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.