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Does your head spin sometimes trying to wrap it around all of the
marketing ingredients available for your business today? It can seem
like there’s a new flavor every week making the rounds in the news and
being promoted by creative types. And then next week there’s one more
… and another the week after that, and so on until suddenly you’re
faced with 30 or more ingredients for preparing what you thought was
going to be a simple marketing recipe. However many of these flavors you
choose to add in, marketing integration is the key to blending a
consistent and cohesive brand experience.What is a brand?Most
people think that “brand” and “logo” are synonymous. They’re partially
right. Your logo is part of your brand, but your brand isn’t just your
logo; it’s more. Your brand is a combination of all the elements that
people come into contact with, known as “touch points” that
differentiates your business, your products and your services from the
competition. These touch points range from the name of your company to
the designs of your marketing collateral, as well as any contact with
the people in your organization … even the look and design of your
office space speaks to your brand.What is marketing integration?Let’s
say that your customers get a taste of your brand on your website, your
social media profiles, and the email blasts you send them. What your
brand represents needs to remain consistent across all channels, but how
you convey your brand will change. Successful integration requires more
than a cut and paste approach of using the same images and slogans
across all these media. A post on Facebook engages your customers
differently than a direct mail piece. To leverage the strength of these
different marketing mediums, your strategies and messages will likely
change.Marketing integration can become even more complicated
for businesses who hire multiple marketing partners for their brand
management. For example, if you run a healthcare company and you’re in
the process of revamping your marketing campaigns to support some recent
changes within your organization. You hire one company to update your
website. You hire a second company to perform an SEO analysis of your
online content. You hire a third firm to update your offline content,
like your magazine ads and tradeshow materials. And you delegate the
managing of your social media profiles to someone on your staff.
Suddenly you have too many cooks in the kitchen, each making their own
favorite dish.How do you get all these elements to complement
each other? Whether you manage marketing in-house or outsource it to one
or multiple marketing companies, to be successful, you need the
following four ingredients:• A plan with well-defined goals, strategies and tactics• Open communication and cooperation between all parties involved in managing your brand• Coordination between all of your marketing campaigns•
Integration of your marketing strategies into every aspect of your
organization, from your sales team, to your customer service reps, to
anyone who comes into contact with the publicMost companies use
one or two of these vital ingredients. Failing to add any one of these
will change the flavor of your brand. Everything you do to attract,
engage, convert, and retain your customers must be integrated for your
business to maximize the ROI from your marketing efforts and achieve the
best competitive advantage.For more information about brand
management and CMO services for developing an integrated marketing plan
for your business, call us at (410) 366-9479 ext. 2#. Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dina Wasmer is President of Incite Creative, a marketing and
graphic design firm that provides brand-building services and strategies
for small-to-middle-market businesses and non-profit organizations in
the Mid-Atlantic region. Additionally, Dina is an adjunct professor at
the University of Baltimore teaching typography and graphic design
principles. For more information, log onto www.incitecreativeinc.com or contact dina@incitecreativeinc.com

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