Is the messaging for your integrated marketing campaigns a little stale? Don’t worry, it happens to everyone. Over time, even the wittiest or most creative tagline or slogan becomes outdated or just plain uninspiring. (We all have those days where we want the gecko from the GEICO commercials to just shush for a second.)
GEICO’s gecko — we know him and love him, but sometimes we just want an ad-free night.
Good thing there are tons of ways to spice up your ad creative without rehauling your entire brand. Quick! Here are three ways to add some oomph to your integrated marketing messaging.
Integrated marketing is a process that unifies all the various parts of your marketing communications — advertising, PR, and social media — and leverages their combined media, channels, and tactics to offer shoppers a seamless experience. It’s one of the best marketing approaches to ensure a consistent look, feel, and tone to your brand messaging across channels.
Some benefits of integrated marketing include:
More sales. Since you’re combining communication tools and messaging to deliver a more deliberate, focused customer journey, you’re upping the chances they’ll complete a sale and return for more.
Better brand awareness. From Glossier to Coca-Cola, today’s top brands have one thing in common: consistency. By using cohesive graphics, themes, jingles, headlines, tone, colors, and phrases across their marketing efforts, they're more likely to succeed in building better brand awareness.
Higher return on investment (ROI). Instead of creating a dozen campaigns and hoping one sticks, integrated marketing ensures you maximize your budget.
A successful integrated marketing campaign isn’t just about using one tagline or color palette across every ad or marketing effort. Instead, it involves a cohesive look, storyline, or storytelling mechanism to help shoppers understand the brand values, which will then encourage them to purchase.
Take a look at some of the most famous integrated marketing messaging, such as Old Spice’s “Smell Like A Man, Man,” which first launched in 2010. Throughout the years, the brand has kept it fresh by switching up its taglines and characters while still keeping the look, feel, and tone consistent, making shoppers immediately say, “Aha, this is Old Spice.”
Fun fact: Ad Age recently crowned this as one of the top campaigns of the 21st century.
One of the best ways to get a fresh perspective on something is to ask customers what they think. Consider conducting a survey or putting together a focus group of your target audience to see what they have to say about your integrated marketing messaging. Maybe they’re still loving the angle of your campaign, and you were overthinking the need to revamp it in the first place.
If it feels like you’re hitting shoppers over the head with the same message, perhaps it’s not a brand messaging issue but rather an execution problem.
A case study to help you find some inspiration and understand how to keep your integrated marketing messaging fresh is Snickers’ “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.” Initially launched in 2010, the brand sustained the campaign for more than a decade — even today, you may see the campaign on social media, TV, or in print.
The best part? The central theme stays the same, but the execution never does. From using anime characters, to addressing the threat of hunger while studying for a cutthroat exam, to featuring various hunger-induced conditions (think “testy” vs. “snippy”), Snickers has since launched dozens of interpretations from the initial concept.
When you have a central idea, the sky's the limit for creating various adaptations. Think outside the box and always stay malleable.
The most critical component of your integrated marketing messaging? Adaptability. Don’t be afraid to repurpose your content for different scenarios, re-interpret your tagline, or simply try something new while still keeping your campaign consistent.
For a step-by-step guide on how to create an integrated marketing campaign that delivers major sales, check out this post.
Last updated on January 20th, 2022.
