Building an Integrated Digital Marketing Strategy: How Your Digital Marketing Tactics Should Work Together

What comes to mind when you hear the term “digital marketing?” do you think of social media? SEO? Or maybe Google Ads?

While each of these channels is its own distinct medium under the “digital marketing” umbrella, they should not be looked at in silos. Each channel should be a part of an integrated digital marketing strategy, leveraging one another to maximize results.

“Multiple channels. One digital marketing strategy.” That’s a mantra we’ve adopted at OuterBox and what we routinely preach to clients.

If you have an SEO team executing a campaign over here, and a separate paid search team doing their own thing over there . . . if the two teams aren’t talking, you’ve got a problem! To build the most successful digital marketing strategy, you need all of your channels working together.

When all of your channels work together, you’ll not only maximize your ad dollars and minimize overhead, you’ll generate more sales and increase leads in the process. And who doesn’t want to spend less to get more?!

If you’re not sure where to begin, below we offer some helpful pointers on ways you can leverage your various marketing channels to maximize their collective benefits.

5 Ways to Maximize Your SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Email Campaigns

• Keyword Optimization:

  SEO is a long-term strategy. You already know that. It becomes an even longer process when you realize you optimized your content around the wrong keywords. This is where PPC can be helpful. Using your PPC campaigns, you can take your initial keyword list and run ads around those terms. By leveraging your PPC campaigns, you will be able to quickly see which keywords drive the most sales and leads. If the keywords aren’t converting on the paid side, they probably aren’t going to convert on the organic side either.

  While using your PPC campaigns as a testing ground for your SEO keyword strategy is invaluable, the synergies between SEO and PPC run much deeper. In fact, many studies have shown that when SEO and paid search campaigns are run in tandem, they produce better results than using just one or the other. For more on the benefits of running SEO and PPC campaigns together, check out this insightful article from Search Engine Journal.

• Link Building & Content Sharing:
  

  Attracting high-quality backlinks is hugely important to enhance your domain authority, which is a leading indicator of how well your website will rank in search engines. While there are tons of ways to build links, you can’t overlook the power of social media and email marketing.

  Both channels provide a prime outlet for reaching your target audience and help with building relationships. The more your content gets shared on social media or through email, the more likely you are to get backlinks from relevant, authoritative sites. As you attract more quality backlinks, your domain authority and rankings will naturally climb.

  Given the importance of link building and content sharing, make sure to include social sharing buttons in your emails and in your articles. The easier it is for users to share your great content, the more likely they are to do it.

  

• Personalization:
  

  If you want to break through the marketing clutter, you need to personalize your messaging, and email marketing is one of the best ways to do that. As you use your SEO and PPC campaigns to drive traffic to your website, it’s critical to have a way to capture the email addresses of your visitors so that you can send them more personalized messages down the road.

  While someone that clicks through to your site from an ad may not be ready to buy on their first visit, by capturing their email, you can send them relevant and timely messages later on when they may be ready to pull the trigger.

  

  Capturing emails is also great for building retargeting lists. With retargeting lists, you can build custom audiences on platforms like Facebook Ads and the Google Display Network. Once you have your custom audience in place, you can create ads tailored to that specific audience.

  There’s an endless number of ways to personalize your marketing messages but in order to do it effectively, all of your channels need to work together.

• Brand Awareness:
  

  Increasing brand awareness is an important step in getting consumers into your sales funnel, and social media (both organic and paid) can be incredibly valuable when it comes to enhancing your online presence. Here’s a hypothetical example for you…

  Let’s say Mary is scrolling through her Facebook feed and sees a post about the benefits of organic dog food. She scans the headline, maybe clicks through to the article for a few seconds, then goes about her day. A couple of days later, she realizes she’s out of dog food and thinks to herself, “Hmm, what was the name of that organic dog food I saw the other day?”

  Where does Mary go next? Google! She types in “organic dog food” and right there at the top of the page is an ad for the dog food she saw on Facebook and below the ad, an organic listing to the company’s website.

  Voila!

  Granted, most scenarios may not be as straightforward as this but the point still stands. The more brand awareness you drive across your various channels, the greater results you’ll see in your PPC and SEO campaigns.

• Content Optimization:
  

  Creating great content, regardless of the platform, is all about testing and optimizing. When it comes to understanding what headlines, calls to action (CTAs), etc. work best, email can be a great place to start.

  With email, you can easily see what subject lines, headlines, and CTAs are driving the most engagement and use that information to inform the content on your website. If you see that a particular subject line is attracting hundreds of clicks, you may consider using that same phrase on a related page on your website. You could even use it as a headline in one of your PPC ads.

  The same idea applies to things like CTAs on your landing pages. If a CTA is performing really well in an email campaign, it could be wise to replicate it on your website. To test variation of headlines and other elements on your website you can perform CRO (conversion optimization) and run variation tests, showing one version to a set of users and another version to another set of users to determine which elements convert at a higher rate.

  When all of your digital marketing channels are working together, it’s easy to glean insights from one and apply what’s working best to another.

Our Final Thoughts on Integrated Digital Marketing

No matter your business or marketing goals, having one, central digital marketing strategy that encompasses ALL of your various channels and tactics is essential if you really want to drive results. Instead of thinking of one channel as being more important than another, consider how each can improve the performance of the collective whole.

It’s time to break down your marketing silos to drive an even greater impact!

Looking for advice on how to better leverage your marketing channels for maximum success? We’d love to help.

Tell us what you want to accomplish or give us a call at 1-866-647-9218.