Marketers are fond of a campaign journey. We map one message to the next, decide where interest should deepen and, before long, have a buyer moving cleanly from first contact to consideration. But buyers, unobliging as they often are, are unlikely to follow your plan to a T. They’ll miss emails, arrive through search halfway through the campaign and then return weeks later, having forgotten what first introduced them to it.
However carefully choreographed the plan may be, prospects will still slip in and out of it on their own terms. The campaign needs to allow for that, rather than relying on everyone to follow it from start to finish. It has to make sense wherever someone enters it.
Integrated marketing is how you make sure those separate encounters still amount to the same argument. The proposition stays consistent, even as the message changes to suit the channel, the buyer and how much context they have at that point.
Doing that well takes more than making every asset look and sound the same or repeating the strapline ad infinitum in the hope it sticks. Sales will hear questions the brief never anticipated; the campaign should be able to answer them without becoming a different campaign.
So, how do you make sure an integrated campaign pays off? And how do you stop the campaign drifting when the plan inevitably changes? Our B2B Guide to Integrated Marketing has the answers.
Contents
- TL;DR
- What is integrated marketing?
- What should an integrated campaign aim to achieve?
- How should you research your market and audience?
- How do you understand the B2B buying group?
- What makes a value proposition specific?
- How do you build a content strategy?
- How should the creative work across the campaign?
- How do you choose the right marketing channels?
- How should you get data and sales handover right?
- How do you plan for a journey that works out of order?
- How should you measure an integrated campaign?
- How do you keep the campaign integrated?
- Integrated marketing FAQs
TL;DR
Integrated B2B marketing organises campaigns around a single commercial objective and a clear reason to choose the business, then develops that thinking according to what buyers need at each point in the journey.
Channels can do separate jobs, and members of the buying group may encounter entirely separate assets. From the buyer’s side, though, it should still feel like one company explaining one offer with increasing specificity.
What is integrated marketing?
Integrated marketing organises campaign activity around one proposition, even when buyers meet it through separate channels and assets.
Strip it back and integrated marketing is really about making sure the separate parts of a campaign are advancing the same proposition. It’s not quite the same as multichannel marketing, where search, LinkedIn, email, direct mail, events and everything else can all be active without having much to tie them together beyond the campaign name.
A campaign can be active on every channel and still leave the buyer doing the joining-up. The ad talks about one problem, the landing page describes the service in general terms and, by the time sales calls, everyone is having to work out what the campaign was meant to be about.
Across a lengthy B2B purchase, the people involved will change as well. Someone may first encounter a problem-focused webinar while trying to put a name to an operational issue. Weeks later, another stakeholder may be looking for a cost case, while somebody assessing implementation wants proof that the approach will work in practice. Each may arrive through a separate asset, with a separate question already in mind.
Every asset therefore has two jobs. It needs to give someone encountering the campaign for the first time enough context to understand why you’re relevant. It also needs to give returning buyers enough substance to move towards a decision. That is a lot to ask of a single piece of content, particularly when the purchase takes months, but it is why integration needs to start before the assets are made.
What should an integrated campaign aim to achieve?
An integrated campaign should set out the commercial change it is intended to create.
“We want more leads”, while a reasonable ambition, is a bit like telling a satnav you’d like to go somewhere better. You’ll need to be more precise if you’re to get anywhere.
A business with plenty of enquiries but too few serious opportunities has a different job to one trying to open doors with 100 new target accounts. The detail that counts is what, commercially, should change if the campaign works, as well as which part of the market needs to respond.
Working back from that gives the rest of the campaign something firmer to organise itself around. If sales and marketing can only explain the intended outcome by talking about “awareness”, “engagement” or simply “more leads”, there’s probably another layer of thinking still to do.
How should you research your market and audience?
Market and audience research combines customer insight with internal knowledge and evidence from search, CRM and sales activity.
Most businesses already know quite a lot about their customers. Sales teams know where deals stall and which competitors keep appearing. Senior management has years of market context to draw from, while people close to customers hear the questions and objections that keep surfacing.
The problem here is proximity. A feature that took eighteen months to develop will understandably feel significant internally, but to a buyer, it might be something they’d expect any credible supplier to provide. Meanwhile, a relatively unglamorous facet of one of your services, perhaps one that saves a customer three hours every week, may keep cropping up in sales conversations.
That’s where marketing needs to work its magic. Marketers should be able to make a dry subject interesting. What’s much more strenuous, and borders on impossible, is making something of little practical use to a client or prospect feel important.
One customer’s recollection is still only one view. Google Search Console shows the words people use before supplier terminology takes over. CRM data and sales conversations show which enquiry types progress, what objections keep returning and what buyers ask before a decision. Customer interviews explain why the purchase happened when it did, what nearly delayed it and what finally shaped the choice.
Those conversations are often where the strongest campaign ideas start. They show you what people truly need from a supplier and give marketing something to test its internal assumptions against. The observations can become a stronger message, provided the original point survives the translation into campaign copy.
Competitor research can be equally selective. You don’t need a forensic record of every piece of copy across ten rival websites, but you do need to know where competitors have built a strong case, which claims have become category wallpaper and which questions have been left unanswered.
