How Best Can We Go Integrated in a Speciality Marketing World

Good Strategy is the key to the success of Integrated Marketing. It’s not about doing more but doing the right things in right way, at right time i.e., blending customer opinion with marketing, it was previously called as pipeline engineering.

Taking customer-centric approach to marketing, all customers oriented functions within an organization need to be integrated. Integration is a better way to overcome fragmentation. Steve McKee’s Statement “To fight off fragmentation effectively, everything you do attract, convert, retain, and engage your customers should be integrated.” Seems so actual and true.

With the goal of customer-centric, for integrated marketing, we need to have few practices:

• Customer Journey Mapping : Maps should include all customer interactions across the internal organizational functions, external channels and mediums.
• Architecture : Consideration of text and graphics, for particular solution/medium or function/lifecycle combination, must be implemented, and shared as applicable externally. Managers and Marketing managers must work closer to flesh out prioritized messaging for each medium and for each stage of product lifecycle.
• Data Integration : Integrated data must be tapered across all internal organizations and with key partners must be implemented. The resulting data will help the customer mapping as well as informing decisions.
• Metrics : Metrics Integration across all the functions and rolled up to business priorities. Marketing excellence is required along with focus on providing leadership by fostering and institutionalizing best practices, enhancing team skills to improve marketing performance, achieving business results through increased agility.