What It Is and How to Adopt it In Your Marketing Strategy

Whether we realize it or not, we’re surrounded by integrated media planning.

For example, a few months ago, I was driving to the airport and saw a billboard for Kim Kardashian’s company, SKIMS. A week later, I saw ads on Instagram and a SKIMS segment on “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”

I had one of those moments where I thought, “SKIMS is everywhere!” and soon, when I was shopping for shapewear for my wedding, guess what brand I thought of? (Spoiler alert: it was SKIMS).

Integrated media strategy made this possible. Below, we’ll dive into what integrated media planning is and how to adopt it in your marketing strategy.

Already know what you need? Jump there with this table of contents:

Table of Contents

For the purposes of integrated media planning, some find it helpful to divide channels into three buckets: paid, earned, or owned.

Paid Media: As the name implies, paid media is media where you pay for exposure. Think sponsored social media posts, billboards, retargeting ads, TV commercials, or paid search results.

It is typically used to expand your brand awareness, get more clicks, and generate more traffic.

Need help tracking and organizing your media planning and media buying? Our free paid media template can help.

Earned Media: This is media or content you didn’t ask for but can benefit from. It’s any material written about you or your business that you haven’t paid for or created yourself, like magazine features/articles, television or radio interviews, or reviews. Some often call it “publicity.”

Like paid media, this can help build awareness and generate more interest and sales, but you don’t have any control over the messaging. It can be positive or negative.

Owned Media: Owned media is made up of channels you’re in full control of. Think of content for your company website, blog, and social media accounts. You determine what’s said and how it’s presented.

The decision about which specific blend of these is the task of an integrated media planner.

Integrated Media Planner

An integrated media planner makes all media planning decisions based on buyer personas, competitor analysis, reviews, and social listening.

From this, the planner learns the best course of action that will help their marketing meet business goals.

They choose the most effective channels and types of media (paid, owned, earned, etc.) and consider when and how frequently content will show up on each platform.

For example, perhaps you’ll post Instagram stories around 5-7 p.m. when your audience is home from work, and you’ll plan a radio spot for the morning, around 6-9 a.m., to reach your commuting audience.

Either way, deciding when and how often a piece of content will appear is an important aspect of an integrated media planner’s job, and ‌this happens during integrated media planning.

Why is integrated media effective?

Integrated media is effective because it doesn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Rather than leaning into one or two channels, it experiments and brings together the best options to achieve your goals.

It also capitalizes on the power of repetition.

Remember my SKIMS story? Over the course of several months, I was hit with content for the brand multiple times before actually taking action and making a purchase. And that’s how it goes for a lot of people.

A recent study found that consumers can take anywhere from one to a whopping 50 touches to take action, depending on their current stage in the buyer’s journey.

A good integrated media strategy establishes a wide variety of these touchpoints to foster this kind of experience and meet people wherever their attention is.

But, as you might guess, this isn’t easy.

Challenges of Integrated Media Planning

Like all good things, integrated media has its share of challenges. Three of the biggest are attribution, cost, and resourcing.

• Attribution: With so many channels coming together, it can be difficult to know what to attribute “credit” for conversions and sales. This makes it hard to know what mediums are really most effective and what should be cut.

  Tracking links, cookies, and attribution reports like HubSpot’s can help if you use Marketing Hub, but ambiguity just comes inherently with the strategy.

• Cost: Investing in many different channels isn’t cheap. Hiring specialists to put together effective strategies or creative can stretch any budget. Not to mention the built-in costs of paid mediums.
• Resourcing: Monetary costs aside, developing and running a lot of different strategies is just demanding on team time and effort.

But if you can navigate these issues, how do you get started?

Just like any marketing campaign, you should have SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) written down so you can develop a strategy.

Why exactly? HubSpot’s Lucy Alexander explains, “The SMART acronym is a framework that will enable you to write goals that drive greater impact. Write goals with these aspects in mind, and you’ll be able to quantify how far you’ve come and how far you have left to go against your goal.”

“When you reach each milestone you articulated, you can celebrate knowing that you achieved something tangible and impactful.”

When it comes to integrated media, perhaps you want to reach a certain amount of people in a certain amount of time. Or maybe you’re just looking to increase brand awareness among a new market.

No matter what it is, write down your goals and objectives so you can track your performance.

2. Zero in on your target market.

This goes hand-in-hand with your goals, but who do you want to reach with your integrated media strategy? Zero in on this to identify the mediums and platforms you need to tackle to get in front of them.

Research your target market. Document demographic information such as income, education, and gender, as well as pain points and goals. You need to know what’s important to your audience, what their lives are like, and what problems they have to know what your messaging should look like.

