Posts Tagged ‘IMC’

There are a lot of marketers out there that understand that integrated marketing and communications (IMC) is a preferred way to do business because it is an outside-in approach. If an organization isn’t integrated, what are the best approaches to getting management buy-in? Anna Barcelos and I wanted to share nine key ways to provide management with the value of IMC.

Sales-Oriented Vs. Market-Oriented – Which Are You?

It’s often been said that the mindset of “If we build it, they will come” is not viable for long term business. To understand why, let’s look at the difference between a sales-oriented and market-oriented organization.

Sales-oriented organizations have a heavy reliance on promotional tactics to sell whatever products/services the organization has selected to produce. Sales teams, not marketers lead the pack and have the burden of performance (i.e. revenue generation).

In the short-run, markets can be created with aggressive campaigns and sales work; however, the lifetime value of a customer is minimal. The organization mindset is focused on ‘the next big thing,’ hungry and aggressive sales teams, and sales beating up marketing for not dishing up qualified leads or customers ready to spend.

Market-oriented organizations identify what markets need/want first and tailor their operations to deliver products/services that meet those demands as efficiently as possible. Within a market-oriented organization, marketing takes the lead not sales.

Because the market-oriented company has its complete focus on the customer, the end result is often brand loyalty, sales, and strong customer lifetime values.

Getting Management Buy-In

If you are in a sales-oriented organization, how then can you get management to understand the benefits of customer-focused integrated marketing and communications? Here are five areas to focus on:

1. Execute long-term customer acquisition programs across channels instead of short-term lead generation to feed the sales funnel. While the former may take a little longer, the end results produce longer term customers with much higher life-time values. Demonstrate this with metrics and show management. They are always interested in seeing results tied to revenue generation. 
2. Emphasize that a customer for life is a much more cost-effective model versus solely focusing on new customer acquisition.
3. Communicate the benefits of how integrated marketing communications delivers a consistent message to both existing and prospective customers.
4. Involve key players from “silos” within the organization in planning process. If you can’t beat them— join them. Realistically, sales-oriented organizations will always have silos due to individual department goals/quotas.  If sales and marketing work together, both are vested in acquiring/retaining customers.
5. Build incentives around existing and new business initiatives to not only motivate sales, but customer service and marketing as well.

You would think that a market-oriented organization would have a leg-up on getting management buy-in, but a lot of times there are still silos and separate budgets in place that affect true IMC. But by demonstrating the value of IMC, chances are you’ll have an easier time convincing management of its inherent benefits. Here are four ways to show value:

1. Do an A/B test of an integrated campaign versus a non-integrated campaign (suggested by Valeria Maltoni, Conversation Agent) Testing is a risk-free, quick way to prove the value of IMC. Large companies shy away from radically changing their current marketing efforts. Testing gets them interested without any disruption in day to day. If tests delivers expected ROI, then scale.
2. Leverage/collect behavioral data and analytics for follow up IMC campaigns with existing customers and build profiles on potential untapped new markets. It’s astonishing how companies have amazing databases that they are not exploiting as much as they could.
3. Survey/talk to customers for the best insight on what works with them and what doesn’t. (“How can we be better?” “ Where do you want to find information?”) Management is always interested in seeing results of these efforts!
4. Maintain communication across all departments. Market-oriented organizations are more customer-centric than sales-oriented organizations. Goals are aligned across the organization from top to bottom. Everyone plays a part in the customer experience. IMC works well within these organizations, but communication is key.

Whether an organization is sales- or market-focused, and the latter may be more beneficial, the reality is that unless upper management encourages a customer-centric culture, self-contained silos and status quo will continue to be the norm.  The benefits of outside-in planning that IMC offers will bring you closer to the customer and social media has really helped put that into perspective.  The voice of the customer is louder than ever, which is forcing traditional organizations to rethink their marketing communications strategies and encouraging customer-centric organizations to develop deeper relationships with their customers.  Both take time, but small efforts across an entire organization will deliver what’s most important—a happy, loyal customer.

Share your expertise with us! Have you encouraged management to implement IMC? Have you broken down or bridged silos in your organization? What worked best? What didn’t work? What would you add here?

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After 14 years of practicing integrated marketing communications (IMC), I never thought I’d write a post about it.

I guess there was an assumption on my part that after all these years that most marketers were already integrating their efforts…until I saw this comment on David Mullen’s blog post: 

“I’ve heard many people in our industry scoff at the idea of integrated marketing communications. It was always great in theory, but hard and messy in practice.”

Scoff? Hard? Messy? 

The definition of IMC on Wikipedia: 

“a planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are relevant to that person and consistent over time.” 

Sounds easy to me…

In their book “Integrated Marketing Communications: Putting it all Together and Making it Work” (1993), Don Schultz and Stanley Tannebaum state that IMC is also about “talking to people who buy or don’t buy based on what they see, hear, feel, and so on, not just about your product or service.”

What’s the problem? Why is IMC such a struggle? My first thought was to wonder how many agencies and corporations still exist with information silos. Perhaps a lot and maybe that’s the problem? 

According to “Developing a Creative and Innovative Integrated Marketing Communications Plan“ by James R. Ogden, one insight might be: 

“The problem with the integration of the marketing concept into today’s businesses and organizations is that many top executives learned different methods of management. The old adage ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ may be one of the stumbling blocks to the adoption of a customer orientation.” 

The book then goes on to state: 

“Many businesses are organized around departments, which are set up to specialize in given tasks. With this system, companies and organizations build fences around their duties. They become territorial in nature and want no part of corporate overlapping. Each territory needs to be protected by departmental managers, who may fear for their jobs. Because of these organizational structures, it has been hard to sell the marketing concept to many businesses and organizations, but without it there are decreased sales and profits.” 

James Ogden wrote his book in 1998. Here is it 16 years since both books were written and it seems that businesses are still struggling with moving towards customer-oriented communications. 

Back in the day, IMC referred to all the traditional marketing goodies: direct mail, PR, advertising, e-mail marketing, sales promotions, Internet marketing, etc. 

But today, simply put, communication silos don’t work because marketers cannot silo how audiences & communities string together & respond to all the communications they receive. ( “Dear Customer: This message is from PR. That message is from Advertising. And the other message is from E-Marketing. Please don’t confuse the three as they serve different purposes, contain different messages and you must react to each separately so we can tell our VP of Marketing that our individual campaigns worked.”) 

Like I said, I’ve been fortunate to have always been doing IMC, so I can’t comment on what the challenges are today. But I’d really like to gain some insights in to the mindset that David describes. If you are working in an agency or corporation that has not embraced IMC, would you be willing to share with us your insights, challenges and experiences? 

And one final thought… what happens when we add social media to the mix? Will social media finally force companies out of their communication silos? 

If you are a marketer interested in learning more about IMC, check out Amazon’s selection of books on IMC. Medill also offers the Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications. 

NOTE: Integrated Marketing Communications was pioneered at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. However, other than a Digital Marketing course that covers social networking, it doesn’t appear that social media has been added to the curriculum.