“Unity is strength” and “integration is the power of evolution”. We all are familiar whit these phrases but what is surprising to me is that although we know the potential strength of digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), marketers are shying away from merging both in an marketing campaign.

Integrated digital marketing, Omni-channel marketing, and multi-channel marketing is the marketing strategy that is revolutionizing the marketing in a robust and diverse digital landscape. Let’s take a look at these three strategies.

Integrated digital marketing is reaching the widest number of your target audience and crafting your contents to them across all channels in a manner that delivers the best to them.

Omni-channel marketing is trying to reach the widest number of customers or targeting audience while crafting your contents to them across all channels.

Multi-channel marketing is reaching the widest targeted audience across multiple channels.

It’s for this reason that I took off time to test, evaluate, identify and I can now put my findings together in this article.  My inspiration is driven by the phrase unity is strength and the need to revolutionized our marketing strategy.

True to this phrase, the best and most effective and also most cost efficient digital marketing campaigns combine digital marketing strategy and search engine optimization strategy. But what is digital marketing strategy and search engine optimization strategy?

Digital marketing strategy:

Success in business may often depend on the actions you take in term of your online or digital marketing strategy.

With the presence of so many digital marketing techniques (from SEO and content marketing to email marketing and analytics), it may be overwhelming figuring out where to start and also being able to determine the biggest impact on your business. Thus to be effective in your digital marketing campaigns, you’ll need a strategy that combines SEO with most effective digital marketing strategy such as email or content marketing.

The best or most effective digital marketing strategy might involve multiple goals depending on the scale of your business.  No matter what you decide to include in your digital marketing plan, or what goals you plan to achieve, it can be difficult to get started actually building one.

Digital marketing strategy is a marketing technique used by business owners and marketers on the internet to expand their reach, attract new customers, create awareness of their product, drive traffic to website, and diversify revenue or to make a call regarding their products and/or services.

Many who have understood the power of digital marketing are now exploring it through many online marketing campaigns ranging from online or internet ads (such as pay-per-click, pay-per-call, banners, pop-ups) advertising on compatible websites, in online newspapers and magazine, e-newsletters, and search engines as a means to reach the billions of people who use the internet for research or shopping.

Search engine optimization strategy: SEO bring together both creative and technical elements required to drive traffic, improve SEO ranking, and increase awareness in search engines. It involves many complex strategies, from the organization of words on your page to the way other websites link to you on the internet. SEO may be regarded simply a matter of ensuring that your website is structured in a way that search engines understand.

Integrated Digital Marketing

We are going to start our look on effective integrated digital marketing campaign with these three building step:

Know your target audience: By utilizing analyzing tools, first and third-party data regarding customer behaviour, it’s now possible to predictively determine which digital content will or is performing best. Thus you can use this analysis to strategize your digital marketing campaign accordingly.

Identify channels that convert: In today’s marketing environment, high technological tools are available which can be used to identify how and where different channels affect each other to better understand which channels are driving business performance.

Align your digital marketing strategies: For every successful integrated digital marketing strategy, business owners and marketers must ensure that their internal departments and digital talent are structured to work in unison. However, this will not only foster cross-channel collaboration, but also will drive impact across numerous marketing functions.

How to Implement an Integrated Digital Marketing Strategy

To be able to implement an effective digital marketing strategy or effective digital marketing campaigns, business owners and marketers should be able to better understand their target audience and be able to provide their needs without putting additional strain on their internal marketing budgets or resources.

An effective integration digital marketing strategy starts with an effective digital marketing plan. Such a plan can make all the differences when it comes to making key decisions on your business. Thus to give your digital marketing plan the best chance at success, it’s vital that it contains the following components.

1.   Digital Marketing Goals

Setting some goals for your digital marketing plan will help you understand what effectively constitutes a business success. Your goals should be set around the number of leads generated or traffic your digital marketing campaign is able to drive to your website, but very often, you’ll more likely measure your business success on revenue generated.

2.   Value Content or Messaging

Your business’s value contents or messaging will be the foundation to shoulder your digital marketing plan. Your digital marketing content should be tailor to the needs of target audience, potential buyers, and should be able to educate such target audiences on the important of your product or service. Before you start creating contents, ensures that your business’s value messaging goals are clearly listed down.

3.   Content Management

Your digital marketing plan will center mostly on high-quality unique content. Therefore, your content management system must be sufficiently equipped to handle a larger volume of content without which your marketing plan will suffer. This is the avenue to acquire an automated content management tool and/or systems to integrate with existing employee workflows and systems. The choice of your content management tool should be also be able to integrate seamlessly with new processes and systems in the likelihood of a re-org.

4.   Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is simply define as the marketing strategy that seeks to optimize a website to become more search engine friendly or as an marketing strategy, tactic and technique used to drive traffic to a website by obtaining a high search engine ranking or placement in the search engine results page of major search engines like Google.