To make this process easier, think about your customer journey.

If your company has a buyer persona, or perhaps even a few, then this step should be pretty easy for you, but if you don’t, now’s the time to get some clarity and organize the details. Our free buyer persona templates can help.

3. Choose your media outlets.

This is the bread and butter of integrated media planning: deciding where to conduct your marketing campaign.

It can be stressful. In fact, according to HubSpot Research, the number one challenge marketing professionals face is determining which platform (or platforms) they should invest in.

But truly, you just need to go back to the facts.

Based on your target audience, what do you need to include? Where do you need to be? Ask yourself, “Where does my audience want to consume content?” and “What type of content do they want to consume?” and see what the data says.

If you’re trying to reach Gen Z, perhaps that’s TikTok and Instagram. Boomers? Television ads and Facebook may be your best bet. Look at your persona research and data you have from previous campaigns and choose at least three channels to get started with.

HubSpot Research has actually found that 81% leverage more than three channels.

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HubSpot’s Flori Needle breaks down how to audit your existing paid, earned, and owned media outlets in this article.

4. Produce the creative.

Now, here’s the fun part.

Write the copy, design the graphics, and take the pictures. Your creative elements should follow your brand guidelines and tell a story about who you are as a company.

To keep your workload easy, you might consider creating adaptable marketing assets that can be used for several channels or tapping into AI tools like ChatGPT or HubSpot’s Breeze to help you get started.

5. Launch

This is self-explanatory, but hit the launch or publish button and start seeing how the world responds.

6. Analyze.

After some time, you need to evaluate. Answer questions like, “Which channels worked best?” and “Did I strike the right balance between various media platforms?”

Once you’re armed with this information, you can incorporate it into your future campaigns.

However, don’t forget to let your strategy play out. Don’t switch it up so quickly that you don’t know how it will perform over time.

Some campaigns include both short-term and long-term strategies and goals, so it’s important to see the impact before changing it out.

In 2023, after some of their redesigns from the year prior proved controversial, candy brand M&M’s put its beloved “spokescandies” on pause indefinitely — at least that’s what they wanted people to believe.

Rather than let the commentary silence them entirely, M&M’s wove an intricate integrated media campaign centered around the backlash.

It launched commercials (including one during the Super Bowl seen below) highlighting the lives of the spokescandies without their day jobs, billboards, social media content, and even unique elements like an eBay page where “Red” sold merchandise from his former career.

Eventually, the spokescandies “returned,” but the campaign has been lauded, earning 25.2B impressions overall and leading to the brand’s highest January and February sales ever.

2. Spotify Wrapped

While they rubbed some fans the wrong way this year, Spotify Wrapped is overall one of the best-integrated media campaigns out there.

It starts with a personalized in-app experience but is promoted with social media ads, billboards and transit ads (or out-of-home ads), and of course, all of the user-generated content shared upon its launch.

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They even have content specific to artists, podcasters, and other creators.

3. Wicked Movie

If “Barbie” was the integrated marketing darling of 2023, “Wicked” certainly took the crown in 2024.

The motion picture adaptation of the Broadway musical left no stone unturned when it came to promotion.

It pulled all of the traditional levers of television and digital trailers, posters, billboards, interviews, and event appearances but also went wild with product collaborations.

Some of their creative endeavors included:

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It also went for big in-person spectacles like illuminating the Empire State Building in New York City and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The integrated marketing and media campaign stretched the limits to some, but considering it raked in more than $400 million worldwide in its opening weekend alone, I’d say it was money well spent.

4. Baboon to the Moon’s CDMX

Baboon to the Moon sells bags for people to use on their adventures, from small weekend getaways to intense backpacking trips. It used integrated marketing to advertise one of its limited-run lines that pays homage to CDMX (Mexico City).

It created marketing assets for three different marketing channels (email, Instagram, and website, respectively) that are cohesive in images, copywriting, and editing style.

Regardless of the channel audiences are reached on, every single ad tells a story about the same thing — the CDMX collection.

5. NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest

NPR Music runs a segment called Tiny Desk, where artists perform live acoustic sets from what appears to be a crowded office. The content gets shared on the NPR website as well as YouTube, with clips also being shared on Instagram.

Every year in recent years, NPR has also launched an annual #TinyDeskContest. In it, undiscovered artists from the public can submit an original song for a chance to win a Tiny Desk concert.

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To advertise the contest, it creates an integrated media campaign with a landing page, Instagram Stories, and YouTube videos, among other things.

The Tiny Desk series is multi-faceted and reaches a very wide audience.