What is an integrated marketing roadmap?
Integrated marketing is about delivering consistent messaging to customers across all interaction points. The goal is to communicate in a way that resonates with your target audience and conveys the unique value of the product or service. No matter what platforms customers use to interact with your company, they will receive brand messages that are both relevant and uniform.
Plenty of research shows that customers often have multiple exposures to a product before they will consider trying or buying it. It can take several touchpoints to turn a prospect into a qualified sales lead. So you need to make sure every touchpoint of the customer experience is clear, compelling, and consistent — whether it is through email marketing, case studies, or social media.
An integrated marketing roadmap helps you achieve this consistency. It is a visual representation of the integrated campaigns and programs that help a company create a holistic customer experience across every channel. The goal is to facilitate collaboration and focus the team on the work in your marketing plan that is most important.
Defining the integrated marketing strategy
The first step to ensure the whole team is taking a holistic approach from the outset is to capture the integrated marketing strategy. This is the foundation for building an integrated marketing campaign that will successfully reach potential customers and encourage them to try and buy your product.
To begin building your strategy, focus on the following steps:
Start with your marketing goals
Identify your target audience
Explain the benefits of using your product or service
Figure out how to reach and communicate with your ideal customer
Establish initiatives
Define your campaigns and programs
Initiatives lay out where you are going to invest to reach your target audience. These high-level efforts need to be considered across the team, especially if the team is organized around different marketing functions (such as content marketing, digital advertising, and social media marketing).
How to build an integrated roadmap
Once you have defined the strategy, it is time to create your roadmap. You can customize it depending on how your marketing team is structured or the customer segments you want to pursue. Some marketing teams use purpose-built roadmap software to create these types of plans, which allows you to enter data once and visualize it in different ways. No matter how you build it, your roadmap should include the following components:
Marketing goals | Marketing goals are time-bound and measurable objectives that support the overall business goals. |
Marketing initiatives | Marketing initiatives are the high-level themes that each team is working on and the timeline for achieving them. |
Programs and campaigns | Programs and campaigns are the planned marketing efforts that the team will deliver. They should be tied to the initiatives so it is clear how the actual work aligns with the strategy. |
Time frame for completing the work | The time frame shows when programs and campaigns will be delivered. It depends on the level of detail you want to capture — months, quarters, or even years. |
Milestones | Milestones indicate when the team will complete activities and reach milestones along the way. |
Now that you have an integrated marketing roadmap, you need a detailed marketing plan that ties all of your activities together. Here are a few ways you can build out the details of specific programs and campaigns in a unified way:
Creative brief | A creative brief is a strategic document that helps you ensure that your messaging is consistent across all written copy and visuals. The goal is that everything you produce looks and feels like it comes from the same company. You can also easily adapt assets for different media or channels. |
Gantt chart | A Gantt chart captures all the components of the cross-functional work — including what needs to be done, when it will be completed, and who will do it. Coordinating every task in one place is particularly useful if you are planning a complex product launch or promotional campaign. |
Marketing calendar | A marketing calendar gives an overview of the ongoing work for programs along with dates. This allows you to think about how everything will be implemented across different channels from a communications perspective. For example, the content marketing team will need to coordinate when to send an email campaign with the corresponding social campaign. |
Metrics and KPIs | Key metrics are what you will measure to determine whether the campaign was successful or not. Metrics to track may include website visits, customer acquisition cost, and customer attrition. |
Delivering a consistent and relevant experience to customers starts with defining a clear strategy and creating uniform workflows for the marketing team to follow. This ensures that everyone stays on track and avoids spending time on random tasks that do not have a real impact on the business.
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