What is an integrated marketing campaign? Examples + AI tips

Marketing leaders are under more pressure than ever. According to our research, 92% report rising campaign demands, while only 25% say they have clear visibility into ROI. With fragmented tools and growing content workloads, the need for a more integrated, insight-driven approach has never been more urgent.

Enter the integrated marketing campaign (IMC): a cross-channel strategy that delivers a unified message, boosts brand visibility, and drives measurable business outcomes. In this guide, you’ll learn how to build high-impact IMCs using AI-powered strategies, real-world examples, and tools that streamline execution.

What is an integrated marketing campaign?

An integrated marketing campaign is like a well-choreographed dance. It brings together different marketing channels to send a unified message to your target audience. Unlike isolated, single-channel campaigns, IMCs create a cohesive narrative across touchpoints.

If you’re worried about bombarding customers with your messaging, don’t be. According to the Marketing Rule of 7, it typically takes multiple, separate touchpoints before a customer is ready to purchase, and if that customer is new to your brand, the consistency you build across various channels helps build trust, improve brand recognition, and drive higher conversion rates. 

Benefits of integrated marketing campaigns

Streamlining integrated marketing communications offers significant advantages over isolated marketing efforts. When properly executed, they reduce the risk of duplicate efforts while amplifying your message and impact.

Reach a broader audience

Consider that people aren’t necessarily looking at every channel. By leveraging multi-channel marketing, your message reaches a broader, more diverse audience than via single-channel approaches, increasing brand exposure and potential customer acquisition.

Create a consistent brand image

Uniform branding elements, messaging, and visual identity across all touchpoints foster stronger brand recognition and build trust with your audience over time. Why? Because your audience will know what to expect each time they encounter or engage with your brand.

Improved ROI through asset optimization

Consistent branding enables efficient repurposing of digital assets across channels, reducing production costs and valuable time while maximizing content value and improving overall marketing spend efficiency.

Increased market authority

Delivering valuable, consistent content across multiple channels builds credibility and positions your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

Better customer experience

Cohesive campaigns provide clarity and consistency for audiences about who your brand is and what you can offer. The message is unique to your brand, and aligned wherever it’s viewed—whether someone is watching a video on YouTube, reading an email, or visiting a physical store.

How AI is transforming integrated marketing campaigns

AI is rewriting the rules of integrated marketing—making it faster, smarter, and a lot less chaotic. From AI project management to AI content marketing, it helps teams pinpoint the right audiences, personalize content that actually resonates, and launch across channels without the usual delays or approval gridlock. What used to take weeks now happens in minutes.

Take Airtable, for example. With just a simple brief, AI can spin up multiple campaign ideas—tailored by region, channel, and audience. It can even draft copy and generate visuals on the spot. And behind the scenes, AI keeps things humming: optimizing budgets, flagging blockers, and surfacing real-time insights so you can course-correct fast. It’s like having a tireless campaign manager that never drops the ball.

How to use AI for integrated marketing campaigns 

There are many ways to apply AI to plan, build, and support effective marketing campaigns. Increasingly, in 2025 and beyond, marketing teams will incorporate AI-powered marketing tools to bring insights-driven campaigns to life faster and with deeper personalization. AI can assist at every phase, helping teams plan, execute, optimize integrated campaigns, and report on their success.

Campaign planning

Many marketing campaigns often begin with an idea, but typically not with data-driven insights. The difference in a campaign’s success can be stark. AI’s ability to recognize patterns and quickly generate insights offers a great starting point for any team. Use AI to review survey or market research data, sales call transcripts, competitor information, and channel trends. The output can help shape both your campaign messaging and tactics.

Prioritization

AI can help align your campaign and team priorities to wider business objectives and OKRs. AI can help assess dependencies between teams and the impact of the highest-value activities. Some tools also enable you to route work to the right teams based on skill sets and team bandwidth. Create workflows that work for everyone.

Production

AI can summarize insights from longer reports or documents to quickly create things like campaign briefs and product requirement documents. Of course, generative AI apps and agents can also create drafts of written content, generate images or video (and even review for brand adherence, flagging content that may need human eyes). This helps accelerate channel-specific content variations and ensures that they align with your brand identity.

Distribution

Some aspects of integrated marketing campaigns are less flashy. Once the creative is done, there’s the reality of translation and localization, and organizing and tagging content into your digital asset manager (DAM)—all of which some AI tools can help with, thankfully, including notifying key stakeholders when an asset is ready for use in a specific market.

Measurement

It can be easy to get lost in the numbers, especially when each marketing team is tracking its own metrics. AI can help your marketing team take a step back and look at IMC performance holistically, from analyzing and summarizing high-level performance across regions to summarizing sentiment to measuring overall campaign effectiveness. 

What is the integrated marketing strategy planning process?

Developing an effective integrated marketing strategy requires a structured approach that aligns team goals, audience insights, and channel optimization:

What are the elements of an integrated marketing strategy?

A comprehensive integrated marketing strategy incorporates the following elements, working together in service of your campaign objectives:

Brand positioning and messaging: No IMC should be built before establishing clear brand positioning that clearly differentiates you from competitors and resonates with your target audience. Develop core messaging pillars that can be easily adapted across all marketing channels.

Optimized channel mix: Select the optimal combination of digital and traditional marketing channels based on your audience research, budget constraints, and campaign goals. Common channels include social media, email marketing, content marketing, paid advertising, events, and public relations.

Content strategy and asset library: Create a centralized content strategy that includes various formats (blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts) that can be repurposed across channels. Build and manage a comprehensive asset library for consistent brand representation.

Customer journey mapping: Map the pathways you are creating for the user from awareness to conversion and retention. For each channel or asset, it’s important to identify the logical next step to bring a customer deeper into the funnel.

