The need for digital marketing in today’s digital world is undeniable; it allows you to connect with your audience in a personalised and measurable way – digital advertising is one of the easiest ways to get your message and brand in front of people. Many organisations tend to focus their energy on one digital advertising channel. However, relying on just one isn’t enough to influence behaviour to increase your visibility, engagement, or conversions.
Most people don’t search for product information on Facebook, or stumble upon a new brand or product they’ve never heard of on Google. Every channel serves a different purpose in your customer’s journey. By relying on a single channel, you’re likely missing out on enhanced brand visibility, engagement, web traffic and conversions. This is why a multi-channel (integrated) digital advertising strategy is crucial to your digital marketing success.
What is an integrated digital advertising strategy?
An integrated digital advertising strategy establishes the goals, tactics, channels, audience, key metrics, and a plan to reach your goals.
Understand your goals
Your goals could be to:
- Increase your reach: with more channels, you’re more likely to find your potential customers wherever they are.
- Promote brand consistency: by advertising on multiple channels, you can control your message better.
- Streamline the customer journey to gain quicker conversions: with a multi-channel campaign, you can guide your customer through the marketing funnel towards a desired action faster and more precisely.
- Improve competitiveness and market share: if your competitors are there, you also want to be there. You have even more of an upper hand if they aren’t there (and your target audience is).
In practice, your goals may:
- Drive traffic to your website
- Encourage on-platform engagement
- Collect lead/contact information for sales follow-ups
- Grow your email list
Consider your audience for digital advertising
Every digital advertising strategy needs to include an overview of the audiences you are trying to reach. You can group your audience and create profiles with details and characteristics. For example, let’s say you sell holiday accommodation, and you are looking to target millennials:
Typically, millennial couples:
- Are aged between 28 and 43 years
- Are frequent weekend travellers
- Browse for holiday destinations on their phone
- Look for accommodation for up to 2 people
- Prioritise local and regional foodie destinations: cafes, restaurants, bakeries and vineyards.
By creating specific audience profiles, you’ll focus your ad spend in the right areas. With the right key message and creative assets, your ads will be more relevant to your audience’s interests.
Track the success of your digital marketing through key metrics
Digital advertising is highly measurable, which is excellent when it comes to knowing which channel results in conversions. However, this makes it easy to get lost in the data. For this reason, it is important you set measurable objectives and track the relevant metric. By doing so, you track your performance, compare performance between channels and get insights into the effectiveness of your strategy.
It sounds obvious, but plan to succeed
Set up a plan that will keep you on track for success. Your plan should include:
- Monitoring your key metrics and revising and optimising your channels, ads and budgets based on performance.
- Regularly updating copy and creative assets to avoid creative fatigue.
- Learning about channel updates. Digital platforms regularly update their campaign and channel set up so it’s important to stay up to date.
Key channels in an integrated digital advertising strategy
Social media advertising
Platforms: Meta (Facebook and Instagram), LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat
Social media advertising is great for finding new audiences and boosting awareness of your brand, products, or services. Through visually appealing content, social media advertising can help you increase brand awareness or drive web traffic from users who may not know your brand.
If you have sufficient web traffic or a large customer database, Meta is a great channel for retargeting audiences with a specific message. This could help keep a customer engaged and lead to additional conversions.
Search engine marketing
Platforms: Google, Bing
Also known as pay-per-click, search engine marketing is key to capturing high-intent searches. This means your customer is purposefully looking for your specific brand or a service or product you offer. For this reason, search engine marketing campaigns can be set up to either boost awareness or drive conversions.
These channels also offer a combined cross-channel ad type (e.g. Performance Max) which includes placements on video, display, maps and email. Performance Max ads are an effective tool to place your brand across a variety of formats.
Display advertising
Platforms: Google Display Network, Digital Out-Of-Home
Display ads combine text, images and a URL that links to a website. The ads can be static, using just an image, or dynamic with multiple images, video or changing text. Most display advertising takes place on the Google Display Network, news sites and even apps. Display ads can help increase brand awareness and reach customers at every stage of the customer journey.
Digital Out-Of-Home advertising (DOOH) is another display advertising solution that involves showing ads on digital screens such as in shopping centres, gyms and airports. DOOH is great for reaching new audiences in specific locations. For example, if your business is launching a new retail product, you could advertise on the digital screens in front of a supermarket.
Back digital advertising with other marketing tactics
Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool
Email marketing is essential for nurturing leads and maintaining a relationship after their first purchase. Through engaging and personalised content, email marketing can drive conversions, increase customer retention, and encourage repeat purchases. If you aren’t sure where to start with email marketing, check out this article. If you’re ready to take the next step, see what more you can do with your email marketing.
How to set up your integrated digital advertising strategy
It is easy to make an integrated digital advertising strategy more complicated than it needs to be. The first rule of thumb is to be where your customers are.
Secondly, you want to make sure you know your marketing goals. If you need to find new audiences, then Google might be the wrong platform to invest your money in. Meta on the other hand is great at finding new audiences who could be interested in your brand.
Lastly, any digital marketing efforts require regular check-in and review. Whether you have a strategy in place already or need to set one up, make sure you incorporate a mix of digital marketing channels so you can achieve your business goals more efficiently.
If you need help setting up an integrated digital advertising strategy or it’s time for a review, don’t hesitate to reach out!