7 ways to achieve Integrated Marketing

Marketing is simple isn’t it? Just a question of getting customers to buy brands!

However today it has become much more complex with many messages carried across ever evolving platforms and channels being delivered through a variety of agencies and suppliers of varying disciplines and levels of marketing understanding.

This situation puts a tremendous strain on the brand as it is stretched across channels and compressed into the technical constraints of the media and at the same time there is the marketing discipline to achieve the best utilisation of the medium and the most cost effective use of the budget. And to do all of this with a consistent presentation to the consumer.

This then is the background to achieving integrated marketing. Its necessity re-affirms the management role of marketing and the importance of strategy and planning.

For marketing should always be seen as a set of interrelated brand activities co-ordinated around the targeted customer.

Integration is implicit. Here are 7 ways to help to achieve it….

1.  Brand Manual – Radically re-appraise your brand guidelines (often prepared by a design agency and concerned only with logos, typefaces, graphics and colours). Build it as a point of reference to best practice with successful examples for each media used. Ensure that every marketing supplier is fully briefed and contributes to it.
2. Communication planning – Create a single spread sheet to assess the relative performance of each media used in achieving the objectives
3.  Customer Target Groups – Develop a tangible set of customer target groups with your understanding of their behaviour, media preferences and importance. Build and use in conjunction with the brand manual.
4. Manage the process – Have a monthly co-ordinating meeting to ensure alignment and best practice. At the same time set billing and reportage standards so that results are compatible and comparable.
5.  Co-ordinate through campaigns – It will help the integration if you plan and implement ALL activity as part of a given campaign. This will also facilitate taking up new media and ideas within the overall framework.
6.  Is it working? - Increased profitable sales is the desired outcome of all marketing activity and this is achieved through the setting a variety of objectives. But these should be comparable and measurable. It is often necessary, especially with online activity, to look beyond the measurement data delivered to what has been the effect on meeting objectives and actual sales
7.  Customer Feedback – It should go without saying that the customer will be the best judge of your marketing. So it is best practice to keep checking back with the customer, setting up a simple panel is sufficient. The panel will also help you keep tabs on competitive activity.

If you wish to improve the integration of your marketing activity and you want top marketing input with full time commitment but without a full time cost the new form of marketing consultancy could be for you. Find out more at

http://www.tarrystone.com/clear-strategy/integrated-marketing/. Call it interim or consultant the outcome will be the same.

Tim Arnold Principal Consultant

Tarrystone CONSULTANTS

Marketing Direction & Consultancy  www.tarrystone.com