What Is Integrated Marketing? Strategies and Examples – Shopify

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There are more ways than ever to reach your target audience, but simply launching campaigns across multiple marketing channels isn’t enough to resonate with buyers. That approach can actually end up wasting your valuable time—not to mention your marketing budget.

Instead, businesses can benefit from a user-centric approach known as integrated marketing. With this type of marketing strategy, you customize your marketing efforts toward the needs of your customers at each stage in their customer journey. An integrated marketing approach is not only about prioritizing unified messaging across all your channels; it’s about prioritizing the cultivation of ongoing relationships with your customers by speaking directly to their goals—not your own.

Keep reading to get a better understanding of this customer-centric marketing strategy, including tips for how to create your own integrated marketing campaign.

What is integrated marketing?

Integrated marketing is a strategy to align brand messages at all customer touchpoints. Formally known as integrated marketing communications (IMC), this marketing strategy prioritizes an external focus on customer needs, not an internal focus on sales goals.

The core principles of integrated marketing are:

• Communicate with your customer based on their needs and interests, not your sales goals.

• Use your brand communications to build a relationship with your customer.

The concept of integrated marketing predates the commercial internet. Its original definition is most commonly attributed to Don E. Schultz, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University in the late 1980s:

“(a) IMC is about starting with the needs and interests of the customers or audiences for the communication, not with the goals/objectives of the seller for his or her product/service, and, (b) the communication focus was to be on sharing created value and building relationships.”

Today, the wealth of customer data available allows you to take an integrated marketing strategy a step further: You can now tailor your messaging to an individual customer’s needs and pain points as they go through the marketing funnel. By using both first-party data and third-party data—which reveal customer insights like demographics, displayed intent, and behavior online—you can deliver relevant and resonant messaging to every individual customer as they move down your funnel.

Example of integrated marketing

Let’s say you sell pool toys. With a different marketing approach, you might buy ad space from a publisher next to “swimming pool” content. But if the articles in that publisher’s editorial cycle happen to be all about building a new pool, your pool toy ad is bound to have a low click-through rate. After all, if someone hasn’t decided whether or not to build a pool, they probably aren’t looking to buy pool toys.

With an integrated marketing strategy, here’s how your pool toy business could approach advertising: Instead of simply serving ads next to a relevant keyword, you could work with the publisher to segment readers who read multiple pool-related articles. You could then serve those users pool toy ads three months after they engaged with the pool-building content—a time where they are more likely to be interested in pool toys. Instead of focusing on the keyword “swimming pool,” you can serve ads to those users wherever they read about water recreation or summer activities.

Integrated marketing vs. multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing is a marketing mix approach that uses multiple marketing channels—think: website, social media, email, live activations—in your marketing strategy. Integrated marketing means you unify your message across those marketing channels.

When you use integrated marketing as an overall strategic approach, each marketing channel specialist can use the particular strength of their channel to tailor your brand’s core messaging to its best and most poignant use.

Essentially: Multichannel marketing is not inherently integrated marketing, but it is common for integrated marketing to also be multichannel marketing.

Integrated marketing vs. omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is a surround-the-prospect approach to marketing in which you attempt to reach a prospective customer at every marketing channel they use during their journey. Tactically, it involves higher-level marketing technology like ad servers and programmatic advertising trade desks because you target the same IP address everywhere.

But omnichannel marketing doesn’t necessarily mean your messaging is consistent at every touch point. It also doesn’t necessarily mean you use customer data to personalize the message for each customer.

Integrated marketing is an umbrella communication philosophy you can apply to an omnichannel approach, in which your messaging is consistent across touchpoints, always buyer-centric, and (in today’s world) personalized. Think of it as an extra layer of intentionality that can make your marketing campaigns more effective and efficient.

How an integrated marketing strategy benefits your bottom line

There are two main ways successful integrated marketing campaigns can increase your bottom line: by improving conversion rates and increasing brand loyalty.

Here’s how integrated marketing benefits those key goals:

Improved conversion rates

Relevance and resonance with the buyer are the most significant factors driving high conversion rates. Because integrated marketing focuses on delivering ads that are both relevant and resonant, it tends to outperform other approaches.

To return to our previous example: It’s easy to imagine that an ad for pool toys that appears next to all pool-related content would have a lower conversion rate than that same ad served only to users who are serious about building a pool. 

Increased brand loyalty

When a brand consistently proves itself to be relevant to its customers, they gradually develop the belief that “this company gets me.” When this happens, brand loyalty skyrockets. Loyalty is crucial to your bottom line: According to a 2023 report from Smile.io, the top 5% of customers are responsible for 35% of an ecommerce store’s revenue.

