The Importance of Integrated Marketing

I’ve just spent a very interesting day at the Media Pro Expo marketing exhibition at Olympia where I’ve spent the day listening to a dozen different experts expound on various aspects of marketing, and talking to exhibitors specialising in a wide range of marketing implementation services. The recurring theme that came over loud and clear in nearly every instance was the importance of properly integrated marketing and the fact that most businesses aren’t doing it properly.

Integrated marketing is something that I bang on about incessantly to both clients and prospects, and it is only possible with a proper marketing strategy that includes your business objectives. All of your marketing activity must then work together to achieve those objectives. It means having online, digital, traditional print, advertising, social media, etc, all working together as a unified force to achieve your strategic objectives. If you’re not tying all these things together, then you’re missing out on huge opportunities which, if your competitors are on the ball, will be going to someone else.

This is becoming increasingly important in the process of lead generation and nurturing. Recent research has shown that 36% of companies now have a sales cycle in excess of six months so it is critical that you keep your leads and prospects interested throughout this period.
All businesses should be analysing exactly what it is that motivates their customers to buy, and then presenting this message consistently, in a way that emotionally connects with prospects, getting all the different marketing platforms to work together, continually testing different permutations and tracking the results.

The downside is that, while an integrated strategy requires inclusion of fairly sophisticated email marketing techniques, this is becoming harder to achieve without some very serious thought and planning. The main ISPs are now becoming very hot on making sure email marketing is relevant to the reader and so deliverability is now the big issue. Simply blasting 1000s of people with potentially irrelevant emails is no longer acceptable and will damage your reputation with the ISPs to the point that, eventually, none of your email will get through. Relevant content and interactivity are the keys to making this successful.

A number of the people I spoke to were of the opinion that any business not marketing by these new rules would be very lucky to still be around in five years time.