Technology and automation: Implement marketing technology tools that enable cross-channel campaign management, data integration, and performance tracking. Consider platforms that offer unified analytics and workflow automation.

How to build an integrated marketing campaign: 5 steps

Creating a successful integrated marketing campaign requires systematic planning and execution. Follow these five essential steps:

1. Set measurable goals and objectives

Start by defining specific, measurable goals that align with your broader marketing plan. Examples include increasing brand awareness by 25%, generating 500 qualified leads, or boosting sales by 20% within a specific timeframe. Ensure that objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

2. Define and research your target audience

Conduct thorough market research to understand your audience's demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and preferences. Use data analytics, customer surveys or interviews, and social listening to build comprehensive buyer personas. Identify where your audience spends time online and offline to inform channel selection.

3. Develop your channel strategy

Evaluate various marketing channels and determine which combination will most effectively reach your target audience. Consider each channel's unique strengths—for example, social media for engagement, email for nurturing, or paid search for intent-based targeting. Create a channel matrix that outlines messaging adaptation for each platform. Individual channel tools may help optimize timing or other channel-specific factors. 

4. Think: scalable, adaptable content

Put your effort into producing high-quality content that can be adapted and repurposed across multiple channels. This includes creating modular content assets like proprietary reports and research, educational long-form written content, or live event presentations or media (video, podcasts) that can be leveraged and customized for different platforms and audiences.

5. Implement systems to help track and optimize

It’s vital that marketing teams invest in robust measurement frameworks and analytics tools to track performance across channels. Monitor key metrics aligned with your campaign objectives and regularly analyze data to identify optimization opportunities. Implement A/B testing protocols to continuously improve digital strategy performance.

9 integrated marketing campaign examples 

Let’s take a look at some successful IMCs, including what worked well in each example. 

1. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign

Coca-Cola personalized bottles with popular names and phrases, creating a unified campaign across TV commercials, print advertising, and social media. The strategy emphasized user-generated content by encouraging consumers to share photos of their personalized bottles and to share their beverage with someone special. Coca-Cola sales rose by 11% in the U.S. alone and 1.25 million more teens tried Coca-Cola than the previous summer — and as of 2025, the brand is bringing it back.

2. Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign 

Nike's enduring campaign leveraged television, print, digital advertising, and athlete endorsements to deliver a consistent message of determination and achievement. The campaign's longevity demonstrates the power of consistent messaging and staying true to core brand values. Subsequent campaigns, including “Find Your Greatness” have also been very successful.

3. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign 

Dove challenged traditional beauty standards through TV commercials, print ads, social media, and a dedicated website celebrating diverse women of all ages, sizes, and ethnicities. The campaign resulted in increased perception of the brand being feminine and a 10% increase in revenue. The integrated approach rejecting conventional beauty standards consistently conveyed authenticity and inclusivity across all touchpoints. In 2025, Dove remains committed to addressing unrealistic beauty standards and its new campaign, “The Code,” addresses beauty in the age of AI.

4. Airbnb’s “Live There” campaign 

Airbnb positioned itself as an alternative to traditional accommodations through TV advertising, digital marketing, social media, and user-generated content. The campaign encouraged travelers to "live like a local," appealing to desires for authentic travel experiences while differentiating from competitors, increasing brand awareness, and driving bookings. In summer of 2025, Airbnb is launching a new brand campaign focused on Airbnb Experiences, rather than vacation rentals, still in line with the company’s messaging about making personal connections.

5. Apple “Shot on an iPhone” campaign 

Apple has long demonstrated integrated marketing excellence through coordinated product launches that span keynote presentations, digital advertising, retail experiences, and media coverage. This iconic campaign leveraged user-generated content, supported by out of home advertising, endures today even though it debuted back in 2015. The campaign aligns with Apple's minimalist aesthetic, but is also aspirational for consumers.

6. Spotify’s “Wrapped” campaign 

Spotify's annual "Wrapped" campaign creates personalized, interactive experiences that reflect a user’s music journey throughout the year and that encourage social sharing. The campaign integrates data visualization, social media optimization, and email marketing to create viral, user-generated content that reinforces brand engagement. 

7. Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign 

Old Spice revitalized its brand through an integrated campaign featuring humorous video content, social media engagement, and traditional advertising. The campaign successfully repositioned the brand for younger audiences while maintaining consistent humor and messaging across all channels.

8. The Rhizome Collaborative's Valley Cultural Foundation Contest

The Rhizome Collaborative successfully managed an integrated "battle of the bands" competition by combining website integration, automated voting systems, social media promotion, and real-time content updates. The agency used Airtable forms for vote collection, built-in fraud prevention through de-duplication, and automated daily posting to the client's website, creating a seamless multi-channel experience that solved previous integrity issues while engaging audiences across multiple touchpoints.

9. Psychoactive Studios' 121 Festival Campaign

Psychoactive Studios created an integrated festival marketing campaign that paired creative visual design with operational efficiency. The agency developed a cohesive brand experience featuring "native flora and fauna with vibrant electronic pulsations" while building an Airtable-powered backend that automated vendor applications, tracked ticket sales, and enabled real-time website content updates, demonstrating how integrated campaigns can deliver both creative impact and operational seamlessness.

Types of integrated marketing campaigns

Different campaign types serve various marketing objectives and audience needs. Integrated marketing campaigns might support the following initiatives: 

Streamline your integrated marketing campaigns with Airtable

IMCs require sophisticated coordination across teams, channels, and assets. Airtable's marketing solutions provide the underlying infrastructure needed for taking a successful integrated marketing approach. This includes: