Integrated Marketing Tips

It’s easier than ever for customers and brands to interact with each other. Long gone are the days when brands relied on static media channels with broad, unidirectional messages with little means of attribution. Now, marketers are utilizing integrated marketing approaches to create true bidirectional interactions though rich, personalized user experiences across multiple channels.
Organizations that make a concerted effort to coordinate multi-wave cross-channel campaigns that create consistent brand experiences at each touchpoint have the advantage over those who continue to run their marketing programs in silos. It takes more than technology or additional headcount to run these multichannel campaigns successfully, however. In fact, after reviewing several successful integrated marketing programs, the following commonalities stood out:

• Target segment and buyer profiles are developed before executing multichannel campaigns
• Campaigns are created with a 360 view of the organization and are not solely demand-generation focused
• Analyzing customer behavior and preference trends is critical in order to optimize personalized messages

When combined, these three elements form the foundation for an integrated marketing approach. Once these elements are established, executing relationship marketing programs that span over the entire customer lifecycle become a lot easier.

Scaling with Integrated Marketing

Faced with having to do more with less, small businesses know the opportunity digital marketing offers, and are typically at the forefront of using web, social, email and display. As the company grows, it can become challenging to scale marketing programs efficiently while delivering more personalized offers across all of these available channels.
To help get around this common challenge, I have developed a list of tips for integrated marketing to help organizations big and small excel with integrated marketing.

10 Integrated Marketing Tips

1. Baseline how you are currently coordinating messaging within channels and across channels.
2. Map out your current process for implementing and deploying a relatively simple multichannel campaign against a specific buyer persona (if you don’t have buyer personas, you need one before proceeding).
3. Note any gaps with the process you’ve mapped out in Step 2.
4. Identify if gaps are related to process or technology. If the problems are process-oriented, course correct. If they relate to technology, upgrade or train.
5. Repeat Steps 1-4 above but for post-sales scenarios (e.g. customer support, face-to-face).
6. Evaluate your marketing automation tools and processes to ensure you can measure user behavior across each channel without leaving the system.
7. Place greater emphasis on measurement in order to track results and link them to individual efforts.
8. Communicate performance metrics throughout the organization to establish credibility and buy-in. Every employee needs to see themselves as a brand steward.
9. Modify your customer personas when you spot a trend with customer behavior.
10. Consider adopting a Scrum framework to keep the marketing team as agile and iterative as possible.

Integrated marketing can continue moving the needle when done right. In fact, according to IBM Applied Insights, organizations that engage customers effectively can experience a three-year revenue growth that is more than 40 percent higher than other companies.
While tip #10 may seem a bit odd at first, it’s this agile and iterative approach that can continuously help move the needle in the right direction. It can also help improve communication and transparency across each campaign, which can be tremendously useful when marketing organizations are distributed by vertical.
Lastly, these tips are mainly intended to help marketing organizations get clarity on how integrated marketing can work for them. For a deeper dive, we will be publishing a eBook in the next couple of months highlighting specific strategies on planning, executing and measuring relationship marketing programs in an integrated way.