By M. Isi Eromosele

The modern customer consumes a wide variety of different media, and is the recipient of communications and services across numerous distributive channels. Brands are therefore required to do an effective job at marketing products and services across multiple channels. This presents opportunities – and, of course, this also presents challenges.

One particular challenge is that of implementing integrated marketing. There’s a buzz around it. Even those who are confident their business is executing integrated marketing may in fact be doing nothing of the sort. There are only a small number of marketers that really understand it.

So, what is multi-channel marketing, what is integrated marketing and how can they be married into a successful marketing program.

Working in unison

Multi-channel marketing encompasses the efforts of businesses to get communications and services into the marketplace across a number of distributive channels. For multi-channel to be truly effective, the multiple channels must operate as an integrated whole.

Effective multi-channel campaign marketing should be a cohesive process that emphasizes the delivery of consistent messages to each individual, accommodating their feedback and actions to maintain a dynamic single view of the customer’s profile.

Rather than operating separately, a company’s marketing campaign simply uses the right blend of media to reach the customer and achieve its objectives, rather than each division team having their own campaigns and their own objectives.

As such, for multi-channel marketing to be fully effective, it requires an element of integration. This integration should extend to the strategic thinking behind the campaign, urging a shift away from the traditional view of what constitutes campaign success in multi-channel marketing.

Integration

For multi-channel marketing to be most effective – and be most measurable - there needs to be aspects that are integrated. But neither of these approaches is, by definition, integrated marketing – as has sometimes been mistakenly suggested.

At a high level, integration is about media. It is about coordinating the timing of those messages, their proposition and their offers, such that they are all mutually reinforcing. Had all the individual media been utilized separately, it would not have achieved the same momentum and response.

However, in the main sense, integration is about bringing the channels together with the media in a plan that is then optimized to give you the best overall marketing results.

Integration is often thought of as just integration of media - and certainly if you are coming at it from a digital marketing perspective you might be more inclined to think of integration as a media-based planning activity.

However, the complete picture of integrated marketing is when that planning includes all of the activities through your various channels as well.

Encouraging signs

Defining integrated communications and practicing it remain two of the most important functions in the marketing industry.

The Internet has certainly brought to the fore that there is a constant need for integrated marketing that involves multiple channels. Whether you are just sending out a brochure, customers expect there to be a website that invariably leads to you, a blog that promotes your company and an email to support and promote that website.

Voila, you have become a multimedia, multi-channel business. The advent of social media has resulted in many more companies practicing multi-channel marketing.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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