objectives and maximize its returns. Your strategy should include the following:
- Cross-departmental collaboration – Integrated campaigns need input from your marketing, sales, product, customer support and IT teams, requiring that you align objectives, timelines and resources.
- Budget and resource allocation – You must balance your budgets and resources across all the different elements of an integrated campaign, including creative development, media buying and technologies.
- Technology integration – A lot of technology goes into creating and managing integrated campaigns, including CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, analytics tools and ad platforms, all of which must be integrated to enable data sharing, tracking and cohesive buyer journeys.
- Data management – Integrated campaigns require that your data is fit for use, which means it must be clean, accurate and complete. You must have a clear strategy for data management, governance and collection.
- Strong brand messaging – You need a strong brand positioning statement and messaging that clearly communicates the value you deliver to different audience segments, buyer personas and positions on the buyer journey. This will be the foundation of your cohesive messaging across all pieces of content.
- Content marketing – Integrated campaigns require a wide range of high-quality content in different formats tailored to different audience segments and channels. This may include blog posts, white papers, emails, videos, ads and social media assets.
- Content coordination – You must be prepared to strategically deploy a steady stream of content across multiple channels and timelines.
- Real-time performance tracking – You’ll need to monitor and analyze marketing metrics and data to measure the success of your integrated marketing strategy and accurately attribute conversions. This information allows you to quickly adjust messaging or reallocate resources for better results. It will also help you make informed decisions about future campaigns.
5 Steps to Creating B2B Integrated Marketing Campaigns That Inspire Action
Step 1 – Define Your Target Audience
Before you can connect with your target audience, you need to know who they are. What are their goals? Their pain points? What drives their decisions? This understanding will be the foundation of your messaging, helping you communicate with them in a way that resonates and motivates them to act.
To define your target audience:
- Conduct market research to identify the characteristics of your potential customers, including their demographics, firmographics, content and channel preferences (which often differ across segments). Use qualitative research, such as surveys, customer feedback and 1:1 interviews to understand their aspirations, barriers, challenges and decision-drivers.
- Segment your audiences into different groups based on their characteristics, including market segments, firmographics, job titles and position in the buying journey.
- Craft personas for each segment based on your research. This helps you tailor your messaging to reach and engage each group.
- Map the buyer journey for each persona from awareness to purchase and beyond. This helps you identify the touchpoints where you can engage each group and the types of content they need at each stage.
Step 2 – Determine Your Campaign Goals
This step requires collaboration across all teams to determine what you want to accomplish with your campaign. Is it to increase website traffic, generate leads or increase sales? By defining your campaign goals, you can ensure your campaign efforts contribute to overall business growth and strategy. Additionally, setting campaign goals gives the campaign direction and helps measure success.
Step 3 – Choose Your Channels
The channels you use for your campaign should align with your audience preferences and your goals. For example, in-depth articles may be an ideal way to drive SEO and educate users about complex topics, but if your audience prefers more snackable content such as infographics or videos, your company blog may not be the best channel. Likewise, if you’re considering YouTube to drive awareness with engaging content but your audience prefers shorter videos, Instagram Reels might be a better alternative.
Step 4 – Develop Your Content
If you don’t already have a brand positioning statement and brand messaging, use the insights from Step 1 to develop them. Then, with your positioning, messaging and campaign goals in place, begin crafting the content assets needed. This step involves creating assets in multiple formats to ensure effective deployment across channels, tailored for specific audience segments and aligned with your campaign timeline.
Step 5 – Execute, Monitor and Adjust
Once your content assets are ready, launch your campaign across the channels you selected. Execution is only the beginning; ongoing monitoring and adjustments will help you maintain momentum and improve your results.
- Set up tracking and analytics – Use analytics tools to monitor performance, track engagement rates and measure the impact on your goals. Ensure your key metrics are in place for each stage of the journey — these metrics will help you track how effectively each touchpoint moves your audience toward a conversion.
- Evaluate channel performance – Review which channels are most effective for each segment. For example, if LinkedIn generates high engagement but few conversions, consider whether you need to optimize the content type or just the CTA, or if you should be using LinkedIn for earlier stages of the buying journey.
- Optimize content – If certain messaging or formats resonate well, consider replicating those elements across other pieces of content, segments or channels. On the flip side, adjust content that isn’t resonating with your audience (per engagement insights).
- Adjust budget allocation – Shift your resources to high-performing channels. For example, if video ads drive more conversions than display ads, consider reallocating funds to increase your reach on a video platform such as YouTube.
Examples of B2B Integrated Marketing in Action
Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce campaign is an example of a successful integrated marketing campaign that ensures all efforts are aligned and reinforce each other.
Dreamforce is an annual event that showcases products while connecting customers, partners and employees with learning and networking opportunities. As a result of the campaign, the annual event has hundreds of thousands of attendees, strengthening Salesforce’s position as a leader in the CRM space.
Another excellent example is Canva’s What Will You Design Today campaign, which distributed content across online and offline channels, including television ads, billboards and audio channels as well as YouTube and other social media platforms. As Canva’s first global brand campaign, it achieved noteworthy reach and engagement, underscoring the effectiveness of integrated campaigns to connect with target audiences.
Simplify Your Integrated Marketing Efforts
Integrated marketing is a must for success in B2B digital marketing, but organizing all the moving parts can be a complex. Whether you’re just beginning your integrated marketing journey or looking to improve the results of ongoing efforts, we’re here to help.
With over 25 years of expertise in B2B integrated marketing, Elevation Marketing can help you navigate the complexities. Our tailored approach ensures your digital marketing efforts are driven by strategy and fueled by insights that enhance your success. Contact us to see how we can help you connect and engage your audiences to drive measurable results.
