What Is Integrated Marketing? Strategies and Examples

Blumer Marketing Strategy & Consultants specializes in modern, customer-centric marketing approaches. My team of fractional CMOs and strategic consultants help businesses provide customers with the right information at the right time, building workflows that anticipate needs and deliver next-best content. I’m excited to share my experience driving conversions and fostering loyalty.

There are more ways than ever to reach your target audience, but simply launching campaigns across multiple marketing channels isn’t enough to resonate with buyers. That approach can waste your valuable time—not to mention your marketing budget.

Instead, businesses can benefit from integrated marketing, a user-centric approach. With this type of marketing strategy, you customize your marketing efforts toward the needs of your customers at each stage in their customer journey. An integrated marketing approach isn’t just about prioritizing unified messaging across all your channels; it’s about building customer relationships by speaking directly to your customer’s goals—not your own. 

Keep reading to learn about this customer-centric marketing strategy, including tips for how to create your own integrated marketing campaign. 

What is integrated marketing?

Integrated marketing is a strategy to align brand messages across all customer touchpoints. Formally known as integrated marketing communications (IMC), this marketing strategy prioritizes an external focus on customer needs rather than an internal focus on sales. 

The core principles of integrated marketing are: 

• Communicate with your customer based on their needs and interests, not your sales goals

• Use your brand communications to build a relationship with your customer 

The concept of integrated marketing predates the commercial internet. Its original definition is most commonly attributed to Don E. Schultz, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University in the late 1980s.

The wealth of customer data we have access to today allows you to take an integrated marketing strategy a step further: You can now tailor your messaging to an individual customer’s needs and pain points as they go through the marketing funnel. By using both third- and first-party data—like demographics, displayed intent, and behavior online, which reveal customer insights—you can deliver relevant and resonant messaging to every individual customer as they move down your funnel. 

Key aspects of integrated marketing

To create a successful integrated marketing strategy, keep these key aspects in mind:

Consistency

Your brand should maintain consistency across all of your messaging and visuals, whether that’s on social media or in paid ads, emails, customer service interactions, or blog posts. One way to ensure this is by creating and disseminating brand guidelines.

Customer-centric focus

Integrated marketing prioritizes a customer’s needs and wants, not just your business goals. Instead of broadcasting the same message everywhere, you tailor communications to where a customer is in their journey. This creates a seamless experience across all touchpoints with your brand. 

Unified systems

Integrated marketing requires breaking down silos that make it difficult to get a holistic view of your customer. This might mean improving communication between teams or, for brick-and-mortar businesses, investing in a point-of-sale system (POS) that supports unified commerce.

Integrated marketing vs. multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing is a marketing mix approach that uses multiple channels (think website, social media, email, live activations) in your marketing strategy. Integrated marketing means you unify your message across those marketing channels. 

When you use integrated marketing as an overall strategic approach, each marketing channel specialist can use the particular strength of their channel to tailor your messaging strategy to its best and most poignant use.

Put simply, multichannel marketing doesn’t automatically mean integrated marketing, but integrated marketing almost always spans multiple channels. 

Integrated marketing vs. omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is a surround-the-prospect approach to marketing in which you attempt to reach a prospective customer through every marketing channel they use during their journey. Tactically, it involves higher-level marketing technology like ad servers and programmatic advertising trade desks because you target the same IP address everywhere.

But omnichannel marketing doesn’t necessarily mean your messaging is consistent at every touchpoint. It also doesn’t necessarily mean you use customer data to personalize the message for each customer. 

Integrated marketing is an umbrella communication philosophy you can apply to an omnichannel approach, in which your messaging is consistent across touchpoints, always buyer-centric, and personalized. Think of it as an extra layer of intentionality that can make your marketing campaigns more effective and efficient.

How an integrated marketing strategy benefits your bottom line

There are two main ways successful integrated marketing campaigns can increase your bottom line: by improving conversion rates and increasing brand loyalty. 

Here’s how integrated marketing benefits those key goals:

Improved conversion rates

Relevance and resonance with the buyer are the most significant factors driving high conversion rates. Because integrated marketing focuses on delivering messages that are both relevant and resonant, it tends to outperform other approaches. 

For example, when heritage clothing brand Belstaff created personalized emails that recommended products based on customers’ interest, it saw a 32% increase in conversions. 

Increased brand loyalty

If a brand consistently proves itself to be relevant to its customers, they gradually develop the belief that “this company gets me.” When this happens, brand loyalty skyrockets. Loyalty is crucial to your bottom line: According to a 2025 report from Smile.io, the top 5% of customers are responsible for 35% of an ecommerce store’s revenue. 

How to create an integrated marketing campaign

1. Start with the voice of the customer
2. Create a buyer journey map
3. Conduct keyword research
4. Determine what information the customer needs
5. Adapt messaging for different marketing channels
6. Measure campaign performance

Here’s how to embed integrated marketing into any campaign, regardless of your marketing budget:

1. Start with the voice of the customer

Any integrated marketing plan should start with understanding the customer’s different use cases and language, not yours. You can do this with the voice of the customer (VoC). 

