Source: Lyris, Whitepaper “10 Trends that will Make or Break Your Email ROI this Year”
Through multiple touch points, campaigns leverage each other to gain traction, rise above the noise, improve relevance and increase both response and ROI. Social media can help your email efforts; mobile can help your email efforts; and search and Web analytics can help your email efforts. But when you combine all of these mediums, the results can be exponential.
“[The Internet] stands as the only medium that consists of multiple different marketing channels. In order to have a successful online marketing campaign, you must take an integrated approach and use all of the channels that the Internet affords you.” – Clay Schossow, New Media Campaigns
The quote here is just one of countless that appear in the public domain that express the unique opportunities that integrated online marketing delivers. The key concept is this: In order to be successful online, marketers must integrate with all available online channels.
This concept isn’t necessarily a new thought to most marketers. Integration of messaging across multiple mediums and across campaigns has been essential to effective marketing for quite some time. But the economic challenges of the past year have further heightened the need to integrate and have thus accelerated (and necessitated) adoption of this approach. During this time, when marketers need it most, there is a greater appreciation for the efficiencies that integrated online marketing provides.
With multiple touch points as well as the merging of technology (mobile, video, television, computer and so on) the lines between media types will continue to blur. Content will no longer show up in a single medium but will be broadcast across many; from the miniature screens of mobile devices to the large screens of broadcast media. This makes the need for well-coordinated and fully-integrated online marketing that much more pressing in the next year.
To carry this idea a bit further, as these lines blur, new and sometimes unusual partnerships will form to reinforce and amplify each other. According to Judy Franks, an integrated marketing guru, “We will continue to see emerging relationships among what appear on the surface as competing media channels.” Just ask Susan Boyle, a contestant on a television show who became an overnight star thanks to YouTube; or Ashton Kutcher, who Tweets his way to popularity and a successful acting career. They can tell you about the power of one medium to reinforce and amplify another.
As any good marketer knows, the more points at which you can touch your prospect with consistent messaging, the more your message has the opportunity to cut through the clutter. And with more and more companies allocating a higher percentage of their marketing budgets to online, the ability to create multiple touch points in a cost-effective way will be critically important to marketers in the next year. How can marketers take advantage of this trend?
Fill in any blanks in your online marketing mix. No mobile marketing capabilities yet? Create your infrastructure so you can run mobile campaigns. Haven’t fully developed your social media strategy? Apply resources to complete it and execute it. You simply can’t afford to not do these things. Without them, in an increasingly competitive online marketing world, you’ll be left in the dust.
Create messaging and offers that can be applied across various online marketing mediums. This includes designing the creative so that it displays properly on every medium. For instance, an email message renders differently in Outlook 2007 than it will in Gmail or on a smart phone, and you will want to account for these differences in all design.
Use the data collected from an email campaign to inform your other online marketing efforts. Probably one of the most powerful things that integrated online marketing can provide is data. Any data from any online campaign provides insight and education to optimize any other future online campaign. So measure, collect and analyze the data across all mediums to determine the most efficient and effective ways to improve your integrated online marketing in the future.