Integrated Marketing is No Longer Enough: Why B2B Brands Need to be Synchronized

In today’s connected marketing environment—where the conversation never ends and every message can link across platforms—the integrated marketing model that guided marketers for decades needs to be upgraded to a far less linear approach. Many B2B brands have invested in evolving to meet the moment, some with greater success than others. In our view, however, the full potential for marketing to both acknowledge and enrich the journey of today’s B2B buyer has yet to be realized.

Let’s review integrated marketing, why it once worked, and why synchronized marketing is now essential for B2B engagement that drives value creation.

What is Integrated Marketing?

Integrated marketing is the strategic approach that aligns a company’s marketing channels and tactics—websites, social media, advertising, public relations, digital marketing, and more—to maintain a consistent brand message and prospect/customer experience. By ensuring consistency across platforms, from traditional media to digital touchpoints, it reinforces the brand identity and supports business objectives.

When integrated marketing was first introduced is hard to say, but it grew in popularity as media became increasingly fragmented. Traditional marketing experts (largely ad agencies) were looking for ways to leverage their expertise across the growing media landscape in return for a greater share of limited marketing dollars—and integrated marketing was born.

What has always been missing from the integrated marketing model, in our view, is a committed brand focus. It was never really media agnostic in practice. It largely centered on one advertising idea applied across other platforms. While innovative and effective when it first emerged, it no longer packs a bunch in the world that surrounds it and the journey of today’s B2B buyer.

The old integrated marketing model assumed a sequence like this:

1. Your target sees a print ad in Fortune or Businessweek
2. They visit your website
3. They request and attend your sales presentation
4. They experience your brand

But this no longer works. In today’s marketing environment, with easy access to information and all sorts of opinions, corporations don’t control exactly where or when customers or prospective customers encounter their brand. Social media upped the ante tremendously, turning marketing into an ongoing conversation whose location, start or finish is impossible to control.

In B2B, any of a number of entry points could lead to time spent reading a white paper on a microsite or viewing a video on your YouTube channel … and not necessarily in any controlled sequence. It is more critical than ever, then, that your B2B brand voice is harmonized across these touchpoints:

The need for going beyond integration in marketing only becomes more pressing. Lack of differentiation, constrained budgets, fragmented media, complex regulation and brutal competition have turned making the right recommendation to the C-suite into a contact sport for corporate buyers of multimillion dollar products and services.

It’s high time for B2B marketers to give them all the help they can. They need to think about marketing in a different way, starting with the language they use and what it means.

What is Synchronized Marketing?

Synchronized marketing is the strategic approach that ensures every touchpoint delivers a cohesive, dynamic and harmonized brand experience. Unlike integrated marketing, synchronized marketing is driven by a singular brand idea, not an advertising concept or slogan. It is simultaneous, not sequential—allowing marketing efforts to work together dynamically rather than following a fixed rollout. It continuously adapts to real-time customer feedback, digital engagement, and market shifts, ensuring the brand remains relevant and responsive.

Synchronized marketing aligns all marketing disciplines in real time, allowing each to contribute its unique strengths across:

• Digital journeys (websites, microsites, social media, mobile technology)
• Thought leadership
• Public relations
• Experience design that spans investors, prospects, customers and employees

If you think of synchronized swimming in the Olympics, all the swimmers orchestrate their moves simultaneously to create a much larger and more important image than any individual stroke. When done right, synchronized marketing strengthens every touchpoint in much the same way, energizing the brand. It serves to attract and retain the people who matter most, building the deep connections and enduring loyalty that drive value creation over time.

How to Synchronize Your B2B Marketing in Four Steps:

1. Keep the dialogue going and growing

As far back as Willy Loman, the best salesman was the one who could avoid the dead-end conversation and leave the door open for another day. Social media (not to mention 24/7 chatbots, getting better all the time at adhering to brand voice guidelines and brand experience principles) have raised opening doors to a higher level, becoming a meeting place for constituents to converse about a brand.

Today’s customers want to be engaged with brands—in fact, they demand it. By having a dialogue with them one on one, the best marketers know the payback can be lucrative. They are making their constituents into fans and part of the family.

