No matter what business you're in, it's never too soon to look ahead to the holiday season. While integrated marketing is an effective strategy throughout the year, crafting a marketing campaign that uses both TV and digital channels during the holidays is especially beneficial. You're able to reach shoppers in a cohesive way that allows screen-to-screen flexibility and, most importantly, more opportunities to convert.

Making the Leap From Screen to Screen

While you may find it challenging to reach consumers during that busy time from Thanksgiving through Christmas, an integrated marketing campaign can help you follow them from screen to screen and drive them from the TV to their computer, where they will ultimately purchase. You can craft broadcast ads that advertise limited-time deals, special offers like shipping discounts and event shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Green Monday. Forbes points out that sales are now strong across the entire holiday shopping weekend, from Thanksgiving night itself through Cyber Monday, rather than the frenzy traditionally reserved mainly for Black Friday, so make sure you highlight your sales for the entire weekend. Even if all these things don't automatically make customers navigate to your business' website when they log on, digital ads on social networking sites, shopping apps and even on popular deal aggregate sites can help increase ad recall and ultimately drive conversions.

Whether you have a small, single-location business or a growing midsize company, building brand awareness is a vital component of any marketing campaign. It can help turn one-time visitors into repeat customers who not only recognize your business as a provider of certain goods and services, but also see your brand as important in their lives.

TV, radio, and print advertising provides marketers with broad platforms capable of reaching thousands of consumers. Digital display and video help augment these marketing strategies and build brand awareness among targeted demographics with specific messages designed to increase knowledge and familiarity with the brand. These two approaches work particularly well in tandem, since one strategy alone simply isn't effective enough in today's media-saturated world.

Being seen everywhere is something most companies are trying to accomplish. What they (and you) may not realize is that you don't have to choose between digital advertising and TV, radio, or print advertising. You can do both and experience more success because of it. 

"Today we're spending less money, but we're reaching a lot more people." - General Sales Manager, Ferman Automotive - Tampa. 

One of digital marketing's greatest assets is that it allows advertisers to do just that - spend advertising budgets in really strategic ways that target the people most likely to make a purchase. In today's marketplace, the competition is tough, particularly for automotive dealers, so finding a digital marketing partner that can hone in on what will make your business stand out from the pack, reach more customers, and drive more sales is critical to success. 

Traditional advertisers have seen their industry change dramatically, as digital channels continue to rework the marketing landscape. Meanwhile, digital marketers and strategists often take an online-only view of their channels and dismiss traditional outlets as outdated strategies. But in fact, using an integrated marketing campaign is the most effective strategy for a variety of reasons. Integrated marketing recognizes the value of both traditional and digital advertising and uses a combination of both to optimize results and capitalize on audience reach. Consumers expect the same experience across screens and it is now more important than ever to make sure your message is consistent across platforms.

Why Integration Trumps a One-Dimensional Approach

There are many advantages and disadvantages to both traditional marketing and digital marketing. For instance, traditional marketing offers value that digital can't supply. It can serve as an effective location-based targeting platform as well as a macro-targeting tool. Traditional campaigns are also highly effective in creating brand awareness through mass marketing.

Are you trying to attract attention to your business? Though you might not immediately think that radio can augment a digital display-focused campaign, nothing could be further from the truth. You can bring your display and video marketing campaigns to the next level by using radio ads to create urgency and demand attention from consumers.

The "Window Shopping" Problem

Imagine that you own a car dealership. You promote your dealership through various active digital advertising campaigns that showcases new and used vehicles for sale. Your Web statistics look quite healthy, but your sales are not backing up your marketing efforts. How is this possible?

Millennials only care about their smartphones, boomers prefer to shop in store, and seniors are helplessly behind the technological times, right? You probably understand that things aren't really as black and white as that. The world is changing, and people — all people — are changing along with it, just in different ways. There are just as many ways for you to reach your customers, which is why an integrated marketing strategy is critical for your business.

Do Your Homework

Every business wants to reach as many potential customers as possible, but marketers can maximize efficiency by identifying just one or two demographics to focus on. Once you identify this sector, it is vital that you learn all you can about it. Although it might be tempting to generalize certain audiences (millennials only look at ads online, only those over 40 consume traditional media, etc.), it's important to perform some deeper research about the people you are trying to influence, as data can often subvert your expectations.

It can be an exhilarating experience to get that first real breakthrough on a marketing campaign. Whether a piece of content goes viral or a social networking channel passes a certain milestone, it feels great when you can demonstrate a proven success and count it as a reliable stream of revenue. However, just because you've found one marketing strategy that works, you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket.

Integrated marketing campaigns can help you grow your brand's presence even further. Though it can be tempting to devote all of your energy to a singular effort that has brought your business demonstrated success, investing your time to create an integrated plan will ultimately set the stage for long-term growth. Here are three key characteristics of any strong integrated marketing campaign.

In August 2014, Facebook launched its cross-device targeting tool for digital ads, as reported by AdExchanger, which sent a clear signal that the social media giant is becoming accepted by marketers as a way to measure and reach Internet users across smartphones, tablets and desktop computers. Cross-device targeting occurs when a brand identifies a visitor to its website and subsequently serves an ad to that consumer when they are browsing elsewhere on another device. If a person is perusing Kate Spade handbags from her work desktop on the Nordstrom website, for instance, she may see a Kate Spade banner ad for a sale on her mobile Pandora app.

The goal of cross-device targeting is to more closely follow the new customer journey, requiring multiple touches to influence purchasing decisions. Here are three ways the tool will change your digital advertising strategy:

When you're looking to increase search-driven traffic, it's easy to focus on a single element of your marketing campaign in the hopes of honing your overall strategy. However, by using SEO, SEM and traditional media together, you can organically drive search results and boost traffic, both immediately and over the long term.

Using Traditional Media to Draw Consumers In

Traditional media offers marketers a great way to spark initial consumer interest, which can lead to increased search traffic. Advertising through TV and other traditional media affords marketers the opportunity to pique consumer interest in a way that encourages search activity later on through the use of specific, search-engine-friendly keywords. MediaPost highlights the adults aged 25–54 demographic as one that is particularly inclined to perform searches after seeing an ad on television that contains easily searchable phrases and keywords and cites local news broadcasts as an area where ads looking to drive search results have been very effective. Though you certainly don't want to create ambiguous ads that don't give consumers enough information to care, it's important to craft ads for radio, print and television that invite the consumer to search for additional information in such a way as to lead back to you through a strong SEO and SEM campaign.