VoC is a type of customer research that involves conducting surveys, focus group polls, or social listening to better understand customers’ needs. With VoC data in hand, you can craft integrated marketing campaigns that speak directly to your customers, using their exact words.

For example, Roxana Ontiveros, senior product marketing lead at skin care brand Topicals, found that Topicals’ audience doesn’t use the word “pockmark” to describe indented acne scars. So instead, Topicals uses terms like “pitted texture,” “marks,” and “large pores” in marketing materials for its Sealed Active Primer.

2. Create a customer journey map

Based on the target audience research you’ve done, determine the appropriate messaging for each stage of the marketing funnel using a customer journey map. For each stage of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, and conversion), you’ll use your research to answer the following questions:

• What is the customer asking?

• How is the customer asking?

• What does the customer need?

• What content can we create to meet the customer’s needs?

The answers to the first question—what is the customer asking—should come directly from VoC data. To answer how the customer is asking, you’ll match customer questions to the words and phrases they might use when searching for answers to their questions online.

For a product like Topicals’ primer, the “what” in the awareness phase could be “get rid of pockmarks,” but the “how” might be “improve skin texture.”

3. Conduct keyword research 

Keyword research involves identifying the terms customers use to find answers to their questions. 

However, instead of using keyword research tools for the highest-volume keywords associated with your product and then purchasing Google Ads or conducting SEO content marketing associated with those keywords, you’ll start with the customer’s question. From there, you determine which keywords they might use to find answers. This method leads to more relevant marketing campaigns, since all keywords come directly from customer insights.

In the case of Topicals’ Sealed, this would mean conducting keyword research around questions like “improve skin texture” instead of starting with keywords related to the product itself, like “silicone scar gel”—at least in the awareness phase.

4. Determine what information the customer needs

Look at the answers to the first question in the customer journey map (What is the customer asking?) to determine what answers would help the customer move to the next stage of the funnel.

For Topicals’ Sealed, moving from awareness to consideration might involve educating the customer on the different types of acne scars and treatment options. This could include explaining how silicone-based products immediately reduce the appearance of pockmarks by filling indentations, while retinol works over a longer period of time to promote skin healing. To get from consideration to conversion, Topicals could promote Sealed as a two-in-one product, like it does in this social media post:

5. Adapt messaging for different marketing channels

Now that you know what information your customer needs to move down the funnel, how can you best use different marketing channels to convey this information?

In Topicals’ case, a social media video can easily convey that its primer is a two-in-one solution for acne scarring. But other content, like the results of a clinical trial, might be better suited to a product or landing page.

6. Measure campaign performance

The best metric to measure your campaign’s effectiveness is informed awareness. You can track informed awareness by running a regular, statistically significant survey of non-conversions from your advertising efforts in the education/awareness phase.

Try running a poll containing three separate statements: one about your company, one about a competitor, and one about a company with a name similar to yours. The goal is to have the participant match one statement to your company’s name. If someone from your target audience who didn’t convert can still match your company’s name to your message, they have informed awareness—and increases in informed awareness will lead to sales gains over time.

Another way to measure campaign performance is by tracking actions that signal a potential buyer has moved from one stage of the customer journey to the next. For example, an email opt-in suggests a move from the awareness stage to the consideration stage: a potential customer has enough interest in your brand that they want to receive more information.

Tracking the percentage of users who move between stages helps you identify opportunities. If a high percentage of users opt in to email but do not convert, you might add customer testimonials to your marketing emails. This could encourage email subscribers to move to the next phase of the customer journey and actually buy your product.

Example integrated marketing campaign

The customer journey map is the cornerstone of integrated marketing. It provides a simple, visual framework for linking your customers’ needs at each stage in their journey to your marketing efforts.

Below, you’ll find an example customer journey map for a fictional lawn-care service, broken down into different phases: 

• Awareness/education

• Consideration/information

• Confirmation/conversion

Each phase in this journey map includes questions customers would ask, relevant keywords they might use to search for answers, information that can push them to the next stage of the funnel, and the content and marketing channels that could help convey that message. 

Use this example customer journey map as a jumping-off point for developing your own integrated marketing campaign: 

Education/awareness phase

In the awareness stage, customers are looking for answers to their problems. While they might start searching online to learn more about solutions, they aren’t considering specific products or services yet. 

For example, a customer who has a lawn that needs maintenance might be open to both solutions they can handle themselves and businesses they can hire. 

Information/consideration phase

At this point, a customer understands their needs and is looking for products or services. As they conduct their research, they might start watching tutorials or reading more about different solutions. 

In the example below, a customer is no longer debating whether to go the DIY route. They have decided to hire a lawn care service business and are weighing their options. 

Confirmation/conversion phase

In the confirmation/conversion phase, a buyer has completed their research, narrowed down their options, and knows which solution is best for them. In this phase, a lawn care service company needs to show the customer why their particular business is better than competitors, and to address any hesitation.