How to create an integrated marketing campaign

1. Start with the voice of the customer
2. Create a customer journey map
3. Conduct keyword research
4. Determine what information the customer needs
5. Adapt messaging for different marketing channels
6. Measure campaign performance

Here’s how to embed integrated marketing into any campaign, regardless of your marketing budget:

1. Start with the voice of the customer

Any integrated marketing campaign should start with understanding the customer’s different use cases and language, not yours. The way to do this is with the voice of the customer (VoC).

VoC is a type of customer research that involves conducting surveys, focus group polls, or social listening to better understand customers’ needs. With VoC data in hand, you can craft integrated marketing campaigns that speak directly to your customers, using their exact words.

2. Create a customer journey map

Based on the target audience research you’ve done, determine the appropriate messaging for each stage of the marketing funnel using a customer journey map. For each stage of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, and conversion), you’ll use your research to answer the following questions:

• What is the customer asking?

• How is the customer asking?

• What does the customer need?

• What content can we create to meet the customer’s needs?

The answers to the first question—what is the customer asking—should come directly from VoC data. To answer how the customer is asking, you’ll match customer questions to the words and phrases they might use when searching for answers to their questions online.

3. Conduct keyword research 

Keyword research involves identifying the terms customers use to find answers to their questions. For example, a customer who wants to know “How do I take care of my lawn myself?” might search for “DIY lawn care” or “lawn care tips” in a search engine or on social media platforms.

Many marketing campaigns involve keyword research. The difference with integrated marketing campaigns is that keywords are secondary to real customers’ actual questions.

Instead of looking for the highest-volume keywords associated with your product and then purchasing Google Ads or creating SEO content marketing associated with those keywords, you’ll start with the customer’s question and then determine the keywords they might use to find answers. This method leads to more relevant marketing campaigns, since all keywords come directly from customer insights.

4. Determine what information the customer needs

This step involves looking at the answers to the first question in the customer journey map (What is the customer asking?) to determine what answers would help the customer move to the next stage of the funnel.

For example, if you run a lawn-care service, what would move the customer who wants to learn how to take care of their lawn from the awareness phase to the consideration phase? Maybe they’d appreciate an overview of different lawn-care options that weighs the pros and cons of DIY lawn care versus hiring someone to care for your lawn.

5. Adapt messaging for different marketing channels

Now that you know what information your customer needs to move down the funnel, how can you best use different marketing channels to convey this information?

For example, one way to answer the question “How do I care for my lawn?” is to create a quiz on your landing page that helps users determine whether they should take care of their own lawn or hire someone else to do it. You might include questions about the size of their lawn, their budget, and the climate where they live to deliver a personalized result.

You can then run ads and social media posts (targeting the keywords you found in Step 3) that direct users to the quiz.

6. Measure campaign performance

The best way to measure the effectiveness of an integrated marketing campaign is informed awareness. You can track informed awareness by running a regular, statistically significant survey of non-conversions from your advertising efforts in the education phase via a poll.

The poll should be structured with three separate statements: one about your company, one about a competitor, and one about a company with a name similar to yours. The goal is to have the participant match one statement to your company’s name. Positive changes in the ability of your targeted audience who never converted but can match you with your message will lead to sales gains over time.

Another way to measure campaign performance is by tracking actions that signal a potential buyer has moved from one stage of the customer journey to the next. For example, an email opt-in suggests a move from the awareness stage to the consideration stage: a potential customer has enough interest in your brand they want to receive more information.

Tracking the percentage of users who move between stages helps you identify opportunities. For example, if a high percentage of users opt in to email but do not convert, you might add testimonials to your marketing emails. This could encourage email subscribers to move to the next phase of the customer journey and actually buy your product.

Example integrated marketing campaign

The customer journey map is the cornerstone of integrated marketing. It provides a simple, visual framework for linking your customers’ needs at each stage in their journey to your marketing efforts.

Below, you’ll find an example customer journey map for a fictional lawn-care service, broken down into different phases:

• Awareness/education phase

• Consideration/information phase

• Confirmation/conversion phase

Each phase in this example customer journey map includes:

• Questions from real customers

• Relevant keywords customers might use to search for answers

• Information that can help customers move to the next stage of the funnel

• Content and marketing channels that can convey that message

Use this example customer journey map as a jumping-off point for developing your own integrated marketing campaign.

Alt text=Customer journey map table: lawn-care service with education, information, and confirmation phases.