Everything You Need to Know About Connected Marketing

Putting together an effective marketing strategy is crucial to the success of almost any organization. Connected marketing is a great way to more efficiently reach your targeted audience and build your business. You need to understand exactly what connected marketing is, why it’s important and how to make it work for your particular business.

What is Connected Marketing?

Connected marketing is also sometimes referred to as interconnected or holistic marketing. Connected marketing takes into consideration individual media platforms as well as the connection between them as a group. While connected marketing is often thought of in only digital terms, it can mean more. The following lists the basic marketing venues that you can use to promote your products and services:

• Offline Marketing – Radio, newspaper, in-store ads and promotions, television, magazines, billboards
• Online Marketing – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest

Knowing all your marketing venues and understanding how they work is the first step. You’ll need to have people in your organization with the skills to market effectively in each of these areas. A team with all the necessary skills would include the following:

• Mobile Marketing – Anyone in charge of mobile marketing should understand how to put together mobile advertising and responsive designs. You’ll need content, video and images that work well on both large and small screens.
• Content Marketing – Those in charge of content marketing should focus on the most important aspects of content. Content must create brand awareness, build links and educate the audience. Most importantly, it should generate leads and bring in more business. A specific example of connecting your content to your customer includes having a call to action or offering customer support.
• Email Marketing – It’s important to understand email regulations and rules. It’s also necessary to understand the basic metrics of email marketing. These include open rate, response rate and conversion rate.
• SEO – People that understand SEO should have the capacity to understand how to use analytics to promote link building and the best ways to draw traffic to websites.
• Video Teams – You’ll need people that can create and optimize video for marketing purposes.
• Social Media – Your team needs to know which types of social media are the best platforms to promote your products or services.
• Analytics – It’s important to gather and effectively use data in all your marketing campaigns.

Why is it Important?

There are now several online social media and internet platforms. Creating a marketing plan for each venue individually is time-consuming, inefficient and unnecessary. Connected marketing involves reaching out to customers in several ways at the same time. Many companies have a great social media marketing campaign. Others have a phenomenal website. Other businesses do a good job of traditional marketing such as TV or newspaper ads. Very few companies excel at all of these. An effective connected marketing strategy provides several specific benefits for a company.

• Consistency – Connected marketing provides consistency. A consistent marketing plan paints a clear picture of your brand.
• Shared Goals – Connected marketing brings different departments together throughout an organization. Small Business Trends states that a holistic approach creates a strong and united business image.
• Effective Results – Connected marketing makes the most efficient use of all your talent and resources. It produces the best results for your marketing efforts.

How Does it Work?

A connected marketing plan focuses on effectively using data through a variety of touch points. These touch points include several devices such as smart phones, desktop computers and even TV. Besides different devices it would also include text, photos and video. A connected marketing plan would include all these venues and platforms interacting and working together to provide a fluid and efficient marketing strategy. You put connected marketing into practice when the individuals in your company come together to work as a united team.

According to simplilearn, an interconnected marketing strategy starts with the content. You’ll want to include great content in your email, mobile and social media plans. Using data and analytics will help you identify and reach specific marketing goals. Tracking and understanding data is the glue that holds all the moving parts together. You’ll know exactly what content works on each particular platform. Good data will help you readjust and tweak your marketing plan.

How Can Your Business Make it Work?

Connected or holistic marketing will look slightly different in each particular field and business. There are particular points that will apply to all businesses and organizations. IG lists several specific steps to take when you’re bringing your connected marketing plan all together.

• Tactics – Your tactics should start with content. You’ll probably also want to use videos or photos.
• Format – Where will you put your content, videos or photos? Choose online and offline venues that will work best for your products or services.
• Frequency – How often will you tweet or post content on a blog? How often will you advertise on television or in a newspaper? Determine the frequency for each marketing point.
• Attention – Your attention is who and what you’re focusing on. This is usually specific customers.
• Marketing – This is where you bring all the previous points together for an actual marketing plan.
• Shuttle – This is the phase where you spread your message through the different platforms.
• Adjustment – Using data, reevaluate your marketing plan and make adjustments.

Now that you know why it’s important and how to implement it, it’s time to put connected marketing to work for your business. Don’t overwhelm yourself by starting with too many moving parts. Start with a simple message that you’ll market through maybe one or two platforms or venues. You’ll eventually want to expand until you have several points all working together in your connected marketing strategy.