Email marketing and social media are elementary components of every online marketing mix. However, email marketing and social media are not only efficient as individual tools, but offer a number of possibilities to mutually complement each other. Part of this is the synchronisation and hierarchisation of the message content. We will show you how to integrate content in both channels.
The objective of content integration of email marketing and social media content is to synchronise the messages with each other, which are communicated via both tools. It is necessary to sort the messages to be communicated in a hierarchy within your company. From a general message, which represents the whole company, you can derive messages for each tool. Messages can be put into hierarchy according to the communicative central idea, core statements and individual statements.

Communicative Central Idea as Starting Point of All Communication

In the communicative central idea, the task set by the company or the benefit, its activities are to provide the relevant target groups, manifests itself. For logical reasons, this communicative central idea orients itself  towards the vision, or mission of the company and may even be identical. The central idea should be formulated in an abstract way so that it has relevancy for every target group and can be communicated via every communication tool. You should be able to derive all further communication messages from this central idea. Examples for central ideas would be “We want to be innovation leader in the market with all our products” or “We see ourselves as an international service provider, whose solutions satisfy the demands of all our stakeholders at any time.” The central idea can be supported by consistent design elements, such as logos or font types.
In the next step, we will derive core statements from the communicative central idea. Core statements orientate themselves towards the different target groups of the company. They formulate the performance promise to the respective target group. A core statement for the target group end customer would be “We offer our customers the best service for our products with satisfaction guarantee.” An example for a core statement for the target group “public institution” would be “We are cooperative with our public contacts and support them in the realisation of their initiatives.”
The most concrete type of message can be found on the level of individual statements. Individual statements contain concrete arguments, which should be substantiated by the core statements. These statements are formulated for individual communication measures. Individual statements  must not only be derivable from the core statements, but also be consistent with each other.

Guarantee Consistent Communication

When the communication messages are defined and put into hierarchy, the tools to communicate these messages can be determined. Each message can be assigned individual tools. The hierarchical derivation of all messages from the central idea guarantees consistent communication throughout all levels and tools. How the content of the tools is designed depends on the chosen strategy and the resulting hierarchy of tools. With a conditional relation – the goal of one tool is based on the goal of another one – between email marketing and social media, for example, you could communicate a specific individual statement in a social media campaign, while email marketing may “only” be used to promote this campaign. In a successive relationship – tools are employed time-delayed – in which social media marketing is first used, possible user generated content (e.g. product promotions) from social media platforms could later be integrated in emails.
By means of a suitable dialogue marketing software it is possible to output integrated content in email marketing and social media communication together. Emails, as well as social media items, are created and sent in the same software environment. This allows you a comprehensive success tracking of both tools in a common dashboard. Not only autonomous performance figures for both channels are shown, but also their interaction. If an email, for example, links to a social media campaign, you can determine how many clicks in social media were generated after clicks in the email. Personalised profiling makes it possible to allocate a response from the email marketing, as well as the social media marketing to each user within a profile. The software also enables you to install tool-wide triggers. These may, for example, trigger the automated sending of an email when a specific target in social media is reached.

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