 There are many projects we think we should take on, but don’t because they seem too daunting: cleaning out the garage, losing fifteen pounds or taking an integrated-marketing approach. I’m not talking about the integrated marketing of yore, which meant ensuring that all media told the same story. The new integrated marketing does that and more:
It also provides an end-to-end view of the entire marketing process, and insight into which campaigns and tactics drive the highest return on investment.
Research has shown that companies focusing on this type of integration reap big rewards in increased annual revenues, higher lead conversions and a bigger payoff from their marketing spends. But anecdotal evidence shows that many marketers perceive that integrated marketing is too difficult, too time consuming or too expensive to implement. I’m not here to say that integrated marketing is a quick-and-easy fix. But I do think that once we address organizational and technological barriers to implementation, the results are well worth the effort and investment.
Integrated marketing can help us work smarter, achieve better results, measure results more accurately, and determine where we’ll get the highest returns on our marketing investments. Specifically, integrated marketing can promote:
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Accountability. Increasingly, we marketers have to demonstrate the relationship between marketing campaigns and sales revenues, and back up our decisions with meaningful, accurate and actionable data. With an integrated-marketing solution that lets us compare disparate data and validate it, we’ll be able to draw conclusions with a higher level of accuracy and back up our decisions.
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Clarity. By leveraging web analytics and other tools, we can conduct granular analyses of email campaigns, PPC ads, banner ads and other tactics to see which are most likely to lead to actual conversions. Then, we can discern why – and either focus on the tactics that work best or take action to improve the not-so-effective ones.
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More consistent campaigns. This is where the new analysis-oriented integrated marketing meets the old creative-oriented integrated marketing: If we know that the email with the A Test subject line drove the most traffic to the Web site and resulted in higher-quality leads and sales, we can use that data to drive creative decisions moving forward.
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Higher productivity. The less time we spend wrestling with technology, the more time we can devote to actual marketing tasks. For example, an integrated system can automatically add Web-analytics tracking codes to email links and PPC landing pages, a task that nearly every marketer finds tedious and time-consuming.
But the following endemic organizational issues cause most of us to shy away from even considering a more integrated approach:
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Too many silos. Jane does email, Joe does analytics, IT owns the Web, and PPC is the agency's domain. Very few of us are "do-it-all" marketers. Some prefer the creativity of the job, while others (like me) are more comfortable crunching numbers. Beyond the temperament and skill sets, the separation of duties is an issue, even at small and midsize companies. How can we take on integrated marketing when so many of us have little day-to-day interaction with colleagues who handle radically different tasks?
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Data, data everywhere. But who knows what it all means? Online marketing promises measurability and accountability only if we can turn the wide range of data from various online programs into useful, meaningful metrics that help us make better decisions.
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The mystery of ROI. How do we calculate the overall ROI of a holiday marketing campaign that includes a trade show, multiple email campaigns, several banner ads, numerous keyword buys, new branding that required a Web-site redesign, a direct-mail piece and a couple of miscellaneous tactics no one even bothered to track? Without a system that lets us easily compare the apples-to-oranges data, we have to guesstimate how many leads made it into the CRM system and how much revenue was generated … which is imprecise at best.
But here’s the good news
We can start right away to break down those barriers and move our organizations toward the goal of integration, one step at a time.
First, get Jane, Joe, the IT guy and the agency in the same room. For example, when we kickoff our next major marketing push, such as a product launch or holiday campaign, we can invite all the major stakeholders to the planning meeting and discuss ways we can all work together more effectively. We can also align creative teams working on pieces of the marketing program to make sure everyone adopts a similar look and feel.
We can also suggest a simple change to our accounting procedures that makes it easier to calculate ROI for the entire campaign: assigning specific campaign codes to all the related marketing expenditures, in addition to the more common codes for line item or type of tactic.
We can also recommend putting the right-size integrated-marketing technology in place. An enterprise solution may not work at a small-to-medium business. A solution like Lyris HQ, however, may be a better fit. Lyris HQ provides 360-degree control of campaigns by combining email marketing, web analytics, pay-per-click bid management, content creation for landing pages, and asset management – at a fraction of the cost of separate, standalone solutions.
The quest toward integration doesn’t have to be drastic and needn’t disrupt everyday activities. And efforts like gently breaking down silos need not cost a dime. If we’re serious about improving ROI and allocating scarce resources with greater accuracy, we need to stop putting off integrated marketing simply because we're afraid it might be too hard. Take it from me, it's not nearly as scary as it seems.
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About The Author
Blaine 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.
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