We’ve all read marketing articles that promise to revolutionize your business, based around impressive statistics and examples about how a big brand had success with a national campaign or a multi-million-dollar overhaul. But if your company is a small-to-medium-sized business (SMB), following in a major corporation’s footsteps might not be feasible. A strategy that works for a large business with hundreds of employees isn’t necessarily practical for a business with fifty, not to mention the fact that a public company and an SMB are going to have different material challenges, demands and goals.
SMBs shouldn’t settle for trickle-down techniques. Instead, they should look for strategies that are honed for their success, and that’s why this article is focused on demonstrating how integrated marketing can grow SMBs and produce more effective and efficient marketing plans.
And how do I know that integrated marketing works for SMBs? Because at Sagefrog, we’ve seen success by applying this technique and seeing objective gains in KPIs like conversions and growth rates. Take a look at real-world integrated marketing success stories to glean useful lessons applicable to SMBs.
How Neta Scientific Grew 3x the Industry Average
First, let’s look at how Neta Scientific, a laboratory supplies and solutions company, benefitted from a brand strategy overhaul and integrated marketing program.
Integrated marketing is centered on the buyer. Detailed buyer personas are the basis for a coherent, consistent brand voice and messaging that drives straight to what makes the most promising prospects tick. Neta Scientific saw transformative results with this business approach.
Neta came to Sagefrog as a growing business that had shifted toward larger and more complex services, but their brand and marketing still reflected a less sophisticated company with narrower, less ambitious targets.
Sagefrog applied an integrated marketing approach in developing a new brand for Neta, starting with newly developed corporate- and buyer-centric messaging. The corporate messaging included a clear mission, vision and positioning statement, which guided Sagefrog’s development of separate messaging platforms for Neta’s target markets, enabling respective messages to be geared to their unique needs.
With a refined brand and a thorough plan of action for Neta, Sagefrog developed the tools to bring its new identity into the world, with public relations campaigns, online and print advertising, tradeshow marketing, sales presentations and marketing materials all stemming from the new brand, the goals that formed that brand and the people those goals were designed to serve.
The result was across-the-board growth. Neta’s growth rate after Sagefrog’s integrated marketing approach was three times the industry average. The company also rapidly expanded in diverse markets, outpacing each market’s respective average with 18% growth in the academic market, 11% growth in the biopharma market and 54% growth in its life sciences portfolio.
The high growth rates across a broad range of markets are a concretization of Neta’s integrated marketing approach. Its consistent, broad success demonstrates how integrated marketing creates a universal yet refined and flexible appeal, communicating the full value of your service or product through a range of variously targeted messaging.
How Pinnacle ENT Acquired 1,700 New Patients
Although messaging is a critical first step of the Integrated Marketing Framework, no one part of the process is more valuable than the others. Without nailing the real-world application of your messaging, any brand planning you’ve done will be rendered irrelevant. That’s why it’s important that we delve deeper into how integrated marketing upgrades your messaging across all channels. To observe how integrated marketing makes your digital and traditional marketing work together, we can look at how Sagefrog helped Pinnacle ENT Associates increase engagement and patients with new marketing tools.
Pinnacle is the largest specialty ear, nose and throat doctor, allergy and audiology practice in the Philadelphia area, and its business is spread out over seventeen locations and divisions. Pinnacle sought Sagefrog’s help in finding new patients and deepening its relationship with the local communities.
To raise awareness with whole communities and bring in new patients, Sagefrog applied an integrated marketing plan that spanned multiple materials and channels, including traditional marketing through content and PR and digital marketing through web development and social media. Traditional marketing leverages the immediacy of real, physical interaction to build powerful relationships, while digital marketing creates efficient, consistent exposure with new levels of engagement. When used together, they can be powerful enough to reach all vectors of a community.
Sagefrog utilized content marketing and PR to increase patient and community engagement with quarterly newsletters and communications. We provided real incentive to engage by offering substantial content like health tips and trends and new treatment options. Sagefrog expanded the audience we were building by publicizing Pinnacle’s outreach efforts on social media.
Preparing to convert that primed audience into patients, Sagefrog gave website visitors the ability to schedule appointments online with a request form, updated the website to make it mobile-friendly and re-structured the site for SEO to make it easy to find. We didn’t just sit back and wait, however; we ran a targeted Google Ads campaign that led to customized landing pages that enticed prospects to convert.
The integrated marketing approach paid off for Pinnacle. The combination of tactics resulted in a 59 percent increase in organic search visits and a 15 percent increase in web traffic overall, with a 159 percent increase in its social media following. The increased visibility culminated in Pinnacle appearing in Philadelphia Magazine’s Top Docs list and on the cover of Suburban Life Magazine. Its community engagement and higher profile led to incredible marketing success, with 1,700 new patients in twelve months and a 99 percent return on marketing investment.
With both inbound and outbound marketing at play, Sagefrog got clients ready to convert, then pursued conversions and, at the same time, accomplished Pinnacle’s goal of deepening the business’s relationship with the community.
Share in Their SMB Success
Neta and Pinnacle demonstrate how businesses can benefit from two key aspects of integrated marketing. Neta experienced growth in all its target markets with a brand strategy oriented around its values and its desired relationship with the consumer. Pinnacle enjoyed a huge number of conversions and strong brand recognition with web development and an expansive but unified multi-channel marketing campaign. Both succeeded with an ordered, purposeful structure that made their brand cut through to the consumer, which demonstrates that integrated marketing can be transformative for SMBs no matter which stage or stages of the buyer’s journey could use improvement.
To read more about the success integrated marketing creates, check out Neta and Pinnacle’s full case studies, and if you’re interested in how an integrated marketing approach can help your business, contact Sagefrog. We’re happy to answer questions or provide a free audit of your business’s marketing. The audit will assess the performance of a marketing tactic of your choice—website, content, branding, digital marketing or your use of PR and social media. Find out how you’re doing on a particular channel and how you can improve it with a free marketing audit today.