A dialogue about a company’s product or service on Facebook, for instance, can spill over to X overnight, lead to a far-ranging conversation with thousands of voices and lots of feedback. By understanding the dynamic and keeping the dialogue going, smart B2B companies can lead the prospect through the conversation to the sales sweet spot: consideration for the short-list.

Let’s consider the example of a technology company introducing a new product to the business marketplace. They need to ramp up their education activity to be part of the conversation with prospects who need their solutions but are not as tech-savvy.

A good example is IBM’s effort to create a high profile in the complex conversation about cloud computing, adding clarity and understanding through simple language and compelling creative on every available communications channel. It was a far cry from Cloud Computing for Dummies to most of us. But in IBM’s high-end services world, its robust and synchronized educational efforts for its B2B collaboration network helped make it an industry thought leader and a magnet for prospects trying to make sense of it all.

2. Connect multiple platforms

Old-school barriers between a print ad, a TV commercial and making it into a prospect’s consideration set no longer exist. When marketing is synchronized and built on a solid brand foundation, all touchpoints feed each other, becoming connected in the web of conversation.

A print or clickable on-line ad can lead to a microsite where a corporate buyer can download a white paper or watch a You Tube video offering valued information and insight. Or an outdoor ad can invite corporate prospects to scan a QR code with their mobile device, which then takes them to a microsite with more information.

3. Invest in content marketing (aka the new black)

More and more corporate prospects are short-listing companies based on their ability to educate, clarify and give perspective to complex issues. As a result, CMOs are turning their firm’s intellectual property into a wide range of content, learning that it is the gift that keeps on giving as it unlocks access to the C-suite.

A scintillating white paper can be marketed with an HTML email campaign that leads prospects to a microsite featuring the white paper and perhaps a:

• Related video
• Bylined article in trade or business publication
• Webinar on a similar topic
• LinkedIn message
• Facebook post
• Insight (blog) post

The most effective content marketers have learned to synchronize their compelling and timely insights with their brand at each touchpoint, establishing them as thought leaders in their industry and opening the door to a meeting with the right C-suite decision makers.

4. Never forget employees

We’re big believers that brands are built from the inside out. Enlightened companies have always recognized employees as a critical part of their brand, so it is surprising how often they are overlooked as a significant communication channel to external audiences.

Employees are not only the face of the company in every interaction with clients and prospects. They are active on social, engage in business networking and of course, participate in society in general. Today businesses who empower employees with a compelling brand messaging platform—and help them to understand their importance in their companies’ and their own prosperity—can activate a consistently strong brand identity at thousands of touch points.

These companies understand that it is important to link brand strategy with brand behavior so that you not only talk the talk but walk the walk.

One of our clients, a fast-growing community bank, looked to expand by acquiring other community banks in new markets. Our research revealed its success was largely due to its high-touch, personal approach to business banking—something customers felt they couldn’t get from large national banks.

The bank’s challenge was to maintain its high-touch brand as it expanded into new markets and grew larger. To succeed, it had to align its expansionist business strategy with its brand strategy, leveraging its brand attributes across its growing enterprise, and importantly, to synchronize communications to employees along with its other audiences.

Significantly, it was important to engage branch managers to understand the high-touch nature of the brand and get them to apply the strategy to brand behavior at every customer touch point, from teller window to customer service desk to loan office.

By creating a high touch experience for customers and prospects (with personal dialogues, not one-way generic mailings or automated phone calls), the bank was able to leverage the success of the legacy banking institution and reach its business goals. Its secret weapon was its own employees—who walked the walk. They made the brand work in the real world.

Synchronize the Connection Between the Brand and Marketing Plan

In our high-stakes B2B world with its multimillion dollar accounts, successful synchronization must start with a committed brand focus, including a differentiated position, a compelling messaging platform with unique messages to critical audiences and a savvy synchronized marketing plan that connects all touchpoints that influence and persuade buyers.

And to create value, all must be implemented with as much precision and harmony as synchronized Olympians.

Want to discuss building your strong brand foundation and synchronizing your marketing? Let’s talk.