Long a buzz word in the marketing world, today integrated marketing is the key to marketing in a digital world. Why? If planned carefully, ALL marketing programs should drive results which can be measured and analyzed to understand which audiences respond to which messages or offers. In other words, it makes no sense to do email marketing unless you can see who opened it, read it, and became your customer. It makes no sense to run an ad unless it drives people to your website, or motivates them to sign up as your Facebook friend.
Integrated marketing used to mean advertising, PR, sales promotion, etc. all sharing a common creative vocabulary and a team of people who made sure one campaign did not conflict with the other. Today it means much more than that. It means that each component of the marketing mix is driving for the same or complimentary result, and the integration is really the technical underpinning which allows marketers to see exactly how it is all working together .
It is our view that a Google-friendly website and e-commerce engine is the centerpiece of a every marketing campaign. Your website (internet, intranet and/or extranet) should have everything your customers, prospects, partners, and employees will need to know about your company and motivate them to “buy” or contact you to learn more. And once you have this key marketing tool in place, all other marketing should lead people to your site. Why? Because your website can measure (via website analytics) how many people are interested in you, what they are specifically interested in, and who is buying what you are offering.
In an ideal world here is what an integrated marketing program can do for your company. People who want to learn more about your company, products or services will identify themselves to you by giving you their email, address, phone number or become a friend via LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Once you have this information, you will be able to market to these people via email, social media, ads, PR, direct mail, etc. and when they are interested in your message, they will likely go to your website to get more information. If you knew this person’s email when you marketed to them originally, and you can see them when they hit your website, you can track their marketing path and better understand them, their preferences and what motivates their behavior. If you do this for all of the marketing programs you run, you will begin to see which ones work better than others, you will begin to have a more accurate sales pipeline and forecast, and you will be able to refine your marketing scientifically instead of gut feelings or anecdotal evidence.
Are companies doing this? Ironically, most are not, because their departments and internal resources are set up to compete with each other rather than work together. So, product managers within large companies have multiple agencies working on very specific things typically in isolation from the other agencies. And while integrated marketing is the brass ring all marketers aspire to, few large companies do it.
So integrated marketing is best achieved by smaller, more nimble companies or brands. They set up their marketing programs and internal resources to work together, and continually work to make sure things are working in harmony. It’s no wonder that upstart companies like Amazon, Zappos, Salesforce, and Intuit took their respective industries by surprise because all of their marketing was integrated and leveraged all of the online tools referenced here. The good news is that if you are reading this you are a smaller company or brand within a bigger company, or an upstart with plans to change your industry, and you are able to do this quickly without a lot of money, red tape or internal strife./
If this sounds like you, and you are committed to truly building a smart marketing program that is efficient and measurable, contact our Integrated Marketing Manager about our FREE 30-minute Integrated Marketing audit or to get a proposal for your next marketing project.
