Marketing integration is so much more than matching colours

Bryony Thomas examines tactics for successful integration.

Marketing people are always banging on about integrated campaigns, indeed there are qualifications and companies bearing the name.

However, so many ‘integrated’ campaigns I see are little more than loosely co-ordinated tactics in the same theme or colour.

The key difference between co-ordination and genuine integration, is whether or not a campaign has been designed to take a person through the whole buying decision. Or, whether it’s just turning on a number of expensive promotional taps using a common theme, without a functioning sales funnel to convert the interest you generate.

If you want to make your marketing pay in terms of real sales results, you need to make sure that you’re not doing half a job.

A co-ordinated marketing campaign

A co-ordinated campaign will typically have a common creative theme and a matching ‘look and feel’, used consistently over a number of mediums. For example, an ad, some web banners, a press release, a direct mail piece and a web landing page. Some go further, with a download or give-away of some kind that relates to the theme. So, while you’re integrating tactical elements, you’re not integrating with sales … which is what matters if you’re after a decent marketing ROI. Typically, these campaigns will generate a number of marketing leads, which are then passed to sales for qualification. This is often where a number of potentially profitable prospects fall through the cracks. If you’ve not developed an integrated plan with your sales team, then you may have wasted precious marketing budget. I’ve often observed:

• Sales people not following up marketing leads immediately, meaning that by the time they pick up the phone, the prospect can’t remember ever having been interested.
• Sales people not being fully briefed (or ideally involved) in the campaign concept, meaning that follow-up calls are disjointed from the original point of contact.
• Sales people being incentivised on outbound volume targets, meaning that marketing follow-up actually dents their performance on paper.
• Sales people working on that month’s targets, seeing marketing leads as slow burn that won’t reward them immediately and, as such moving down the priority list.
• Sales people not being equipped with relevant follow-up material – for me this is the biggie in terms of marketing having let the team down – so often, a great lead generation campaign just isn’t seen through, and the sales person is left with some great people to call, but nothing more to tell them.

A truly integrated marketing campaign

Planning an integrated marketing campaign means equipping everyone in the team with what they need to move a person from one stage in the buying decision to the next. Simply generating awareness is doing less than half a job. Here’s a quick outline for a genuinely integrated campaign that you might find useful. You’ll need a tool for each step and a fully briefed team that understands how someone moved from one to the other, and (crucially) what tool to reach for next.

Creating awareness: Marketing tools that are specifically good for awareness-driving include:

• Advertising: sponsorship, press, outdoor, ambient, web, pay-per-click.
• Direct marketing: mailings, door drops, exhibitions.
• Social media: broadcast tweets, comments on Blogs and forums for example.

Creating interest: Create your own material, and give the whole team some decent bullet-points, cut & paste copy, for use in their own interactions:

• Content: Blogs, guest blogging, videos, articles papers
• Interaction: Webinars, teleseminars, conversations in social media

Surviving evaluation: You can support people who are comparing you against the market with:

• Product literature: detailed facts and figures that allow them to make a comparison, e.g data sheets.
• Case studies: Video interviews, detailed case studies.
• Other customers: have clients lined up who are ready to take testimonial phone calls, emails, etc.
• Proposal copy: a library of well-written copy for proposals and presentations.

Facilitating trial: having an easy first step will make it easier for people to say yes. Marketing can support this with:

• Product demos: have a pre-built dummy client demonstration that they can look at, or a screen capture of key features.
• Special offers: make sure that your sales people have a pre-rehearsed trial offer up their sleeve if people are teetering on the decision.

Closing the sale: Getting people to sign on the bottom line is more of a one-to-one relationship thing, but there are things that marketing can help with:

• DMU FAQs: have materials to hand that the buyer can use to cover off any internal objections in their wider decision-making unit
• Guarantees: Having pre-agreed guarantees can help people get over the hump if they perceive a risk in the deal.

Generating loyalty: Once you have people on-board, it is important to keep them happy. Marketing can help with:

• Welcome packs: introduce key people, provide contact details, outline support arrangements.
• Capture data: ask them to join a ‘club’, or sign-up to updates so that you can keep them up-to-date with the latest.
• Hospitality: make sure new customers are invited to drinks, online events, fun activities in social media, etc.

So, next time your marketing team or agency suggests some great lead generation, make sure there is a next step, and a next tool, through the whole buying process.

Bryony Thomas is a speaker, author & founder of Watertight Marketing.