How do you understand the B2B buying group?
Understanding the B2B buying group means considering who is involved, what each person needs and when they enter the decision.
One company in the CRM can contain several people pulling a purchase in multiple directions. Someone may be pushing hard for change while finance decides whether it deserves the budget, or a technical lead has another set of criteria altogether.
They won’t necessarily be at the same stage either. Somebody brought into supplier evaluation has very little use for the introductory guide that helped another stakeholder get the project moving three months earlier.
Customer personas can help, provided they’re built around the purchase rather than invented lifestyle detail. Mildly diverting as it may be to know that your fictional Head of Operations has a Labrador and drinks flat whites, neither tells you much about how they buy.
Responsibilities, pressures, objections and timing are more revealing. Someone building the business case may need help quantifying the problem, while finance may want proof, terms or a clearer basis for comparing one supplier with another.
Giving both people the same content because they work for the same account throws away much of that detail. In an account-based campaign, choosing the right company identifies the account. Understanding how the decision develops inside it tells you what to say once you’re speaking to the people involved.
What makes a value proposition specific?
A specific value proposition tells buyers what changes and why your business can make it happen.
With several channels and buyers involved, the proposition gives the campaign something to return to when the work changes. One quick test is to remove your company name, replace it with a competitor’s and see how much of the message survives.
“Experienced implementation partner.” “Trusted experts delivering tailored solutions.” Both are perfectly serviceable, and both are broad enough to sit underneath a surprising number of logos.
Push the claim until something concrete appears. If the promise is “faster implementation”, where does the time actually come out of the project? Perhaps an established migration process removes weeks of preparation, or specialist knowledge means fewer rounds of discovery before the real work begins.
“Flexible”, “specialist” and “responsive” need the same treatment. They mean more when the buyer can see what those qualities change in terms of time, cost, effort or risk.
Put evidence behind them too. A comparable customer, a shorter process, less internal work or a problem avoided gives the campaign considerably more to work with than another layer of adjectives.
Lacking that substance, marketing tends to make the language increasingly dramatic while sales quietly translates it back into the plainer explanation that works on a call. If that keeps happening, another headline probably isn’t the answer.
How do you build a content strategy?
An integrated content strategy starts with a subject the campaign has a reason to discuss and gives each asset a role.
A content strategy starts one level above the asset list, with the subject the campaign has a legitimate reason to talk about. That subject needs enough depth to keep producing new material, rather than stretching the same observation across a guide and a run of lightly tweaked LinkedIn posts.
As the purchase develops, content needs to change its job. Early content may help somebody put a name or cost against an issue. Later material can deal with how the approach works, what implementation involves or whether it has stood up somewhere comparable. The asset list may be long, but each piece should earn its place.
Guides and playbooks give you room to make a case in detail. Shorter pieces can pick up questions emerging through sales or campaign activity, particularly when those questions keep coming back.
Repurposing is a lifesaver for marketers, too (although it’s good to remember that distribution and development aren’t the same thing). Posting a paragraph from a whitepaper on LinkedIn gives the original another outing. Taking one unresolved question from the research and honing it further gives somebody who saw the first piece a reminder that might just seal the deal.
How should the creative work across the campaign?
Integrated creative keeps the central idea recognisable while allowing each execution to suit its channel.
A headline might get somebody to stop scrolling, but the thought behind it still needs to survive beyond the click. Strong campaign ideas contain something worth proving or explaining once that first bit of attention has been earned.
A recognisable customer problem or specific product claim can do a lot of work upfront. The landing page can add substance, while lengthier content deals with the questions that need more room. One approved line doesn’t need to appear unchanged on the advert, page, guide cover, email and sales deck to belong to the same campaign. The point behind it should still be clear each time.
By the fourth interaction, ideally, a buyer should know significantly more than they did at the first. If every new execution has to explain from scratch what sort of company you are, the wider brand may be carrying too little of the load.
How do you choose the right marketing channels?
Choose marketing channels according to the job each one needs to do for the audience and campaign.
Once the audience and proposition are clear, the media plan can be less about assembling an impressive channel list and more about deciding what each one contributes. Search has an obvious role where there’s already a decent level of demand, but a market made up of only a few hundred valuable businesses may call for something more concentrated.
Sometimes the point is simply the type of attention. Even a very relevant email lands among internal messages, suppliers and everything else that has arrived since breakfast. A considered piece of direct mail occupies another kind of space and may stay in front of someone for considerably longer.
Whatever brings somebody in, the website has to continue the point made in the ad, email or mailer. Someone responding to a specific campaign idea shouldn’t arrive on a generic service page and have to reconstruct why they clicked.
What role should each channel play?
Each channel should have a defined role in the campaign, rather than appearing because it is on the usual media list.
| Channel | Role |
| Paid social | Put the idea in front of a defined audience before they start actively searching |
| Search | Pick up existing demand around the problem or category |
| Give known contacts a relevant reason to return | |
| Website | Continue the promise made elsewhere and provide the next useful step |
| Content | Carry questions, explanation and evidence that need more room |
| Events | Create space for direct conversations and give buyers a chance to explore the idea in more depth |
| PR | Add credible third-party context and reach people beyond your own channels |
| Traditional advertising | Build familiarity and keep the message consistent beyond digital touchpoints |
| Sales | Continue the conversation with the relevant account context attached |
There is no compulsory media plan. Remove a channel and ask what the campaign loses. If nobody can give much of an answer, the spend may have found somewhere else to go.