The better your business website is optimized, the higher you are place in search engine (such as Google) rankings hence the better chance of succeeding with your digital marketing plan. To develop an effective SEO strategy, there are a number of items to consider. Consider the type of search terms (keywords or phrases) that your target audience or potential buyers are most likely to use as they search for the type of products and services you offer. Once you have a list of keyword search terms, go on to develop the content required to start climbing up those search results. The best SEO content will take the form of a how-to-do list, how-to guides, glossary pages, and blog posts.

5.   Content Types

Knowing your target audience, you will be able to decide the content types that best meet their needs while achieving the greatest returns from your budget and investments. There are many types of content on which to base your digital marketing strategy. Some of the most important include:

• Blog Posts: Blogs have an important role to play in every business. You can use your blog to get across your business POV. Blog can be use drive your SEO strategy, and there are easy to update and maintain. You can use your blog to build your profile, stamp an online presence and turn your business leadership into something of a thought leader in your field
• Case Studies: This has the potential to give some credibility to your products and services. Thus demonstrating the proven potential of your product, of course, you are much more likely to win new business. Most prospect love to be guarantee by the products and services you provide. The biggest fear of key decision-makers is introducing software that doesn’t deliver ROI. Hence case studies that showcase the success of your product can help to remove these fears.
• Newsletters: This is a low cost content type but with proven ROI. This explains why they are becoming an increasingly popular component of a digital marketing plan. Usually, newsletters are integrated with your email marketing plan for best result. Thus you should be able to segment your database to deliver targeted content to the right audience.
• Webinars: Webinars helps to generate quality leads, as well as build a relationship with potential customers. Also it’s a cost effective mode of advertising thus providing high quality and engaging webinar content, your business may immediately begin to realize these benefits.
• eBooks: They provide the needed avenue to go into more depth on particular subjects and educate prospects. EBooks also help you to build a reputation for thought leadership in particular areas, hence develop a degree of trust with prospects.
• Landing Pages: A landing page is the first page on your website where your visitors will directed at, therefore the page that will generate that first impression about your product and services. Because much of your digital marketing plan will be based on driving website visitors to landing pages, your landing page should be well crafted to contain all the vital information about your business products and services. You may also want to include a sign in form that will help you to gather important information about your visitors. Where possible, always attached some free gifts (free eBooks or free download contents) with your form that will motivate visitors to provide their information by filling the form. Also important is creating easy call to actions (CTAs), and including other or formal customers reviews on your landing page. A/B test each element of your landing pages to help identify what works best. 
• Infographcs: It’s often said that an image converges more information and people are more attracted to reading information of images than they do plain text. Thus infographics can be used to transform a complicated premise into an easy to consume piece of visual content. Providing an embed code alongside your infographic, may also help your SEO ranking as people becomes more friendly to share images. Worthy to note is that 90 percent of the information that human easily retained is visual in nature. Thus integrated high quality images and infographics into your digital marketing plan are important.

6.   Marketing Automation

Again, you should be able to empower your marketing team by equipping your team with one of the best marketing plan software. There are good numbers of marketing automation tools (such as Eloqua, HubSpot, and Marketo) which you could get for your team. These tools are also equipped to act as the system of record for your team. These tools empowers your team to better manage each of your digital marketing campaign, track website visitors, create landing pages and emails, and send alerts to your sales team as leads are generated.

7.   Sales Enablement

This is an area that continues to increase in importance. It does consist of the systems and processes that equip sales representatives or marketers with the right content whenever and wherever it is required. Sales enablement tool is also an important component of your digital marketing plan as well as your digital marketing campaign because it ensures your content investment is not wasted.

8.   Social Media Strategy

The potentials of social media in the face of digital marketing cannot be ignored. Social channels like Facebook and Twitter have an important role to play in your marketing plan. Research studies shows that 85 percent of customers currently use social media channels in their purchase decision process. Hence an effective social media strategy may help you to promote your content. Also important is to note that your social media content strategy differ from channel to channel thus its vital to be included in your digital marketing plan. Whenever you mention a high profile company or thought leader positively in your content (which of course is a good thing to do), it’s always a good idea to tweet at the person. This may help to create a friendly or networking relationship with known experts in your sector and If peradventure they return the favor by sharing your content, your content or business gets in front of a brand new audience

9.   Analytics

Analytic tools such as Google Analytics will play an important role of your digital marketing plan. Google analytics is a good tool to start with ant it’s worth the investment. Getting detailed analysis on referrer, page visits, and bounce rates information will inform your SEO strategy and can help pinpoint weaknesses in your content strategy. Other marketing automation services such as Marketo, and HubSpot also provide analytics around conversion rates and email open rates

10.   Lead Nurturing

Creating high-quality unique contents and building automated infrastructure that will help website visitors convert into leads is one of the most important goals your marketing plan should seek to achieve. Every lead needs nurturing which is mostly proper engagement. Thus, your business will need to implement a lead nurturing plan and program for those qualified leads which do not immediately convert. Again, marketing automation tools may be useful in setting up some automated email workflows which can enable you keep a good level of engagement by share your latest content offerings with leads.

Your business needs an integrated digital marketing plan to effectively direct the implementation of your digital marketing campaign. The most effective digital marketing strategy will see the integration of SEO together with other digital marketing channels to generates most effective and cost efficient results.