The art of integrating your marketing is easy if you keep it simple.  Our previous blog illustrated how your marketing activity should be linked by a common message – and integrated – to be most effective. An Appletree mantra: ad hoc marketing does not work.  Our primary focus when planning marketing for our clients is to integrate it.

Here’s an example of how we integrate marketing activities for one of our clients.

Each month we write and produce a newsletter, and a related series of blogs, using a combination of information to guide the subject matter, including keyword research and industry news.  This tells us what people are looking for on the internet, related to the service our client offers, and relates it to what is hot and topical in the industry at the time.  This gives assurance that the newsletter is going to be of interest and value to those reading it.

Once the newsletter and blogs are published they can serve as a really effective promotional tool for our client across many platforms, here’s how.

We create a newsletter web link and use it to update the resources page of our client’s website.  This is great for SEO and gives added value to the website on a regular basis – giving visitors a reason to use the website for valuable information.  The blogs are posted every week on their website.

We then create a shortened link to the newsletter web page, and link it to posts on various social media sites – LinkedIn and Twitter in particular.  This drives a different audience to the website, again on a regular basis.  A link to each blog with an update (using relevant keywords) is posted daily.

We also use a related video in each newsletter, which sit on both the client’s website and their YouTube account.  The videos are always full of tips and advice related to the newsletter topic, they are never self-promotional.   Not only do they give the newsletters greater depth, but they also work wonders for SEO.

We update all the social media sites for our clients, creating persuasive updates on a daily basis – something our client just does not have the time to do.  Yes – we write their tweets and status updates, the client just has to approve a monthly batch of them.  One objective here is to achieve good click through rates (CTR) for all posts, and therefore drive traffic regularly to their websites.  We also promote each workshop the client runs via their website and social media – each one of these is focused on the subject matter we use in the newsletters.  So you see, all the activity is linked by a common theme, one which has been researched, and delivered on a regular basis.

We manage this activity for our client consistently, based on their overall marketing strategy.  It gives them the certainty that their marketing is delivering on many levels: website visitors, client retention, prospect nurturing and ultimately lead generation.