| Carpenters are Only as Good as Their Tools - And One Tool Can’t Build a House |
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| Integrated Marketing | |
| Written by Blaine Mathieu | |
| Sunday, 29 June 2008 | |
 I like to think of online marketing as building a house. There are a lot of pieces that go into a strong, viable structure and a number of tools are required to complete the job. Building a successful online marketing campaign is a similar concept – it is a series of tasks that need to be orchestrated and integrated together to have a successful outcome.
More traditional approaches have been to target a channel, send out a message and hope for the best. There is little visibility into how, for example, an email campaign is driving traffic to the company Web site, or, conversely how the popularity of your Web content might be leveraged to revise an email campaign. Many online marketers attempt to stitch together an integrated online marketing solution because they have favorite point tools. For example, separate Web analytics and email marketing solutions. That approach is costly, has no integrated reporting function and doesn’t scale effectively. It’s frustrating people like Jane Marketer. In fact, let’s meet her, because she’s the reason we launched Lyris HQ. Jane is either the marketing department or the head of small group of online marketers. Her charter is to get results on a tight budget. So she and her small team are charged with a lot. They build a landing page for a new online marketing campaign and populate it with content. They use an email service provider to notify people about the page and the campaign that page supports. Simultaneously, they’re running a pay-per-click campaign. They need Web analysis on that landing page. They need to analyze the email opens. They need to get a holistic sense of what’s working and what needs improvement. Focusing on one piece of this puzzle causes problems. For instance, as three industry luminaries discussed earlier this year, looking at just the email campaign and measuring click-through rates does not give you an accurate picture of what’s working. In addition, it’s really important to develop a robust pay-per-click strategy with savvy keyword strategies. The holistic view is a crucial part of the creation, delivery and analysis methodology that is the hallmark of great integrated online marketing. In the early years of the PC, users bought point tools from different vendors to handle different tasks (remember WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3?). Creating a presentation was either impossible because the tools didn’t talk to each other or painfully slow. Eventually Microsoft took on the job of integrating the most important business tools into its integrated software offering, and few people now remember Lotus 1-2-3. Imagine how much faster online campaign creation could be with an integrated platform. Imagine how much more effectively and quickly you could tune your campaigns with the integrated feedback and reporting you’d get. So let’s go back to Jane Marketer. In her newly integrated world, she has single-log-in access to a suite of tools from Lyris HQ:
That’s what we’re delivering with Lyris HQ. In marketing, the key is to simplify the process, from creation to analysis, and unify the tools and teams to drive improved marketing ROI. And we know it’s working – and not because we think so, but because our customers are proving it every day. We fielded a recent survey in which we discovered that nearly three-quarters of online marketers who adopted Lyris HQ for an integrated online marketing solution are poised to adopt at least three elements of the Lyris HQ in the near future. Fully a third will adopt all five elements as part of their endeavor to build a house with all the right tools. ### About The AuthorBlaine Mathieu is chief marketing officer for Lyris. Blaine is responsible for Lyris' brand and product strategy, including driving marketing initiatives for the company's Lyris HQ™ integrated-marketing suite and its Lyris ListManager™ email-marketing software. Related Resources:
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