Integrated marketing plans or integrated marketing campaigns might be defined by most marketers today as the use of multiple marketing vehicles in a synergistic manner to achieve a better result than could be obtained by using a single vehicle such as advertising, couponing, a trade show or an e-mail campaign.

EMM Group defines integrated marketing as a process of engagement that puts the consumers/ customers at the center, ascertains their preferences in the contacts and content that they prefer and find useful and desirable, and delivers that content at the time and in the vehicles of their choosing.

According to a survey of its membership, the Association of National Advertisers identified integrated marketing planning as one of the greatest challenges for today’s marketers. This challenge can be traced to three factors: (1) a data dearth... most marketers have not acquired the response data to help discriminate among the myriad choices available, (2) organizational dysfunction ... most marketing departments are compartmentalized into functional silos that discourage collaboration around the customer and encourage a competition for internal marketing funds, and (3) process confusion.

In the marketing benchmarking survey that EMM Group is conducting among ANA members, these sophisticated marketers consistently rate themselves lower on integrated marketing planning than on any other process. It is fair to say that the overwhelming majority of marketers have no defined approach to integrated marketing.

EMM Group has developed a gold-standard integrated marketing approach and has deployed it successfully for numerous clients. That approach has the following components:

• Identifying clearly the target audience for the marketing effort. Different audiences respond differently to various marketing vehicles, so one must first clearly identify and profile the target audience including touch points and other factors usually captured in a “Voice of the Customer”.
• Defining the marketing objective of the campaign. Different marketing vehicles affect consumer attitudes and behaviors in various ways so the marketer must define the objective of the effort as precisely as possible so as to facilitate the choice of the proper vehicles.
• Identifying the attitudes and behaviors of the target audience and the barriers preventing the transition from the current attitudes and behaviors to the desired attitudes and behaviors.
• Listing and qualifying the available marketing spending options using a ‘cascading choices’ approach based on the best available quantitative data. Start with the option that seems most relevant and most effective against the target audience for effecting the desired attitude and behavior shift in the direction of the marketing objective.
• Modeling the integrated planning choices using advanced multi-variate techniques where the data is available or simple estimated math models in data-deprived situations. For example, which of the proposed alternatives will reach the most target customers? What is the cost per reached customer?
• Applying historically successful models from previous integrated campaigns. What components seemed to have the best effect? What conclusions can you develop by comparing the target customer response to several past integrated campaigns?

Using the EMM Group integrated marketing process described above helps bring clarity and closure to integrated marketing planning especially when it is conducted in concert with multi-functional marketing teams representing all relevant marketing vehicle options and is enabled by a robust situation assessment and Voice of the Customer.