Thursday, July 9, 2009

Integrated Marketing & Communications 101

Integrated marketing & communication means that your marketing & communication message is delivered in a consistent manner across the diverse online and traditional marketing channels. It also ensures that you capture the full potential of your marketing programs while making them more relevant and reachable to your target market.

But we need to consider how many marketers actually put this concept into practice and reap the benefits associated with it. Even though the concept sounds straight forward enough many marketers suffer from executing it within their organizations due to various reasons and challenges as identified below.

  • Lack of understand amongst the key decision makers of the organization
  • Integrating online with traditional marketing efforts
  • Lack of agencies that provide a true integrated marketing and branding service
  • Technical challenges and budgetary constrains
  • Measuring and controlling

Actually if we can overcome these challenges integration is not difficult, it’s just hard work and getting the right people to sit together and plan the marketing agenda of the organization. And if you still haven’t done it here is why you should do it:

  • Using every medium, channel, format and vehicle in a consistent manner ranging from TV, radio, press, magazines, ambient, online marketing, social marketing, networking, guerilla marketing, hoardings, brochures, POSM will ensure that your message is delivered to the target audience at every possible touch point.
  • Understanding how each marketing channel can deliver to your objectives can ultimately make your overall budgeting more efficient and drive better results.
  • Make use of emerging opportunities and new market segments.
  • Achieve synergy and results by making use of marketing channels that supports each other.

Therefore true integration of your marketing and communications campaign lies in uniformity of your message, and selecting the best possible marketing channels and vehicles to deliver that message in a consistent manner. Therefore in combination this will give more depth, appeal, synergy and effectiveness as opposed to carrying out the message in isolation across mediums.

So to conclude we need to keep in mind that true integration of marketing and branding is still relatively revolutionary for most organizations. Therefore to realistically plan and execute an integrated marketing camping you need the support and understanding within the organization as well as the help of a capable integrated marcom partner that understand the dynamics of marketing integration.