Integrated Marketing Communications Build A Cross-Team Campaign

Integrated Marketing Communications Build A Cross-Team Campaign So you need to launch a brand new marketing campaign. Usually, these campaigns entail multiple moving pieces, a plethora of different channels, and a lot of contributors. The best approach to take is usually an integrated one i.e. integrated marketing communications. Your team will entail: A Graphic Design team to  help you attract your prospects with an amazing experience. Public Relations to help you communicate with + notify your fans and stakeholders. An Advertising team to help you introduce your campaign to thousands of NEW prospects. A Multimedia team to help you reach your audience well beyond the written word (think webinars, podcasts, videos, and beyond). A Social Media team to help you spread the word to your existing community of loyal fans. Product Marketing to help you connect the dots between the prospects you attract and the product or service youre ultimately selling. As wells as your own marketing team to  manage everything behind the scenes + make sure you hit every deadline. ^^^ I bet that just felt daunting. I know. Ive been there in a past life. So the questions become: How can you possibly get every teams management on board to collaborate across these teams most effectively? How can you get the time from the talent you need for the campaign to be as successful as possible? How can you manage the campaign execution process when you arent necessarily the supervisor of the folks helping you out? How can you keep every stakeholder (your manager, the teams managers, your cross-functional team members, and your higher-ups) in the loop at every  moment? Continue reading this blog post to  learn how to: Draft an integrated marketing communications campaign proposal to get approval from the teams management to use their resources and talents to make your project successful. Turn your proposal into a serious campaign game plan complete with campaign execution and launch timeline. Break  every piece of content on your timeline into realistically delegable workflows that will help you crush your deadline. Keep the campaign on track every step of the way with proven project management frameworks. Lets turn you into an integrated marketing communications mastermind, shall we? How To Make The Best Integrated Marketing Communications Campaign In The World With Multiple TeamsUse Marketing Campaigns  To Manage Every Campaign In Looking for an easy way to collaborate across multiple teams? One place where you (and everyone else) can see everything? Well Check out Marketing Campaigns in . First, create your campaign, add a color label, and select your start and end dates. Next, add each individual project that will make up your marketing campaign. You can add things like blog posts, infographics, social media campaigns, webinars the list goes on. When adding a new project to your marketing campaign, you can create a custom task list for everyone on the team to know what to do and when. Learn More:  The Most Effective [+ Amazing] Way To Organize Your Marketing Campaigns Download Your Integrated Marketing Communications Templates To Turn What You Learn Into Action Immediately Your kit that complements this blog post specifically includes: An integrated marketing communications campaign proposal Word doc template to help you get  every stakeholder on board. A campaign execution and launch timeline Excel spreadsheet template to help you plan when your resources will complete the content  within your project. A marketing workflow process checklist to help you translate content into efficiently  delegable tasks your resources will execute. Download it now. Its well worth it. Trust me.Download your free integrated marketing communications template bundle here:Draft Your Integrated Marketing Communications Campaign Plan Your plan will include three key parts: A creative brief outlining why you're taking on this project, the audience you're targeting,  the verbiage you'll use to attract those folks, and more foundational elements  that will help your team understand the purpose of the campaign. A content and promotion campaign timeline that outlines the phases of work completed toward the ultimate publish date. This helps you understand when your cross-functional team will complete the work for each piece of content within the campaign. A human resources plan your campaign needs to be successful. This includes the names of the individuals you'll need to pull from other teams to get your campaign completed. ^^^ It's easier than it sounds, and the benefits of doing this give you a solid starting point for a conversation with your manager (to get campaign approval), which you can then take to the other teams' managers to get their approval. Let's dig in. Write Your Campaign's Creative Brief The first thing to nail down is the why. Why are you taking on this campaign right now? Why will it be successful? Why will your audience prefer your campaign on this topic compared to your competition (how will yours be better)? Anything you can do to back up those answers with your own data will help you prove why your team should take on this project right now. ^^^ The most effective way to do that is by citing how your  new campaign idea reflects qualities from your most successful projects you've  already launched. You can do this for yourself by: Setting Goals in Google Analytics. Tracking which pieces deliver the highest number toward those goals with a Google Analytics  Custom Report. Analyzing the qualities within those successful pieces to include content like them in your new campaign. Follow the instructions here for the extreme details on setting all of this up for yourself. At this point, you'll also want to  outline: Your target audience: Keep it simple; this could be, "{Audience title/role}  who have issues with {insert challenge}." Or, if you're feeling the pressure from office bureaucracy for a little more polished understanding of your target market, use this free template to create your own persona  and include it in  your campaign plan. Goal: While you based this campaign on ideas you know have already been successful, this goal isn't necessarily about laying out the "numbers" of what your campaign will generate (though you could include  that in your campaign plan, too, if your business needs the data).  Instead, write what you aim for your audience to experience. For example, "Attract the right kinds of {audience title/role} who will be interested in {company name's} {product/service}." Call to action: One clear call to action per piece gives your audience way fewer distractions. For your campaign, that likely means the same call to action across all pieces. In your creative brief, this could look something like this: Sign up for your free demo. Now  lay out the verbiage your audience uses to describe the challenges they face that your campaign will solve. This also includes the language they'd likely use to find the content  you're publishing within the campaign. At , we call this framework talking points or speaking points. It's an exercise to help you connect the dots between what you want to market and what your audience cares about. To do this, you can look at: Audience and/or customer user surveys: If you survey your audience, there is a plethora of information to look through to understand the actual words people use to describe their challenges. If you haven't surveyed your audience yet, it's easy. Use a tool like Polldaddy or SurveyMonkey, and ask one simple question: "Why did you hire/choose {company name}?" Open-ended questions give your audience the freedom to describe the why, which gives you the literal words they use (which, in turn, makes for excellent marketing copy). Blog post comments:  If you publish blog posts, your audience likely leaves comments through your comment system like Disqus. Those are GOLD for you to respond back and ask why they found the information helpful. Use their words in your marketing copy. Social media interactions: When someone shares your content or mentions you, you have the opportunity to  respond. In that response, you can ask, "Why?" Why did they share? What challenge were they facing that your content helped them solve? Now it's time to connect the dots between the words your customers, prospects, and audience uses and your  campaign's value proposition. Again, you'll use another why framework. Let's say your campaign is for a new service offering for  integrates one frequently used system or application with another. Ask: Why does my audience care about this new service? Because {insert benefit they get}. Why does my audience care about this {benefit from previous answer}? Because  {insert benefit they get}. Why does my audience care about this {benefit from previous answer}? Because  {insert benefit they get}. Why does my audience care about this {benefit from previous answer}? Because  {insert benefit they get}. Why does my audience care about this {benefit from previous answer}? Because  {insert benefit they get}. It's kind of like a why rabbit hole. You ask yourself, "Why?" Then you keep asking yourself, "Why?" to every answer you come up with.