Integrated Marketing - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Image by Pensiero via Flickr

Integrated marketing isn't just a hot concept, it is the holy grail of marketing in many ways. And in reality, it's what makes the most common sense - you should want one story, one message - weaved across multiple media. The message is the message is the message (for once).

These days, I see the challenges of integrated marketing efforts play out every day at work, but on a micro level, in my company's small marketing team. I've been doing a lot of thinking on what would make integrated marketing campaigns run smoothly at every scale, so these are some of the ideas I came up with. If anyone has particular learnings they found useful, please chime in :)

1. Integrated marketing isn't powered by magic (or good will)

Pretty basic, but still needs to be said in order to frame the conversation: no one should expect integrated marketing to happen naturally, as part of a normal team process, regardless of how high-functioning that team is. Things can be done that way, painfully, but it's not how you get the best, most efficient results. If you have a team of 3+ people, the integration itself needs to be managed as a process/project.

2. Start designing the integration workflow/process by designing the experience you want your audience to have.

If you want integrated marketing, start thinking about how your users/audience will be entering it from different points and make sure that this experience you're building reflects your brand, not just the individual pieces (the banner ad, the coupon at the store, etc.).

3. QA a lot. When you're done, QA some more.

It's not just about QA-ing each individual deliverable/piece, but QA-ing the integration as a whole. On a lot of the projects I've been a part of throughout my agency experience, the QA time always got scrunched very badly if things went wrong early on. It's very important to keep this task as sacred. Make it a show-stopper if you don't have a minimum amount of time to do this step right.

4. Actively seek out partners/team members who can both implement, but are bought into integrated marketing at a visceral level.

It has to be in your agency's blood to create something that's part of a bigger, better experience, especially if they are highly specialized in a small area of marketing. The sincere and true partnership can be challenging to achieve in the agency world where every organization also has very selfish reasons for working on projects, but it should be more than do-able at the micro level. Hiring people who are just worried about the tasks on their plate and don't question how their work will impact co-workers/the business, is a quick way to hinder success.

I've been trying to come up with an example of a great integrated marketing campaign success story. Can anyone think of any, other the Obama campaign or anything Apple does?

Note: Just read this somewhat related article on Harvard Business Review. The Three Cs of Simplicity.