Integrated Marketing: A Better ROI from Your Marketing Budget
Are the Different Parts of Your Marketing Plan Working Together?
In sports, one of the most enduring truths, and common clichés, is that building a winning franchise takes not just the right personnel, but also the desire for everyone to do their job and work together. In other words, you don’t just need great players, but for each of those great athletes to play their part and handle a specific role.
As increasing numbers of business owners and managers are finding out, the same is true of a profitable Internet marketing plan.
Far too often, we come across clients who are taking a disjointed approach to generating leads and finding new customers. Usually, it’s because they have lots of things they want to try – everything from direct mail to pay-per-click advertising and print promotions – but are treating each of them as an item on a to do list, not part of a bigger effort. In other words, the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.
Here are a handful of easy ways to tell if you’re facing a similar challenge:
Your marketing pieces have incongruent messages.
In successful companies, there are one or two core messages (usually called a unique selling proposition) that are evident in every marketing or PR piece. If you don’t have strengths that you’re emphasizing consistently, then you probably aren’t getting the kinds of results you need.
Each of your marketing activities brings in different types of customers.
In the same way, established companies know that their products and services work for a specific kind of buyer, and target them appropriately. The goal of your different efforts should be to reinforce key messages to the right demographic, not scatter your work across lots of different audiences.
Customers are only interacting with you in one or two ways.
When a marketing campaign is firing on all cylinders, it isn’t unusual to see customers visiting a website from a print marketing piece, or downloading a brochure from your web site. The point is that buyers should be finding different avenues to your business, not just responding to one or two.
You have lots of ideas, but few firm goals.
As we mentioned, it isn’t enough to have a bunch of different ideas you want to try – you should also have a firm bottom-line target that’s measurable, achievable, and makes sense with the tools you’re using. Without that level of focus, you won’t ever be likely to put together a comprehensive marketing campaign that shows a consistently high return on investment.
In today’s economy, there are more opportunities than ever to introduce yourself to customers in different ways. To make the most of them, however, it’s important that all the elements of your marketing plan be working in sync with one another.
Our team at Kayak are experts at optimizing traditional marketing materials for online consumption and extending an online lead capture event into the print world. Learn about the ROI of a variety of online marketing activities by clicking the button below.
