Cyberspace allows businesses to market online in a variety of ways: corporate websites, banner ads, email campaigns, blogs, search engine keywords- the list is virtually endless! However, there is still a place for the standard offline marketing tactics, so it only makes sense to integrate marketing strategies to achieve business goals. Integrated marketing is really about allowing marketing decision-makers to view the entire marketing process from beginning to end, thereby providing insight into which combination of tactics will drive the highest returns.
Combining Old and New Marketing Strategies
Whether a business wants to grow and expand its current product or service, or whether it is introducing a new one, its success depends on how effectively it promotes itself via marketing. In the past, this primarily meant utilizing a variety of offline strategies: creating a brand name and promoting a product via print , television, and direct mail campaigns. However, with the advent of the Internet, marketing has taken on a whole new meaning and business owners and managers now have the medium of "cyberspace" at their fingertips. The best of both worlds- offline and online marketing- can now be combined to drive productivity and sales even higher.
Benefits of Integrated Marketing
By employing an integrated approach to marketing, a product can be marketed across a wide variety of channels and domains. This approach can reap the following benefits:
- Traditional advertising strategies merge with online approaches to market a product or service across all possible marketing domains
- Integrating a number of marketing strategies will improve a company's return on investment
- Analysis of integrated marketing strategies allows a company to measure which strategies are successful and which are not; this assists decision-makers in guiding budget and resource allocation decisions
How to Make Integrated Marketing a Reality
Business owners, managers, and CEOs can begin implementing integrated marketing strategies today. Remember that the keys to successful integration of marketing strategies are:
- Be willing to change the marketing culture of the business
- Utilize emerging marketing technologies
- Gather all the major stakeholders together during planning meetings to create opportunities to combine marketing techniques
- Align teams that are working on different aspects of the marketing program to ensure everyone adopts a similar look and feel for marketing the product or service
- Assign specific accounting and tracking codes to record marketing expenditures by project code to make it easier to calculate the return of investment for the entire marketing campaign
- Shift roles and responsibilities within the marketing department so that more employees can see the “big picture”
The initial changes a company can take toward implementing integrated marketing strategies do not have to be drastic, they do not have to be expensive, and they do not disrupt everyday business activities. By expanding a business's marketing vision and combining older marketing strategies with new technology, integrated marketing can be the catalyst that drives a business to optimum success.
