Marketing is a crucial part of any business strategy. However, you won’t sell your products effectively if you don’t pick the right marketing strategy. Integrated marketing vs Omnichannel marketing is the common comparison when it comes to marketing strategies, it can be pretty challenging to pick which is best for your business.
Fortunately, we’ll explain two of the best techniques available: Integrated Marketing vs Omnichannel Marketing. We’ll also discuss why you should choose one over the other.
The Importance of Marketing Strategy
Before we talk about Integrated Marketing vs Omnichannel Marketing, let’s first discuss why having a solid marketing strategy is essential for your business.
Your marketing strategy is critical since it helps future customers know about your brand and products. With a solid strategy, you’ll get to communicate with your market why they should pick you instead of your competitors.
A substantial marketing strategy also projects your message more consistently and attention-grabbingly. With many competitors who show similar products and services, generic advertisements get old and irrelevant too quickly.
Moreover, a good marketing strategy enables you to lessen expenses on advertisements you haven’t researched and designed correctly.
Imagine posting an advertisement only to be criticized for inappropriate or irrelevant ad content. Not only will this cost you money for the spot, but also damage control and lost revenue.
Integrated Marketing Definition
Essentially, integrated marketing consolidates messaging across several channels, including social media, the web, advertising, and public relations, to give clients a consistent experience.
This entails maintaining a consistent look, tone, and feel across many channels and giving accurate information regardless of how a client interacts with your company.
Integrated marketing also focuses heavily on communicating with customers to elicit a sense of consistency that would boost brand awareness across platforms and memorably tell your brand’s narrative.
Benefits of the Integrated Marketing
Do you want to use integrated marketing for your business? Here’s what you’ll be getting:
Costs reduction
Through integrated marketing, you’ll experience noticeably lower marketing expenses.
This is because using the same content across your media platforms won’t need you to purchase images or hire separate graphic designers, copywriters, or editors for your brand’s content necessities.
Your marketing team will also have more time to generate brand ideas for different marketing projects instead of having to think of additional content for the same project under various platforms.
This additional time will allow your marketing team to analyze which practices worked effectively on your previous marketing projects and which did not. This will help them to discard whichever didn’t work and focus on those that did.
They can also analyze the long-term effects these projects might have on your company today and find themes that can be recurring for future projects. For example, if they see that discount promos during certain holidays are effective, your company can repeat them annually.
Greater brand visibility
Integrated marketing also allows your brand to have greater visibility. It does this by sending consistent visual, auditory, and experiential cues to your customers, which builds trust between you and them.
A unified approach among your platforms will give you better traction than your competitors. If you want to check how well your marketing campaign affects your brand’s visibility, you can use ad tracking software to know how your lead conversion rates are going.
Let’s say you’re a consumer and see consistent, high-quality ads or promotions by Company A. Even if Company B’s advertisements and promotions offer higher values, Company A still presents itself better, hence looks more trustworthy.
Another example is using consistent imagery to propel your company’s brand. You might have seen Coca-Cola’s Polar Bears, an excellent example of how an image, in this case, a polar bear, is turned to symbolize a particular brand or product.
Consistent communication strategy
If your advertisements sparsed among different platforms, be it online or in physical locations, they still need to echo the same message; otherwise, your customers won’t trust your brand.
This is one of the reasons why companies choose integrated marketing– it brings to a company’s communication strategy. This essentially broadcasts their brand to more people in short yet regular periods.
Moreover, your marketers may have heard of the term “Rule of Seven” by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. This rule states that customers must see your ads at least seven times before considering buying your product or service.
You can now follow this rule more effectively using integrated marketing since you can use online platforms to branch your branding.
Omni-Channel Marketing Definition
Omni-channel marketing uses various marketing channels or platforms together to improve the entire customer experience. This consistency between platforms allows your customers to easily avail of your products or services.
However, omnichannel marketing is more consumer-centric since it focuses on the customer’s experience and journey, compared to integrated marketing’s focus on customer communication.
For example, instead of focusing on how to tell your customers about your discount promotions, you’ll instead focus on how they can use this discount promo easily. This method allows for a more seamless experience for your customers no matter which platform they use when availing of your products.
Benefits of the Omnichannel Marketing
Here are some benefits that you will enjoy from using omnichannel marketing for your business. Let’s have a look at each of them:
Better user experience
Omnichannel marketing lets you focus on how your customers can have a good experience using your services, whether online or in a brick-and-mortar store.
Nurturing these experiences is essential since they significantly impact their purchasing behaviors. For example, negative experiences with your brand may lead to bad publicity, negative word-of-mouth, and lost sales.
On the other hand, positive experiences can increase your sales, raise your target market’s awareness of your product through word-of-mouth and association, and promote brand loyalty among your repeat customers.
Improved customer lifetime value
Since your marketing efforts are more geared towards customer satisfaction than explicitly propelling your brand’s interest, you’re more likely to make happy customers. And happy customers are lifetime customers when using omnichannel marketing.
Moreover, according to Adidas’ Director for Digital and Retail Marketing, omnichannel consumers are worth approximately 30% more than a single channel consumer in their lifetime.
This is because their consistent, high-quality experience will make them recommend you to other people, generating your company leads in the long run.
Increased revenue
Every marketing strategy’s goal is to increase your revenue. However, omnichannel marketing can improve it even further with its customer-centric and platform-consistent approach.
According to Omnisend’s 2022 report, omnichannel marketing achieved a 494% greater order rate than those reliant on just one platform. It also claimed that the conversion rate improves by up to 429% when you include SMS among your platforms.
Moreover, the same report stated that your customers would likely spend 13% more on your products when you use omnichannel marketing.
Also, consumers are increasingly switching to a multi-platform purchasing preference. A 2017 study by the Harvard Business Review revealed that 73% of the 46,000 Americans surveyed use multiple platforms when buying necessities.
How to Determine: Integrated Marketing vs Omnichannel Marketing
Now that you know how omnichannel and integrated marketing works along with their benefits, let’s see which of them suits your business better.
Choosing Integrated Marketing
You should choose integrated marketing if you want to be more brand-centric. Typically, integrated marketing focuses more on relaying your brand’s messages consistently to your customers.
For example, integrated marketing will have you work more on your promotions and how your customers will see them instead of optimizing how your customers can interact with them.
Another reason you’d like integrated marketing is its focus on lead generation. By focusing on how you communicate your brand’s intent and image, you effectively attract customers and make them go to you.
We also advise using this marketing strategy if you want to get new customers, which greatly helps if you’re a new company.
Choosing Omnichannel Marketing
On the other hand, if you’d like to center your company on customer experience and service, you should choose omnichannel marketing.
Aside from consistency, omnichannel marketing prioritizes the optimization of your company’s touchpoints with your customers, which gives them positive experiences.
For example, omnichannel marketing allows you to personalize your service based on your customer’s preferences. You will also be able to improve how customers can give you their feedback, access your website or physical stores easily, and incorporate your marketing projects seamlessly and consistently.
Moreover, omnichannel marketing is your choice if you want more repeat customers since this strategy’s customer-first approach can foster loyalty easier than other marketing models.
Integrated Marketing vs Omnichannel Marketing: Sum Up
Choosing the right marketing strategy may seem daunting at first, especially since they look similar.
However, you should remember that while the two marketing strategies both opt for your content’s consistency among multiple platforms, integrated marketing has brand-centric features and prioritizes customer communication. In contrast, omnichannel marketing has costumer-centric features and prioritizes customer experience.
Make no mistake, though, since whichever marketing strategy you choose, you’ll still find that both anchor on customer satisfaction and brand popularity– factors that the company itself ultimately dictates.