How to spread a brand message across multiple platforms successfully.

Whatever your business, every company’s marketing strategy is becoming increasingly complex with budgets having further to stretch than ever before.  In today’s fast moving digital world, marketing has to cover every angle – TV, radio, print, billboards plus the more recent additions of social media marketing, guerrilla marketing and app marketing on your smartphone.  This bombarding of people with marketing messages means the audience and their attention spans are becoming increasingly fragmented and your message has less and less chance of staying with them.

So what can you do?  One of the best ways to counter this fragmentation, is to use an integrated marketing strategy.  Integration is communicating a consistent identity, across all mediums and, even more importantly, delivering consistently on your identity/brand/message.  Sounds easy?  Well, it’s harder than it sounds.  It’s not just about a clever tagline, or using a particular colour on everything from your staff uniforms to your stationery – it means clearly identifying a powerful voice for your brand and then having the drive and determination to roll it out in every aspect of your marketing and company interaction.

A common exercise carried out by numerous big advertising firms is to ask their clients to name the taglines of the world’s 10 biggest advertisers.  By and large everyone fails this task which reinforces the fact that great taglines aren’t the answer.  The one company whose tagline is most often remembered is McDonald’s.  The reason for this?  It’s not because they spend more money – the other 9 spend just as much – it’s because they’ve had a singular focus since 2003.  And yes, I bet you’re singing it right now!

So, to fight off fragmentation, everything your business does to gain, retain, convert and engage your customers should be integrated.  Your brand should go way beyond your marketing efforts – it should be woven into all of your practices, procedures and the way you deal with customers and suppliers.

This isn’t a quick fix – integration takes time, but if you stick with it the results will be extremely rewarding.

Nicki Managing Director