This series of blogs will provide insight into the techniques that Angels Media use to provide successful, cost-effective marketing campaigns for our clients.

We will hopefully illuminate how you can improve your business’ marketing, without the need for employing our services (as long as you have the spare time to dedicate to learning and implementing the various strategies).

It might seem odd that we are prepared to give away our knowledge and techniques, and potentially lose lucrative marketing contracts by showing others how to implement our trade secrets.

However, providing genuinely useful information is part of our own marketing strategy (and it is one that we suggest you implement yourselves – more of which later).

A term you will hear from us many times in this series is ‘position yourself as an expert in the field’. That is what, from our point of view, this article series is about.

Whilst we genuinely wish to provide our knowledge free of charge, our now-not-so-secret intention is, of course, to advertise the breadth of our services and to engage a number of our readers into contacting us directly to solicit our services.

Integrated marketing is a term that marketing companies use to make what they do sound incredibly sophisticated. In reality, it is a simple concept which states that all forms of marketing should have a unified message across all marketing channels.

Recently, with the growth of interactive and social marketing, experts have found ways of not only ensuring that a cohesive message is displayed across all mediums, but that the different mediums actually assist each other to create a more powerful marketing effort.

In order to avoid spending significant amounts of time and money on little return, all marketing should have a specific goal. What’s more, marketing should have several goals – an end goal and many smaller goals to ensure that you are moving towards the greater goal. At Angels Media we separate our marketing efforts into three distinct, but often overlapping categories: traffic generation, traffic conversion and client retention.

Traffic generation, from a digital marketing point of view, involves any activity that pushes traffic to your website. Typically, the traffic will come from social media, search engines and repeat visitors.

Traffic conversion is the process by which visitors landing on your site then get in contact with your company. This can be through contacting you directly, or by leaving their details for you to contact them.

The next most important aspect of converting traffic is the website itself. If the website is not modern and easy to use, you’re not going to create the impression that is required in order to convert traffic. Once this criterion has been satisfied, you can begin to implement strategies to engage visitors and ultimately encourage them to leave you their details. The best way to do this is to implement a clearly defined ‘call to action’ button, also known as a lead magnet, to draw the attentions of you r prospective clients.  

We use the term client retention to cover both the retention of actual clients, but also the re-engagement of those who have connected with you previously. Naturally, the practice of keeping existing clients has nothing to do with a marketing campaign, and everything to do with providing a good service.

However, there are a number of strategies that keep clients, and potential clients, engaged with you and that increase the chance of that client or potential client of providing you with repeat business.

For example, having a regular newsletter (like this one) helps keep customers informed of your latest developments and products but, perhaps more importantly, also helps position your business in a position of authority and experience, provided that the content is well written and presented.

So, that should give you more of an overall picture of what integrated marketing is and the rest of the series will cover more niche aspects of the content marketing process such as the integral but constantly changing role of SEO and the free promotional and traffic generating powers of social media.