MSR Consulting TechnoBlog

The goal is to have all your marketing efforts supporting each other, working together to promote your business. There are obvious ways to do this, such as including your URL or domain name on every piece of promotional material that you send out, as well as on your letterhead and business cards. Include it in your Yellow Pages ads and on printed promotional materials. Not only will this increase name recognition for your site, it will also give customers an additional way to contact you or make a purchase.

Of course, you need to make sure that your Web site looks professional. If visitors come to your site and can’t find what they need, they are liable to leave and never return. All of your information should be up-to-date, easy to find, and reflect what you are doing with your offline marketing efforts.

Consistency and constancy are the keys to successful integration. You will need to make sure that both your online and offline efforts compliment one another and that one does not fall behind the other. For example, if you send out promotional postcards for a certain amount of savings, and your Web site does not display the same promotion, you will be creating an instant batch of unhappy customers.

You will also need to roll out online and offline campaigns simultaneously. You can achieve this by planning on a specific date for your campaign launch and making sure that everything is ready on both fronts by this date. One easy way to integrate your marketing efforts is by “teasing” your customers about the promotion in printed pieces that direct them to your Web site for more information.

Offering special coupons in your offline marketing that promise special Web-only deals is a great way to get more people interested in your Web site and improve your sales at the same time.
Integrated marketing is a way that you can get the most out of all of your advertising campaigns, whether you plan on a large television spot to drive customers to your site, or even if you only plan on sending out a small mailing. By using online and offline techniques together, you can increase the effectiveness of both methods.

Many of the articles you’ll find, including the one above, tend to focus on eCommerce style relationships (i.e. Business 2 Consumer). But the Business 2 Business benefits are at least as great if not more so, it just requires much more strategic thinking and tighter integration with your backoffice systems so the upfront cost can cause many SMB’s to not take the ‘risk’. From where I’m sitting the only risk is in not doing it. Trust me, your competitor will. And if you do enough research I think they’ll find that the risk they perceive isn’t really there. This is an investment in your business, not a cost. And if you can find an investment that pays bigger dividends by all means let me know.

Whether you call it Integrated Marketing, Wholistic Marketing, Relationship Marketing, or dozens of other names that I’ve heard over the years, the objective is to plan for and then execute your marketing efforts leveraging all of the channels available to you in complimentary ways. Having worked for and developed what was considered one of the founding agencies of this principle, and then in roles as a product consultant to various software vendors developing automation tools in this area, I’ve seen firsthand how 1 + 1 can equal 3. In this case, the sum of the parts is definitely greater than the whole.

The great thing about this approach for SMB’s is that it is one of the best means to stretch your marketing dollars further. On average the marketing programs that I’ve been tasked with integrating have performed 27% better* in regards to the cost/performance ratio of the campaign. It’s rare that you get to hear real numbers like that, not because those of us in the industry don’t instinctively believe it, but because we typically don’t get our hands on a campaign that was done solely offline, and then have the chance to do it in a integrated way for purposes of comparison.

*A limited sample size of 4 campaigns. Well, I shouldn’t call it a ‘sample’ as that’s the entirety of campaigns that meet my criteria in which I could say they were ‘apples to apples’. Regardless, each campaign consisted of a solely offline portion, and a portion in which I was asked to build an integrated campaign based off of the offline one. Other than references to online materials, online ‘teaser’ content, etc. the original graphics, taglines, layouts, and such were kept true to the original campaign. Target audience of both parts of the campaigns was randomly pre-selected from the same pool of candidates. Results stated represent the actual cost of the campaigns in comparison to the intended result. In all cases the intended result was a specific call to action. In two instances the call to action was for the recipient to provide their information for inclusion in a prospect database. In the other two intances the measurements of success were calculated on each of three conversion tiers. Tier 1 was the percentage of recipient who converted from receiving the initial campaign material to viewing further information. Tier 2 was the percentage who converted from viewing the detailed information to submitting a request for more information. Tier 3 was the percentage who converted to an actual sale of the marketed product/solution. For the purposes of this article only Tier 3 was considered as its the most representative of true success of the campaign. It should be noted however that Tier 2 saw just as high a percentage gain, and Tier 1 saw a 215% increase in initial response as compared to the offline campaign. This large discrepancy is easily accounted for in the psychology of buyers but that’s too much to go into here.

Entry Filed under: Small Business Server, Internet Marketing