The Holy Grail of Marketing

Have you ever seen a marketing department rejoice? It can be a wonderful thing. When a campaign achieves its objectives, it can bring many benefits to a company, from publicity to profits. Ultimately, a campaign that delivers has a direct effect on the success of a product or service. However, achieving success can be a long, bumpy road as marketing departments face multiple challenges as they create and implement campaigns.

Like a (hopefully) well-oiled machine, there are several moving parts to the marketing department and those moving parts then carry out the many stages of a marketing campaign. The moving parts might include the people, design and production. The stages might take you from the planning to budgeting and then building. Finally, there is the management and execution of a campaign. Of course, you can’t forget the measurement stage, where you calculate the actual impact, good or bad, the campaign has made.

When everything works smoothly for this marketing engine, the result is the delivery of a consistent brand message and positive experience to a prospect or customer. However, for many marketing departments, the technology they have available to them fails to deliver through these various processes. Oftentimes, this leads to campaign failure: the wrong message being delivered, at the wrong time, and sometimes to the wrong people. Integrated marketing is the Holy Grail for marketing departments within the enterprise. It is a platform that brings all the marketing processes together and unifies them. It enables you to deliver relevant content at a time when it will have the biggest impact on each individual.

What Does Integrated Marketing Mean?

Integrated marketing is an end-to-end process of managing all activities, including marketing projects, planning, process flows, assets, supporting documentation, authorization. It includes the management of the people involved, the vendors, and the client relationships. Building, managing and executing all outbound and inbound marketing communications. Emphasis on measuring the campaign using clearly defined analytical tools.

Proving the success of a campaign can be quite satisfying. However, many companies have a hard time trying to actually measure that success. A campaign needs to be measured across all channels. These channels may include e-mail, SMS, print, Internet, trade shows, seminars, and more. Through each of these channels there may be different target audiences, which lead you to multiple data sources. Also, multiple response mechanisms are necessary to collect the data.

When the marketing department develops measurement tools, it shouldn’t be asking whether it’s possible to measure all these channels and all these target markets. Instead, the question for the marketing department to brainstorm is: how do you measure all channels and all target markets?

With integrated marketing, this measurement is possible. However, in light of today’s technology, the platform needs to be able to embrace new media communications channels like social media. Without integration, the processes that occur in a marketing department remain fragments, pieces of the puzzle that can easily become impossible to control and manage. In the end, this translates into providing the marketing message recipient with uncoordinated views of your business; the target customer or prospect does not enjoy a unified experience.

How it Affects Relationships

Here is an example: Let’s discuss a cross-media approach using a direct mail piece and a personalized URL response mechanism. Personalized URLs are being used by companies to generate greater response rates for the enterprise campaigns. Service providers are achieving success offering personalized URLs to compliment their print and/or mail services. It is looked upon as a low cost of entry into the “marketing service provider” game. But when service providers or enterprises alike embrace this specific cross-media approach, they fall victim to another challenge that marketing departments are continuously trying to avoid and can be easily seen as one disastrous step leading to another: