In the good old days of traditional direct mail marketing, experts repeatedly stressed that to determine the success or failure of any campaign, the marketer had to have metrics in place to measure the response. Failure to have those metrics in place meant that in most cases the marketer was wasting his or her money.
Then, the Internet revolution started and marketers made sure they had an online presence, such as a World Wide Web page and/or e-mail marketing campaigns (including newsletters and sales offers).
There is one marketing expert who believes that many of these online campaigns are falling short because companies don't use newer technologies aimed at tracking their online tactics.
Shawn Elledge, chief engagement officer of the Integrated Marketing Summit, declared that today's marketers "still don't understand the technology completely, so instead of finding comprehensive ways to integrate it with their marketing strategies, they compartmentalize it and keep it separate. If they want to be competitive, that dog just won't hunt."
The Summit is a regional educational marketing event in the U.S. that deals specifically with the integration between marketing channels.
He cited a Forrester Research report which claims that an integrated marketing strategy can outperform a non-integrated marketing strategy by as much as 800%.
"In the early days of television you could run a TV ad on the three networks and reach 85% of the entire U.S. population," he added. "Thanks to the Internet, buying behavior has changed forever, and it's the consumers who now determine how you reach them, instead of the other way around before there were 1,000 channels.
"This paradigm shift in the marketplace has made it increasingly difficult for marketers to manage and maintain any sense of brand integrity. The sheer number of marketing channels combined with an ever increasing number of applications is forcing marketers to learn new techniques and technologies if they want to be successful or just keep their job."
Elledge's tips for companies who want to get on the integration bandwagon include:
• If you want to become more efficient, you have to add automation. You cannot hope to integrate your myriad online and offline marketing tactics if there isn't some level of automation in both the execution and tracking of your marketing arsenal.
• If you want to become more effective you must integrate all your online channels, and ensure they connect to your offline marketing strategies.
• The need to learn new technologies in today's market is imperative for success. If you're not up to speed on the current marketing technologies available, you can bet your competitors already are.
• If you are selling a product or service today you must adopt technologies that will track and score prospected online behavior, otherwise you'll forfeit the ability to tell hot leads from cold ones. That results in wasted time, inefficiency and lost sales.
"If you know what you're doing, you can use automation and online tracking to get a clearer picture than ever before of what works and what doesn't work," Elledge said. "That's the soul of efficient marketing, because it gives companies the ability to stop spending money that doesn't generate revenue, and focus the marketing budget on what does. And at the end of the day, it's all about spending the least amount of money to drive the most revenue you can."
