An integrated marketing plan is like delicious gumbo.
Recipe hint:
Your brand strategy is the roux and Ingredient #1.
An ideal integrated marketing plan is like cooking the world’s most delicious gumbo for your customers. The deliciousness of your recipe is analogous to the effectiveness of your plan. When the gumbo is indescribably delectable and has people coming back for more, it means that your marketing plan is getting your brand noticed, boosting your reputation, generating lots of leads and growing your sales.
An integrated marketing plan is a recipe for marketing success. But to get the recipe right, you need eight essential ingredients. You can vary the recipe by modifying the ingredients, but if you leave too many out, your gumbo won’t be very good—and your marketing won’t be as effective. Or it might even suck and sit on the table without any takers, which means your plan isn’t generating any results. So you need to develop a core recipe, and also learn how to modify it to your customers’ tastes along the way.
The secret to great gumbo is the roux, the base ingredient and foundation for the entire dish. Your brand strategy is the roux and Ingredient #1. It will either make people insatiable for your gumbo or result in a cold, untouched pot on the table. Your brand strategy is the essential ingredient that supports and guides the messaging of ingredients #2 through #7 in your plan’s recipe. This ensures brand consistency, which strengthens your brand, and in turn, continuously improves every aspect of your integrated marketing plan over the long haul. To learn about brand strategy, we recommend downloading our eBook, The 7 Essential Elements of Brand Strategy.
These are the eight essential ingredients for an integrated marketing plan:
Brand Strategy / Messaging
Owned Media / Website / Content
Lead Generation / Direct Response
Earned Media / PR / Social
Paid Media / Advertising / SEM
Events / Trade Shows / Webinars
Account Based Marketing
Goals & Metrics / Measurement
Sounds complicated, right? But if you have a knowledgeable marketing agency to guide you, it’s actually fairly easy to build the basic recipe of your integrated marketing plan. There are standard principles that apply across nearly every type of marketing challenge, and creo marketing knows what those are and how to build a plan customized for a particular business, the competitive marketplace conditions and the company’s specific target audiences.
Many clients ask “Why must we do all of these things? Can’t we simplify our marketing by just focusing on one ingredient, like choosing advertising OR trade shows OR public relations? It seems like a lot of work to do everything!”
The hard truth is that you must be committed to using all of the ingredients that are applicable to your target audiences if you want a highly effective lead-generating integrated marketing program.
If you leave out one of the ingredients, your results will suffer. If you leave out two or three, your marketing will be lackluster at best. Effective marketing requires time, effort and a financial investment. If your organization is low on staff or budget, we’ll help you figure how to do as much as possible with the resources you have.
There are exceptions because sometimes, one of the ingredients just isn’t relevant to your buyers, so it’s OK to drop it. For example, if you sell commoditized consumer goods like candy bars, lighters or pencils, these types of products typically don’t track customer accounts, so you’d drop Ingredient #7 Account Based Marketing. But any ingredient that can be used to reach your prospects and customers should be included in your integrated marketing plan if possible.
However, we also understand the reality that many start-up and small businesses can’t afford all of the ingredients yet. While we never recommend removing them, we know where to make short-term concessions. Your plan will be less effective and not quite as tasty, but will still generate reasonable results until you can afford all of the ingredients that can be utilized to reach your target audiences.
For example, If you’re cash-strapped, we often drop Ingredient #5 Paid Media because it is the most costly. Paid Media encompasses all forms of advertising. To be effective, advertising requires continual frequency and reach, and costs add up over time, so we wait and add this ingredient when your company can afford it.
Additionally, there are ‘sub ingredients’ we can remove while keeping the main ingredient. For example, we may remove trade show exhibits from Ingredient #6 Events because exhibit fees and travel costs can get expensive. However, we’ll still keep events that are more affordable, like company open houses or webinars.
Now that you’ve built your basic integrated marketing recipe, it’s time to modify it to suit your buyers’ tastes.
The eight essential ingredients are a great mix for most types of products and customers. However, your recipe needs to be modified depending on your customers’ tastes and where they look for information about your product or service. And if you serve different audiences with different types of products or services, then you’ll need to develop multiple variations of your core recipe. Here are two real-life recipe modification examples:
Recipe Modification for a consumer business: Liquor Store
One of our clients was a popular liquor store. Liquor is a universally purchased consumer product. Like soup or toothpaste, nearly everyone buys it periodically. Ingredient #5 Paid Media, which is basically advertising, is the best way to reach a broad base of consumers. However, Ingredient #6 Events is not as useful. Think about it: how many times have you attended a trade show or webinar to decide which liquor to buy? Additionally, Ingredient #3 Lead Generation is not as much of a necessity for this type of product. Therefore, in their integrated marketing plan, we bumped up the amount of Ingredient #5 Paid Media and reduced #3 Lead Generation and Ingredient #6 Events.
Recipe Modification for a business-to-business company: Start-up Software Firm
One of our clients was a project management software company. Their target audience was other B2B businesses that need to manage complex projects. Ingredient #2 Owned Media was very important because prospects needed content explaining how the product worked and its benefits over competitors. This required video demonstrations, podcasts, case studies, white papers, e-books and infographics. Additionally, Ingredient #3 Lead Generation via automated email is very important in selling this type of product. However, they were a start-up on a shoestring budget, so we initially removed Ingredient #5 Paid Media due to its high cost. Therefore, in their initial integrated marketing plan, we bumped up the amount of Ingredient #2 Owned Media and Ingredient #3 Lead Generation and reduced the amount of Ingredient #5 Paid Media until they could afford it.
The Two Ingredients that Can Never Be Compromised or Reduced
As we’ve stated, Ingredient #1 Brand Strategy is the foundational roux that makes or breaks your gumbo. No integrated marketing plan will be effective if you haven’t clarified your purpose, cultivated your brand and formalized your messaging and visuals into clear and succinct platform. The success of all other ingredients rests on your brand.
Second, Ingredient #8 Goals & Metrics must always be part of your recipe. If you have no goals or you’re not measuring results against them, how do you know if you’re plan is successful? And how will you continually refine it? This ingredient includes setting marketing objectives and KPIs, establishing campaign metrics, creating a marketing scorecard and conducting regular reviews of how well your integrated marketing plan is achieving its goals.
Keep Improving Your Recipes Year After Year
If you have multiple buyer personas, vastly different products or a variety of industry target markets, you’ll be managing several variations of your core recipe. If you’re using Ingredient #8 Goals effectively, then you’ll also be continually gathering and analyzing data to tell you where your recipes are weak (not so tasty) or strong (mouthwatering). If you have a good agency partner like creo, we’ll help you use your data to improve all of your recipes into pure deliciousness, which will compel more people to notice your brand, engage with your company and buy your products.
So, let’s get cooking! Tell us about your organization: Is your marketing based on an integrated plan? If not, which ingredients are missing? Or which ones do you rely on most heavily? We want to hear from you.
