Integrating marketing across different platforms and channels often presents several challenges. First, maintaining a consistent brand message can be difficult, as each platform may have unique requirements and audience expectations. Second, data fragmentation can arise, making it challenging to track and analyze performance metrics across channels effectively. Additionally, aligning teams and processes can lead to coordination issues, resulting in miscommunication and inefficiencies. Finally, varying technological capabilities among platforms may complicate the execution of unified campaigns.

It is crucial to have your brand present on various platforms, however, each platform has its unique features and audience, so it's essential to establish different goals and measurements for each. LinkedIn KPI would be different from Instagram, one can be more direct approach, while the other is for awareness, but it doesn't mean you need to focus on one, instead, you set different goals and measure them accordingly. Create a list of platforms by priority, determine your audience for each, align it with your brand and branding data, set goals for each platform, and how performance per platform would be measured. Having a clear goal and accurate measurement is crucial for obtaining reliable results and data you can depend on.

The "gotcha" here lies in creating useful performance goals and not just measuring behavioral activities. Too often, brands with no clear performance KPIs, just give up on creating real KPIs. EVERY brand, in my experience, can identify performance metrics if they are willing to be creative. Once you open up creative performance metrics, you may be surprised at what you learn is really important.

The brand's voice, including the tone and style of communication, is developed to reflect the brand's personality and values. Although various platforms offer diverse features and representation, brands must maintain a unified and consistent brand image, communication style, and representation across all marketing channels. Unfortunately, most brands struggle in this aspect. Defining and maintaining a unique set of visual elements is only a tiny part of the process. The message, the content produced or shared on a specific platform, is also part of the brand voice and identity.

The brand identity is clearly very important, but so is the approach of implementing this across all marketing channels. The brand guidelines should be very clear, strict, and provide specific instructions around adapting imagery or key brand messages for different campaign types or audiences. Also, do not forget about the internal adoption of the brand guidelines within your organization - invest some time in building internal brand awareness and perhaps build a group of 'brand champions' from different departments. This will be very important for maintaining the brand image.

There is a fundamental data layer missing most brands don't have but need to create a cohesive brand identity. Brands need data to understand which topics are worth investment - before they create assets or spend media dollars on. Without that topic data, brands wander just to find interesting content writers "think" is relevant to the brand's position. Way too much guesswork. Instead, with scorable topic data emerging from the core brand identity, a data-based, topic framework can be applied to virtually every marketing function; content development, SEO, channel partner marketing, sales, advertising, corporate social activities.

It's clear that LinkedIn and TikTok cater to different audiences, but there are even many other platforms that each have their unique audience. While LinkedIn allows for text-based posts, TikTok only allows for videos, Instagram primarily focuses on photos, and Twitter is known for short messages. The same type of content cannot be shared in the same format on each platform, and it has to be repurposed and altered to reach the desired audience and achieve desired results. To effectively prioritize and measure success on each platform, it's important to create distinct types of content, campaigns, and measurements.

This challenge is deeply affected by tech stacks that make measurement too complex. Just simply managing the marketing lead funnel & the sales funnel requires technical chops worthy of an engineering firm. This challenge is further complicated by all the user data that is hoovered up today. A lot of time is spent compiling, cleansing, anonymizing data while ensuring privacy best practices are being applied. The way to overcome this challenge is to hire a deeply technical outside marketing tech firm who understand how to knit all the pieces. Most companies are tempted to build that competency in-house but that is usually misguided because Brands should be experts at their core business – not marketing tech that changes a lot & often.

It's important to manage your resources and budget effectively across different platforms. Each platform requires its own unique strategy and resources to maximize its potential. By analyzing the performance and reach of each platform, you can allocate your budget wisely, ensuring a balanced and impactful marketing campaign. Each platform may have different goals and outcomes, such as sales, awareness, or sign-ups, depending on the brand's objectives. By regularly monitoring your expenses and ROI/ROAS, you'll be able to make data-driven decisions and optimize budgets.

Resource allocation and budget management are the backbone of successful integrated marketing. The ability to strike that balance between various media, paid, owned, and earned, while proving ROI is the key to sustainability. Leveraging automation tools for efficiency and data-driven decision-making is paramount in this fast-paced landscape. It's all about making the most of our resources to stay ahead and continuously improve.

Constant communication will enable alignment across your different products and channels. Issues will arise, it's key to be as transparent as possible and clarify expectations in order to resolve issues quickly.

Clear communication and teamwork is always critical to success. Developing good processes becomes essential to making sure your collaboration stays on track. e.g. a center place for documents, best practice guides for benchmarking and analysing performance.

The last but not the least, using data to further and constantly optimise your strategy and spends. This is where the real marketing game begins because gone are the days when execution was the metric of success, for all marketers now metrics is 'conversion'. Hence data largely helps in identifying loopholes in large scale, multi-level/channel integrated campaigns in fixing them as you go along for maximum impact and conversions.

Implementation of brand identity does not come only from the marketing team. Do work closely with your customer-facing professionals (sales, service, customer success, etc), and make sure that: 1. They are aware of the brand guidelines and the parts that are relevant to them (key brand messages, brand pitch, where to get logos, what not to do with powerpoint presentations, etc) 2. They are invested in feeding back to you information from the field. For example, how prospects or customers react to a key message, what they really like, who they compare you brand to, etc. This will help you pick up on any trends or big opportunities/risks quickly, and also build a brand champion mindset in the customer-facing team.