Some of the best known, most successful food brands have become so because they embraced social media early on and used the wealth of analytical data generated to optimize all of their marketing opportunities…they integrated their efforts.  An integrated marketing plan is the road map to managing a brand’s promotional efforts on paid, owned, and earned media channels.

To get the most out of advertising and marketing investments, here are the steps to develop an integrated marketing plan:

1. Define the purpose. The most common reason that marketing initiatives fail is because they were not born out of a well designed framework. The most basic question is this: why are you doing this marketing effort? The answers will lead to a clear definition of objective(s) and the strategies needed to achieve them.

2. Define the measures of success. Measures of success will follow from the defined objective(s). For example, if the objective is to create more brand awareness, a measure of success would be a 30 point lift in awareness, whereas an objective to increase sales would be measured by a 20% increase in sales volume. The measure of success will lead to the metrics to be examined. Each different objective will require its own set of measurement metrics.

3. Define the target audience. Use social media along with other traditional sources of audience data to examine consumer behavioral patterns. Online owned, earned and paid media data can be more easily analyzed through the use of dashboards.

4. Determine where the target audience hangs out online. If your target audience is fitness centric millennials, websites that cater to those interests would be candidates for media placement and targeted content.

5. Identify “influencers” and get to know them. These are the individuals who are active online communicators with a particular interest in your product category and brand. Establishing and maintaining open channels of communication with influencers can significantly expand your “sales force” through their brand advocacy and exposure.

6. Test for accuracy. Social media content that is  used to analyze target audience online behavior and messaging impact will include data you don’t want…spam, advertising, and other irrelevant or misleading information. Use a current version of a social media analytics application with the technological capability to filter out garbage data so that the resultant data set is trustworthy.

7. Define the brand’s position. Before effective messaging can be developed, brand positioning must be clearly defined. A thorough understanding of the brand and its consumers, as well as competitors, will determine its points of differentiation and, ultimately, its most effective message points.

8. Get ready to react in real-time.  Once a marketing campaign has been launched, monitoring performance through social analytics will provide real-time data and a real-time opportunity to react and make adjustments. Automatic notifications can be set-up when any unusual activity is detected that needs to be addressed quickly.

9. Measure campaign impact. Using a social analytics application and the measures of success previously defined, the overall impact of the campaign can be measured along with the impacts against specific benchmarks such as category and historical data. Measurement should also be made of paid and owned media as drivers of earned media to determine the ROI of media investments.

Following these steps will help ensure the development of an effective integrated marketing plan that maximizes the impact of all the campaign components.