Total Marketing Solutions

With the onslaught of increasing noise over social media, the integrated marketing model has reared it’s head again. It keeps cropping up in marketing blogs and articles, but just what does it all mean??? One marketing blogger who has his finger on the pulse is John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing.

Like many other marketing professionals, John has noticed that marketing folks are now using “integrated marketing” to describe their ability to integrate traditional offline marketing with the new sexy social media. In our opinion, as marketing consultants, Integrated marketing is in fact the combination of marketing tactics to help deliver one marketing strategy to more quickly build know, like and trust amongst your customers.

In this sense then an integrated marketing approach is not a strategy, it’s the tactical delivery of a marketing strategy. That distinction is critical, because without the right strategy no amount of talk about integrating multiple platforms and mediums makes much sense. In fact, in many instances integration is simply interpreted as doing more kinds of stuff. The problem with more stuff is that stuff without a central strategy can actually cause one stuff to combat and conflict with some other stuff. The key is to strategically integrate - not just head off in various off- and on-line directions.

To find out more about what John has to say on this matter, go to his blog here.

The Holy Grail of how to accurately assess your Return on Investment for any marketing activities you choose to undertake has always been the sticking point for many marketers trying to justify spending their marketing budget. It’s been a rather hit and miss affair to date, particularly with the marketing waters being constantly muddied by new technologies and the different parameters they bring for measuring marketing effectiveness. Whilst the only real truth to date has been that it is crucial to carry out some measure of ROI, just how to do it has been hotly debated.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing has now produced a paper on measuring ROI, which we believe is well worth a look.The report looks at how marketing creates money and how to maximise your return on ideas, whilst achieving superior results from Finance and Marketing. The CIM has talked to over 100 organisations about what works for them and what doesn’t. They have then produced a framework to be used by any size of company to create a greater sustainable value. For those of you who are CIM members, you can find the paper in the Resource section of the CIM website.

When your best marketing efforts remain unsuccessful, you’re understandably left wondering why, why why? So you send out some more direct mail, refresh your website with a tweak here and a bit of SEO there. You might even attend a trade show or buy some advertising, but still you’re left with poor sales.Why is this? The simple answer is that your marketing efforts need to be more than just a random series of tasks. Truly effective marketing is not just a single activity - it’s a well-planned  strategic approach. Here are the top five biggest marketing mistakes we often see companies make along the way:1: MARKETING WITHOUT A STRATEGY Some companies believe their product does everything, that their target market is anyone who has money to spend and that they don’t have competition. But for your marketing to really succeed, you need to define a target market segment where your product/service has the most relevance and the best competitive advantage. Research your competition and their strengths and weaknesses to compare with your own competitive advantage. Once you identify your key advantage over the competition, build this into every marketing activity, choosing marketing vehicles that only cater to a clearly defined group of potential buyers. Now you have a marketing strategy, so now you can develop a calendar of events and associated budget to help you maximise every penny of your marketing budget.2: MARKETING AND SALES GAPEver developed sales materials that never get used by the sales team? Often marketing teams spend time, effort and money creating sales collateral, only for the sales team to reject it because it doesn’t do the job. Not having a clear integration between sales and marketing can result in failed marketing programs, costing you lost revenue opportunities and wasted expenditure.Instead, ask your sales team to participate in marketing planning. Set up a sales advisory committee for both sales management and representatives to provide feedback on proposed marketing programs. Without uniting sales and marketing departments, marketing strategies are only achieving one-half of the equation.3:  INCONSISTENT BRANDINGIn other words, changing your company’s positioning depending on the audience, marketing vehicle used or even person delivering it. This results in a confused audience—unsure of who you are and what your company does. Brand awareness is only built by consistently communicating your company’s position and identity, so that your audience will repeat your positioning exactly as you intend it.To achieve this, it’s important to clearly define who you are and what you offer. Put together a statement that everyone agrees upon, understands and - crucially - supports. This positioning statement must include who you are, what you offer, for whom, for what result and why someone should choose you over anyone else. Then carry out a full audit of all your marketing materials to eliminate any inconsistencies.4: NOT USING THE MARKETING MIX EFFECTIVELY.Using only one marketing vehicle to promote a company and/or its products is a common mistake, especially in this digital age. Many existing marketing plans we see only focus on one activity - direct mail, advertising, public relations - and do not integrate these activities for maximum effect.It’s key to choose a marketing mix that caters specifically to your target market, before creating a schedule to ensure the required coverage across multiple channels. This takes time, but a variety of vehicles, working in concert, will build awareness and generate leads at a far higher rate than any one vehicle alone.5. MARKETING SOMETHING YOU CAN’T DELIVER.Your marketing team has created eye-catching materials and an aggressive campaign for the launch of a new company product or service. The campaign is very successful, but operations cannot handle the demands. They do not have the ability to deliver. Or maybe, the product itself is not available in time, or has production problems. This upsets your customers and demoralizes your sales and marketing team. They stop selling and the pipeline dries up.It’s important to realign the efforts of marketing and operations by assessing what needs to happen to meet any new business demands. If you then create a plan to detail the specific steps required for each team to support existing sales, as well as successfully rolling out the offering to new customers, this will only build confidence within each team and avoid any potential hiccups.

You may be one of the lucky companies at the moment who is asking themselves “What should I do with my marketing spend in 2010?” Many companies have battened down the hatches in the mistaken view that doing nothing will somehow stand them in good stead for when the British recession is finally over.
So what to do with your marketing spend next year, no matter how limited? Should you ditch more traditional marketing methods and tactics and focus on digital? Is it really cheaper and the only way ahead?

As strategic marketing consultants, we’re not only seeing a large number of our clients with reduced marketing spend for next year but with a renewed desire to really make every penny count. That’s the beauty of digital marketing – it’s highly traceable and transparent. But does that mean that more traditional marketing has no place? Some would argue that digital isn’t that new either – we’re all blogging, broadcasting emails and podcasting every day anyway. Digital is such a huge medium, which is still developing, it’s hard to generalise anymore. Also the cost associated with going to market with digital varies so much, even more so than traditional marketing methods - and in many cases can actually be more expensive.

The key focus for getting the most out of your carefully guarded marketing budget has to be integration – choosing the best online and offline marketing for your particular requirement at any given moment. Measuring the success of each will then always remain crucial, without resorting to just bean counting the number of clicks you’ve got to your website.

Marketing is too varied and too complicated to generalise down to simply “Should I go digital or traditional,” and going for the cheapest option has never been the strategic choice of a winner anyway. What works for one company, or indeed product, will not necessarily work for another. With the vast choice of channels we now have on offer, the real skill is in using the appropriate channel at the appropriate time. In short, staying very well informed is the only way forward. This is how we work as strategic marketing consultants – we aim to find the best solution, be it the development and implementation of a traditional direct mail campaign or an internet marketing strategy, ideally combining the best that both have to offer to achieve the very best results for our clients.