Integrated Marketing Communications

The overall goal of integrated marketing communications is to drive new revenue growth and profits by maximizing the return on total marketing investments and resources while managing the overall brand experience thus building brand equity and future sales.

Many companies have separate online and offline marketing efforts, with distinct budgets. Some even treat online marketing as an IT expense rather than a communications expense.

Two recent books attempt to enlighten marketers on this situation. I highly recommend them.

Steve Woods in Digital Body Language says "Marketers who continue to pursue their mission with a disconnected set of communication tools and non-integrated data sets cannot gain the multi-perspective visibility into their prospects that is required to understand and leverage their digital body language."

Sandy Carter, an IBM vice president, describes the challenge in The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market as follows: "In an integrated campaign, marketers define the role of each channel. … The integrated campaign moves down a purchase funnel across a series of elements of the campaign. What is challenging is how to measure the success of that integrated campaign. … The way you measure the integrated impact of tactics is difficult, in particular, how the channels are synergistically working together is incredibly difficult."