Integrated Marketing: How to Leverage the Rest of the Communications Mix
Just about everyone agrees that Integrated Marketing Communications is a “good thing.” It’s intuitively obvious that each piece of the marketing mix should be working together, leveraging the others’ strengths and presenting a consistent set of benefits and images to the customer. A fully integrated program makes the best use of advertising, public relations, database marketing, direct response, sales promotion, interactive, channels marketing, collateral, trade shows and events and every other communications vehicle you use.
The trouble lies in actually making integration work. Many powerful forces are in place to resist: human nature, people’s comfort level, organizational structure, financial operations. From the direct marketing perspective, this all boils down to one basic fact: direct marketers and general marketers don’t understand each other. They are trained differently, their objectives are usually not the same, and they come from different marketing cultures. This is as true of agencies as it is of marketing departments.
Thus, the key barrier to integrating the communications mix is people, and the way they work. The only way to overcome this barrier is to motivate–or force–the players to form a team. The best team is one that includes client and agency, across the entire communications mix.
Here follow some tips on how to make integration work.
Understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of the disciplines.
With people that have different business objectives and come from different backgrounds, the first step is developing a cross-cultural understanding among the players. Put together a small team tasked with identifying what each discipline brings to the party. With this kind of analysis, direct marketers will begin to recognize that advertising can provide useful air cover for DM campaigns, lifting response and increasing audience penetration. Advertisers will admit that direct marketers can go in and close the sale, once the awareness and interest had been established. With mutual understanding comes respect, or at least tolerance.
How to actually get the pieces to work together seamlessly
The next step is to plan together. Start with the business problem. The solution to the problem will naturally indicate the marketing techniques that make the most sense. Team members whose discipline turns out to be under-represented are less likely to be threatened if they participated in the decision from the start, and understand the rationale for the media mix selection.
The best way to inspire your agency to buy in to the change
The easiest solution is using a full-service agency in the first place. Make it worth their while (combining carrot and stick) to integrate around your business. Ideally, they should pull together a team in support of your account that includes representatives from all the disciplines you need. Then ask them to organize internally around your account. To maintain the momentum, you and your agency counterparts need to preach, loudly and often, that this is desirable, exciting—and required by you, the client.
When you are using multiple agencies, life becomes more interesting. But the principle is the same. Invite the most senior agency person on your account from each of your agencies to a planning meeting. Explain the integration objective, and state the problem. Agencies excel at problem-solving; it’s their passion. Make it their problem, and they will come up with a solution. The solution will likely be driven by a combination of new communications, roles clarification, and incentives. And once it’s decided, the management team needs to go out and preach, constantly.
How to handle fragile egos and career panic when job roles begin to blur
Remember, people are both the problem and the solution to integration. People will inevitable be nervous. The best approach is to create new career paths within the new integrated organization, and communicate them early and often. Make sure each person knows where he might move next, and a couple of jobs thereafter.
Follow the money: how to apportion budgets for maximum effectiveness
The solution is to budget around the business problem, not around the media or even the products. This is easiest to accomplish with the support of senior management. Even at lower levels, during the budget process, bring the product and media managers together and explain how an integrated program will support their goals. If they are not fully convinced, set up a pilot program to prove the concept.
How the Web has changed everything, and allows integration to really pay off
The Web is a medium that miraculously combines the strengths of multiple media. It drives awareness, it elicits response, it allows transactions, it provides measurable results. With this tool, you can create fully integrated campaigns more cheaply, and quickly, and at a global level, than any of us ever dreamed. Make sure you are using it to the max.
Integration isn’t easy, but it is worth the effort. Take the plunge with your agencies, and your customers will notice the difference.