Defining Integrated Marketing
- May 13th, 2009 by Steven Leung
Integrated marketing is the planning an execution of all your company’s marketing activities, online and offline, in a way that is consistent across all of your customer contacts and creates more value than when those activities are performed separately.
It’s very much based on the concept of gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In order for that to happen, your marketing messages must be consistently reinforced at every point where you interact with customers.
But integrated marketing goes beyond integrated marketing communications, which focuses on consistency of messaging across different mediums.
Instead, integrated marketing as a whole uses a number of different mediums to convert people into leads and provide data to support turning those leads into customers.
The campaigns center around a strong web presence — usually a website or a blog, sometimes a microsite — but may also include email, print, direct mail, television, radio and social media to support and publicize that web presence.
Integrated marketing also combines the data you get back about your customers from those mediums to give you a more complete picture of your market and the segments you’re targeting. This information is used to identify how well the campaign is performing in those segments and can sometimes be detailed enough to help close individual deals.
With integrated marketing campaigns, your best data comes typically from web analytics and email response measurement: the reason is that the information is easily, reliably and automatically measured without using special phone numbers, printed promotional codes or coupons.
But it’s not always easy to get the right metrics and interpret them correctly. In our next blog post, I’ll tell you a real-life story about how one company picked the wrong metric and encouraged its employees to make that division unprofitable. Then I’ll share how other companies measure their integrated marketing success and use that information to grow their businesses.
Tags: Lead Generation, Websites
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