For growth minded businesses, success comes down to two critical components: keeping your current customers happy and satisfied and finding new customers to delight.
But with shrinking budgets and a growing list of priorities, business leaders might be asking themselves: what is the right marketing strategy to ensure my business is visible and attractive to the right customers? And, where should I concentrate my marketing efforts to achieve results?
While it may be tempting to cherry pick marketing tactics to save money, employing an integrated communications strategy is the best investment to ensure brand consistency across all channels.
Doing so aligns communications with business objectives and leverages all the tools in the communications toolbox, helping businesses match the message to the medium.
BREAK DOWN SILOS
Not that long ago, PR and marketing often worked in silos, sometimes at odds with each other and, on occasion, running counter to messaging and strategies from other parts of the organization. Channels were limited and communication was one-way.
Today, however, customers have more control, higher expectations and enjoy direct access with the companies they do business with.
In this growing digital ecosystem, communication needs to be a team sport, operating in silos is risky business. Your customer’s relationship with you matters…a lot, and how they communicate with you matters even more.
Brands need to deliver consistent and cohesive messages across both digital and traditional channels to engage all of their target audiences, meet them where they are, build and sustain trust and provide access to positive brand experiences all along the way.
BETTER TOGETHER
With integrated communications, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. By interconnecting the various marketing channels and strategies—everything from PR, marketing automation, events, social media, direct mail, advertising—your customers can benefit from a unified and seamless experience regardless of where and how they’re engaging with your brand.
This approach enables marketing teams to maximize every piece of content created across all channels. Whether owned, earned, paid or shared, the medium is the message. That is to say, your messaging is important, but how it’s being distributed has a significant impact on the effectiveness of your message to elicit action.
CONTENT CREATION IS ONE THING. DISTRIBUTING IT IS ANOTHER.
No matter how helpful or emotive your content is, or how much of it you create, it’s useless if no one sees it. Therefore, developing a distribution strategy is equally as important as the content strategy itself.
Knowing that content must be tailored to specific audiences and personas, the distribution strategy will ensure that each piece of content is targeted to, and is being seen by, the audience it’s suited for.
And just as important is knowing that not every distribution channel is right for your business or the specific piece of content you’re promoting. To a certain degree, the format (e.g., video, white paper, podcast, etc.) dictates the strategy.
Being intimately familiar each platform, its audience, the formats in which they consume information and the ways in which they do it will help maximize your content stream, drive brand awareness, generate leads and build brand trust and equity.
Are you ready to activate your content through a robust distribution strategy? Try working through it with your team and see how it goes. If you need a little help or just a sounding board for some of your ideas, feel free to give the team at //NKST a shout.
Or, if you need help getting started, we should talk...