Firstly for those of you who have heard the term ‘integrated marketing’ before, but are unsure of the meaning. In short, integrated marketing is essentially the strategy that an individual or business forms with the view of unifying various marketing channels such as direct marketing, digital marketing acquisition techniques, mass mail shots, etc.
Challenges facing Integrated Marketing
Now we have our feet firmly planted in the digital age, there are more marketing channels at our disposal than ever before. Advertising on television isn’t the only way to appeal to the masses with digital giants such as Google, Microsoft and high quality affiliate networks readily available to help increase your bottom line. To name just a few of course.
Yet what about existing obstacles posed within companies to cope with these new capabilities? If you’re not currently utilising a display network or a pay per click campaign, would you be confident that your organisation is firmly on top of attribution modelling? Basically being able to record everything from impression right the way through to sale. Then on top of this, how could this new channel be integrated with existing marketing efforts.
There will of course be a significant amount of difference between every company in how sophisticated they are to adapt to this change.
Step forward challenge number one
The first issue that people will generally encounter, irrespective of the company size is the existing technology setup. This will play a fundamental role in integrated marketing as results will inevitably begin to decline if they can’t be monitored and bench marked for improvements. Every campaign has a start, middle and an end so it is important to optimise throughout, not just at one point. The insight you gain from the supporting technology is invaluable to success rate.
If cost is an issue then tender the job out to the wide array of vendors out there who will be more than willing to discuss a solution for your business. You don’t have to sign, but you may just add more value to your company than you ever realised.
Integrated Marketing strategy
This point is quite straightforward. If you have the capabilities but you don’t have the direction in place to exploit this, then you’re never going to be able to run at full efficiency. One thing to take comfort in is that if you currently have no plan and direction and your business is running sufficiently, then it can be improved 100% if not more.
I’ve worked at many companies where a ‘Head of Strategy’ or similar is in place at the top of one end of an organisational structure. The company strategy should have the input of many key people within the organisation, not simply reliant upon one person who has their travel expenses paid for once a month, shipping their self off to a developing territory for ‘research’. It’s easy to identify the individuals who are passionate about their company, you just need to open your eyes to this reality.
As long as the strategy is built using facts, trends and useful insights then this should be easy to apply to every day working activities. What are the priorities of the business? Do you want to capitalise on the traffic hitting your site from tablet devices, increase unique visits from European territories, or do you want to water the plants?
Driving forces behind integrated marketing
Last but very much not least is resource. This is a point that often gets neglected with any new project, but you’ll need to have enough people on board to cope with this new transition. Just because you’re integrating channels does not mean that you are necessarily decreasing work. If anything the work will often increase due to the combination efforts leading to greater sales, leading to more fulfilment requirements.
