Integrated marketing communications create a unified and seamless brand experience for costumers across channels. This requires deconstructing silos while building an agile and integrated marketing team. Getting different disciplines to work together takes some finesse, but an integrated approach has the added benefit of utilizing the strengths of your team members.
You want to create a team of colleagues who have the responsibility, vision, understanding and commitment to engage in a media-agnostic planning process focused on strategic goals. Here are 5 tips to get your teams in sync and ensure consistency:
1. Connect
Aligning your teams starts with connection. Create opportunities for team members to connect via 1) regular meetings that keep everyone on the same page about your brand identity and your ultimate purpose and 2) team-building activities that cultivate trust and cooperation.
Brainstorm a key phrase or hashtag that focuses on a goal team members can work toward both personally and as a team. Organize social gatherings, such as a monthly breakfast or weekly lunch paid for by your company and hosted in your office, that offer a simple way for people to form relationships and opinions beyond the work itself.
When teams come together, share their talents, and communicate well to maintain consistency, it fosters a creative and collaborative environment that will help you get the most out of your team and your efforts.
2. Document
Every marketer and agency needs to understand who your target audience is, what your brand represents, and how marketing can be optimized to reach your target audience when and where they’re most receptive. A strong, differentiated, and documented marketing strategy offers a single point of truth for each of these areas and should be used to drive each channel’s tactics.
Your brand’s documented identity works along the same lines, ensuring consistency in the look and feel of your integrated marketing communications.
3. Cross-Train
An integrated marketing team involves the reinvention of your marketing organization by customer-centric marketing leaders who are system thinkers. These marketers should be cross-trained to understand the entire marketing spectrum and learn discipline-specific skill sets. Provide opportunities and time for team members to shadow each other and create cross-functional teams that include people with strong quantitative skills.
4. Share
A clear flow of information between writers, designers, marketing, sales, and social media is key. Document how your customers move through the buyer’s journey as well as how content flows and information is handed off within and between teams. Create a content repository for sharing information and allowing access to all materials quickly and easily.
5. Measure
In the past, each marketing vertical has used its own benchmarks for evaluating success. To evaluate integrated marketing, you’ll want to come up with a consistent set of metrics specific to your business and your goals that can be used across channels that not only represents this new, more comprehensive cross-functional approach but also isolates the effects of individual elements.
Aligning your marketing teams requires a cross-disciplinary approach that fuses disparate consumer-engagement channels. It also calls for flexibility, creativity, and a willingness to change and work together.
If you’re using different agencies to produce different aspects of your marketing campaign, make sure someone on your in-house team monitors and coordinates their efforts, too.
Check back with us next week as we continue our series on integrated marketing.
Learn more about Filament and how we can help you integrate your marketing efforts today.
