It’s that time again! Time to implement your integrated marketing communication plan for the upcoming year.
Or, perhaps it’s time to integrate the marketing communication you already have in place!
Either way, this guide was developed to get you thinking about what you are doing well and where your integrated marketing strategy needs a little work. Most importantly, it’s time to find ways to strengthen those weak spots so your marketing is as effective as possible in 2025!
But wait. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s begin with the basics.
What is Integrated Marketing Communication?
Integrated marketing communication is the art of aligning all your marketing channels to the same objectives and messages. With an integrated marketing communication effort, everything intertwines beautifully and works together to strengthen the power of one single element– your marketing message!
Organizations that have mastered integrated marketing communication saturate every outreach initiative with their brand. The organization’s voice and “look and feel” are identifiable throughout their integrated marketing communication, which includes multiple channels and initiatives.
You’ve probably noticed that some brands embrace integrated marketing communication by immersing you in their essence from the first encounter.
For example, when you walk through an airport, you can identify the Southwest Airlines gates because of their bright colors and consistent fonts. Even though their stores have different owners, brand identity is strong at Starbucks, too, from the calming yet hip interior décor to the branded cups that change with the seasons.
Such brands integrate their marketing efforts so every message they communicate through word and image is consistent throughout the organization.
Integrated Marketing Augments Your Efforts
Brands aren’t always easy to carry throughout the company, but integrated marketing communication should always be your goal.
Integrated marketing brings your message to a larger audience through multiple channels and stretches your marketing dollar by ensuring a broader reach for a single piece of marketing communication.
So how do you do it? Heading into 2025, we identified 25 things you can do to improve your integrated marketing communication for next year!
1. Review Your Strategy From 2024
If you had a marketing budget that you diligently spent this year, take a close look at the results. Examine where dollars were well spent and where you could reduce your expenditures (or increase them!) in 2025. If you don’t have such information, make sure you put processes in place to gather the data in 2025!
2. Adjust Your Target Audience (if necessary)
As organizations change, so often do their markets. If you’ve added new products and services in 2024, your organization’s marketing landscape has changed, with new markets for your products and services. Be sure to address new initiatives to reach those new audiences in your 2025 integrated marketing plan.
3. Set Your SMART Objectives
Never implement a marketing strategy without setting your objectives first. Make them SMART, an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, a good SMART marketing goal would be “to increase the prospects on our mailing list by 25% by the end of Q3.”
4. Examine the Competition
Every organization has its nemesis—the organization vying for the same target market. Examining the competition sounds like a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how few companies take time to do it. Compare your organization against the competition with an objective eye. What can you do to compete more effectively? How is your competition responding to the changing market more effectively than you?
5. Check Your Website Analytics
Businesses often have a bad habit of ignoring their website analytics. If you are one of those businesses, you are missing a rich source of marketing data. Website analytics reveal your site’s performance on critical metrics such as number of visitors to each page, clickthroughs from calls to action, time spent on the site, and demographics, like the location of visitors and whether they view your site on a computer or mobile phone. It’s essential to understand website user behavior because your website’s job is to drive sales, either directly through E-commerce platforms or indirectly through contact forms or relevant education about your company, products, and services. Website analytics can help you create shrewder marketing goals and a fruitful “to do list” for improving your website in 2025.
6. Perform a Social Media Audit
Many organizations view their social media accounts as “set it and forget it” assets. However, as your audience and organization change, so may the way your followers engage on your social media. Take a critical look at your social media platforms and gauge the frequency and engagement of your audience on each one. This will help you determine which platforms to prioritize for posting and advertising in 2025. Short on ideas? Find some here.
7. Check Your Website Content
Your website is the clearinghouse for all organizational information, from your hours of operation to your services and charity involvement. Heading into 2025, ensure your website content is complete, accurate, engaging, and well-organized. It should also encapsulate your organization’s most critical marketing messages. If it comes up short, consider a website refresh.
8. Use AI… But With Caution
Tools like ChatGPT and Jasper are great for accelerating your ability to brainstorm, research, and organize new content. Just be careful to fact-check and carefully edit AI text for the right brand voice, tone, and message.
9. Check Your Visual Identity
Compare your website to the site of competing organizations. Do you look like a contender or a tired hack? Your visual identity should respond to the expectations of your marketplace. The tweak of a logo, a website design refresh, or a presence in a new place online can raise your profile. Your visual brand should be identifiable wherever it is relevant.
10. Audit Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your position in Google matters. If your organization is not ranking where you would like in the search engines, look closely at your search engine optimization on and off your website. SEO specialists can guide you in identifying keywords and strategically placing content that can move you up the Google rankings.
11. Analyze Your Brand
Kentucky Fried Chicken rebranded to KFC. Dunkin’ Donuts is now Dunkin’. Rebranding reflects a shift and triggers updated and reimagined integrated marketing communication efforts. If your organization’s marketing communication is not reflecting its authentic brand, it may be time for a change. Rebranding with a different mission, message, or even company name may augment your integrated marketing efforts.
