What does Integrated Marketing mean for mid-sized organizations?February 28th, 2008

Integrated Marketing. It’s somewhat turned into a buzzword these days, and marketers definitely like to throw the term around a lot (Agencies like to use the term even more.) But, Integrated Marketing needs to go much deeper and be more “integrated” than I see at almost every organization. In fact, “integration” is one of the core traits or beliefs of a MidMarketer (as I outlined in the recent article Why? Why MidMarketer?)

It seems that many marketers and organizations approach integration simply as the ability to produce various tactics. For example, a marketer saying they need an Integrated Marketing Agency- when what they mean is that they’re looking for an agency that can produce web stuff as well as your print, etc. They’re not looking to actually integrate anything, but rather “one-stop shop” for design and production.

So, why integrated marketing? Think back several years about how marketing was organized and how linear things were. Here’s a visual of the marketing efforts of a typical organization…

Everything is very neat in this scenario. Everyone and everything has it’s own responsibility, it’s own goal and it’s own outcome. Great. Now… wake up, because today’s reality looks nothing like this at all. Very quickly, you can see the urgency to integrate when you think about your marketing efforts in the following diagram:

Kind of scary, huh? But, (you may ask) now what? I’m not suggesting by any means that you immediately go looking for a new agency or resources, or scrap everything you’ve been working on. Rather, I’d like to offer several ideas and thoughts for getting into an integrated mindset.

Map out your integration points:

For every project or campaign, map out the entire (I mean entire) flow of activity. Doing so will help give you a complete picture of the integrated aspects of your marketing. If your planning or executing an ad, don’t just consider the creative and the offer- think about…

• Where will the ad take the person?
• What will they look at when they get there?
• What will come up if they search for you?
• What communication (email? DM?) will they get afterward?
• Where will they talk about you or the campaign?

Integrate people and resources:

Do all of your resources talk to each other and share what’s going on? This means more than just internal staff, but also agencies, software and service providers. Often, agencies are on a “need to know only” basis- when was the last time everyone got together and discussed a strategy and direction, rather than just “updates” and schedules.

Integrate Processes:

Small thing will add up- like when you write copy making sure it is Web ready- and search engine friendly. Making sure Press releases get placed everywhere they should, in the right format. Design processes audit how things will look in different mediums. Distribution processes to ensure videos get posted for search engines. The list goes on and on- a few hours in a fun meeting with all of your marketing staff and resources will uncover some great integration process ideas.

…more to come on this topic.   More than anything, if you can make integration a core trait, many of the details and actions needed to integrate successfully will come naturally.

Posted by Dan Swartz

Posted in: Marketing Creative, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, Misc.

Tags: agency, core traits, integration, processes

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