How should you get data and sales handover right?
Good data and sales handover help sales and marketing understand what an account has already seen and what it needs next.
With just a little data housekeeping before launch, such as standardising how company names are entered and merging duplicate contact records, campaigns become much easier to monitor accurately. Duplicate company records and inconsistent naming become a real problem when three people from the same business are showing interest and the CRM treats them as unrelated stories.
One download tells you relatively little on its own. Several people from the same account returning over a fortnight and moving on to customer stories or implementation detail is far more interesting, though only if the CRM shows those visits as one account in the first place.
Sales can add the context the system can’t. If nearly every serious buyer asks how much internal resource implementation will require, for example, marketing should probably answer that before the call rather than leaving sales to explain it for the fifteenth time.
Sales and marketing need to share that information. Sales should know what an account has already engaged with before making contact, while marketing needs the questions and objections that keep appearing once those conversations start.
More sophisticated tools can help later, but they cannot repair poor account data or fill the gap when sales and marketing are working from separate information.
How do you plan for a journey that works out of order?
An integrated campaign should work wherever a buyer enters it, rather than relying on a fixed sequence.
There’s probably a beautifully behaved campaign journey somewhere in the planning deck. Buyers, inconveniently, haven’t seen it. They may find a supporting article first, disappear for two months and return through search once the project finally has budget.
That’s why the main entry points need enough context to stand on their own. Somebody arriving halfway through should understand the premise and find a sensible next step. They should not have to work out which earlier asset marketing expected them to read.
The plan itself will move too. Sales may reach an account sooner than expected, an asset can be delayed or one question may suddenly become more important because buyers keep asking it.
The sequence can help organise the work, but it should not be treated as sacred. A direct-mail piece designed to warm an account, for example, would feel bizarre if sales had already spoken to them twice.
The simplest fix is a live record of where each account has actually got to in the CRM, somewhere sales and marketing will both update it.
How should you measure an integrated campaign?
Measure an integrated campaign against its commercial objective, then use channel data to diagnose performance.
The dashboard updates much faster than revenue, which makes short-term metrics very easy to overvalue. At first glance, a lower CPC looks like a win, until the cheaper audience turns out to be businesses sales would never have prioritised. Conversion rate can rise in the same way, simply because the targeting has loosened.
Read the metrics against the original objective set at the beginning and judge success against that, rather than the number that happens to be trending in the right direction. Channel metrics help explain what is happening, but the commercial question remains whether the campaign is producing the kind of interest you wanted.
Attribution will miss parts of a long B2B purchase as well. Once a guide is forwarded internally or a supplier comparison moves into a meeting, CRM history and sales feedback become useful companions to whatever analytics can still see.
There’s also a lot to be said for leaving things alone long enough to learn. Change several important variables at once and the results will struggle to tell you which decision helped.
Obvious delivery problems can be corrected quickly. Larger changes to the audience, proposition or creative deserve enough evidence to justify resetting part of the test.
How do you keep the campaign integrated?
Keep the campaign responsive to buyer evidence while returning to the commercial point it was built around.
Even the best-laid plan will change once real buyers start interacting with it, and evidence from those buyers should improve the work. A clearer explanation uncovered in sales can find its way back into the copy. The quality of response may sharpen targeting, or show that the content needs to deal with a question nobody included in the brief.
A benefit that earns clicks can start to dominate paid media, while the landing page follows its conversion data and sales settles on the wording that works most naturally in conversation. Before long, the campaign is making another case in every room.
Keep returning to the commercial problem and proposition as individual executions change. That is what stops drift turning into another campaign altogether. New evidence should improve the campaign, not change the argument it was making.
At Workshop, we work across strategy, creative, content, media and sales activation to build integrated B2B campaigns where the individual parts have a clear job and still add up to the same wider case. If you’re planning one, take a look at our Integrated Campaigns service or talk to Workshop.
Integrated marketing FAQs
What is integrated marketing?
Integrated marketing organises campaign activity around the same commercial objective and proposition, while letting separate channels and formats do their own jobs. From the buyer’s side, those encounters should still feel as though they belong to the same argument.
What is the difference between integrated and multichannel marketing?
Multichannel marketing means using several channels, but those channels often operate independently of one another. Integrated marketing considers how they relate and whether each interaction builds on the last.
Why is integrated marketing useful in B2B?
B2B purchases often involve several people and develop over months rather than days, so people at the same account may see separate parts of the campaign. Integration gives those encounters enough continuity to accumulate rather than repeatedly starting the explanation again.
How should an integrated B2B campaign be measured?
Start with the commercial outcome, then use channel performance to understand what is helping or hindering it. CRM progression and sales feedback are useful alongside analytics because plenty of the later B2B buying journey happens somewhere marketing software can’t see.