12. Critique Your Marketing Messages
As a content-focused marketing firm, we believe in having the right message for your communication efforts. Stand back from your marketing messages and ask yourself if they are accurate and compelling for your target market. We highly recommend seeking an unbiased, experienced, expert opinion on your messaging.
13. Check Your Budget
It’s no big secret that integrated marketing communication is an investment and substantial line item in the company budget. Make your decisions based on the performance of your 2024 marketing and the promise of new initiatives that have been successful for others in the past. Allocate dollars for the tried and true integrated marketing communication efforts but save some for the experimental and innovative, as budget allows.
14. Create Content
Creating original content is an incredible tool for boosting your integrated marketing communications. Consider your marketing funnel and what kind of information your audience wants and needs within each phase of the buying process. From this analysis, you should have a list of potential blog topics and other content ideas that will be desirable and valuable for your audience.
15. Repurpose Your Content
Repurposing your content means sharing or restructuring your content for redistribution to your different marketing channels. It’s the best way to get the most bang for your content buck. One blog can be repurposed as a newsletter article and social media post. The main points of a blog can be developed into an infographic or even a video presentation. Ideas are endless and only constrained by the marketing channels you have in place!
16. Nurture Your Mailing List
Your mailing list is a tremendous asset to your organization. Be sure that you have a straightforward sign-up procedure in place on your website and other touchpoints where you engage with prospects and clients. Check if your mailing list is correctly segmented for your marketing communication needs. Check your analytics, too, to see how the newsletter is performing, and keep a “clean” list of active subscribers.
17. Consider Marketing Automation
Can you automate your sales process for efficiency? With AI, chatbots, appointment schedulers, and other helpful technologies at our disposal, a small investment can pay for itself by freeing up human resources, increasing productivity, and nurturing customer relationships.
18. Engage the Organization
Management must remember that some of their best ambassadors for an organization are within the organization’s ranks. Share the company’s successes with the employees, plan celebrations for well-done jobs, and encourage them to share the organization’s social media posts.
19. Launch a Lead Generator
A sure way to add prospects to your mailing list is to create a lead generator, like a valuable piece of content your audience will appreciate. Then, set up a landing page with a professionally designed whitepaper, report, or guide (like this one!) that people can download if they provide their email. Your prospects receive a piece of valuable content; you begin establishing a relationship.
20. Plan Webinars or Online Events
Are you planning any in-person or online events next year? Now is the time to get them on the calendar and create a mini-marketing strategy for each one that makes sense for your organization and industry. Consider online trainings, lunch and learns, open houses, exhibit opportunities, community outreach events, etc. Fire up your integrated marketing channels to promote them effectively.
21. Plan Event Participation
If it is standard for your organization and industry to attend and/or exhibit at trade shows, open houses, and other in-person events, now is the time to decide which ones and get them on the calendar. Create a mini-marketing plan for each one, deploying your integrated marketing communication efforts to promote your participation at the event.
22. Spread your News
As you consider your budget for 2025, think about the milestones your organization will achieve in the coming year. Plan to write and distribute a press release as part of your integrated marketing communication to share your milestone with the community. Accompany it with a beautiful, relevant image.
23. Showcase Your Thought Leaders
Within your organization there are probably brilliant minds and decades of experience and industry knowledge. Showcase one of your respected subject matter experts with an authored thought leadership piece, a guest blog spot, personal interview or Q&A column. Secure podcast interviews for your most loquacious leaders. And don’t forget the granddaddy of all thought leadership –a book. With a ghostwriter, it can come together more easily than you think!
24. Consider Video
It may be easier to write a blog than create a video about the same content. However, when it comes to engagement, video is king. Video helps an audience retain 95% of the message as opposed to only 10% from the written word. As part of an integrated marketing communication plan, video can educate, persuade, inform, or motivate your audience about your organization.
25. Identify Your In-House and Outsourced Needs
Marketing departments are getting smaller these days, and an outside consultant, marketing specialist, or content writer can focus your efforts, prepare an integrated marketing communication strategy, and then fulfill it. You have many options. Full-service help is available from an agency, while plucky freelancers can provide a variety of siloed services (graphic design, content, web development) for a one-time project. Then there are experienced, resourceful marketing professionals that can function as an outsourced CMO to help you fulfill your marketing plan. Whichever direction you take, make sure that all of your marketing communication pieces are heading in the same direction!
Do More In 2025!
We hope this guide has inspired you to explore different paths or recommit to the ones you have established in your organization’s marketing.
Whatever is necessary to make the most of your 2025 integrated marketing communication, we hope you find it and have a successful marketing year. Remember, images, messages, and marketing channels are more powerful when they are working together!
If we can help you develop or fulfill your 2025 marketing goals, please contact us to discover what Big Ideas can do for you.
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