May 10th 2022

How Integrated Marketing Communications Ramp Up Your SEO

How Integrated Marketing Communications Ramp Up Your SEO

Marketing in today’s age is a complicated matter. It’s no longer enough to simply stick your brand onto a huge billboard and hope for the best. Engagement and efficiency are the name of the game for marketers now, and the best way to do so is by utilizing both practical and digital means of marketing your brand.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has never been more important today. It has become a critical component of any digital marketer’s arsenal of tools. It can achieve many things, including increasing traffic to your website, improving your brand’s visibility, and increasing your leads.

To do this, your business needs to undertake an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) strategy.  What is that, exactly? That’s what we’ll be learning today, as well as the benefits of using such strategies with your marketing plans, particularly for SEO enhancement.

What is Integrated Marketing Communications?

Integrated marketing communications is a method of promotion that basically means “multiple strategies working together towards a common goal”. It’s about covering all of your potential bases through a variety of mediums. For example, if you have a new product, your business should share it on flyers, social media, and billboards wherever possible.

None of these methods conflict with each other. In fact, they work seamlessly together. For example, a billboard could also feature a link that drives traffic to your website, or a website showcases where physical promotional events will be taking place.

Common IMC Strategies

IMC strategies have a few different approaches, but the end goal is always the promotion of the brand.

Pull Strategy

Pull strategies are typically used to make leads want a certain product or service. Sure, they may be aware of your product, but unless they have a reason to want it, that knowledge means nothing to you. What’s vital in this strategy is creating a demand for the product. Once the demand is created, you’ll next make sure the product is readily available in various channels. You may generate demand by increasing your visibility on multiple platforms.

Examples of pull strategies are advertisements, customer surveys, word-of-mouth referrals, or sales promotions. The main purpose pulls is incentivizing customers to buy and try your products out, first and foremost.

Push Strategy

The push strategy is specifically focused on making the customer aware of the product’s existence. They may want a specific type of product or service that you provide, and it’s your marketing imperative to let them know of your existence.

Today, two of the most effective push strategies for many businesses are UGC or user-generated content and affiliate marketing. UGC allows you to partner with influencers, so they endorse the product to their audience. The partnership may entail monetary cost, especially for huge influencers, but a product exchange will often do for smaller niche influencers like micro and nano influencers.  
On the other hand, affiliate marketing allows you to give a portion of the sales to people willing to put your products in their shops. It might shave off a small percentage of your profit, but the broad audience your product can reach can be monumental.  

The Importance of Tactics vs Strategy

Common push strategies include showrooms, product showcases, point-of-sale displays, and incentivizing retailers to stock your products.

Of course, both push and pull strategies are just the macro. IMC is all about using proper tactics to maximize the gains from your large-scale goals. Tactics are the tools with which your strategy becomes a reality. Examples of IMC tactics include:

  • Social media
  • Promotional events
  • Billboards
  • Flyers
  • Word-of-mouth

It’s important to know the difference between the two because they are the key to marketing success. Smart tactics will get you nowhere if there’s no real end goal, and an ambitious strategy will get nowhere if you don’t have the tactics to make it happen.

How to Utilise IMC with SEO

IMC and SEO are actually rather easy to blend. Good IMC strategies and tactics ought to use SEO in the first place anyway. Proper use of keywords is key to maximizing the search of your products The productivity of your team is dependent on clear planning. Here are a few ways to improve your SEO with IMC tactics:

Keep Keywords Consistent

Analyze all of the mediums you will be using to advertise your product. Ensure that the keywords you will be using on your online ads, billboards and flyers are consistent with the ones present on your main site and social media pages.

And if your product, for example, is SaaS, you need to implement an effective SaaS SEO strategy related to keywords which is the building block of SEO. It would be best to keep updated with the newest keyword trend by utilising the latest technology. This will ensure you drive sign-ups and increase your sales.

Incorporate the spirit of your brand into the content of your website. The tone of your physical ads should not differ greatly from the tone of your digital ones. When creating slogans, make sure to implement the keywords into its branding.

Keep Things Simple

When thinking of ways to broaden your brand, don’t get too deep into complex tactics that confuse the customers and your team. Keep content concise and headers even more so. Most people these days are bombarded with a ton of media, so you only have a few moments to grab their attention.

In those few seconds, you need to capture their attention. Everything else around the keyword should also support the statement. For example, if you are a tax-accounting agency, an article like “7 Ways to Maximize Tax Returns” is a simple, punchy, and catchy way to get people’s attention.

Engage The Leads

Once the above tactics have gotten the leads to click on your site, maximize the time they spend by having engaging, clickable content. As they read, make sure keywords or other services you provide are linked throughout the article in non-intrusive ways. This also extends to social media pages and e-mail blasts.

Conclusion

IMC strategies and tactics are crucial for remaining competitive in a digital world. There are so many avenues to extend your brand’s reach. For more information on how to up your marketing game, check out the articles on our marketing blog here.

Author: Chatty Garrate
Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a...

Get in contact

If you would like to know more about our services or would like to have a chat about our blogs please do get in touch below

Give us a call - a conversation doesn't cost anything: 0121 8203659