NCET Biz Tips: Overcome these obstacles for better marketing
by Chad Hallert
Chad Hallert
Chad Hallert
Is your company producing great marketing that connects with your target audience and inspires action? If you’re like most organizations out there, the answer is no. Sure, there are pieces that stand out – a great tagline that sticks in our head or an innovative use of technology that gets a message out at just the right time – but, if we actually look at a typical marketing campaign from top to bottom, you’re going to see a lot of holes.
This hurts performance and makes your customers unhappy. Your audience already feels overwhelmed by advertising and 69% feel that ads are more intrusive than ever. So, if you’re going to interrupt their day, you better get things right.
How do we do this? The answer is actually pretty obvious – through integrated marketing. Easy right? We all know that we’re supposed to work as a “team” in an integrated fashion with a singular focus on our customers and their experience. So, why does this rarely happen in reality?
From my experience with dozens of companies ranging from Fortune 500 to small family businesses, three specific things get in the way of actually pulling off an integrated marketing strategy:
Data: There is so much data available to us right now. We can track the performance of our marketing campaigns to a greater extent than ever before. The problem is often teams looking at different data sets. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in a meeting where one team is talking about eyeballs and reach while another is talking about ROI and cost per acquisition. What’s the actual business goal and how are we measuring progress towards it?
Process: Most individual teams have standard operating procedures. Often, they were created by a department manager and work well for them. What happens when we need a cross-department process created? Who owns it, and how does it get created to each team’s liking? This can be a major pain and there are few volunteers for the job.
Politics: This is a nice way to say “ego.” To me, this is probably the biggest obstacle to integrated marketing. I’ve seen the absolute nicest, most team-oriented people in the world turn into total tyrants the moment they feel their value is being questioned and their livelihoods threatened. The irony is that this is almost never the case. Once an integrated campaign is running, you can quickly identify how all the pieces work together to drive results.
Be on the lookout for these three obstacles blocking you from developing an integrated marketing strategy. They are difficult, but best addressed head on. Once you overcome them, it will be well worth the effort and your customers will thank you.
Dive deeper into this and more on Elevating Results through Integrated Marketing during NCET’s virtual Biz Bite on Wednesday, Sept. 23. NCET is a member-supported nonprofit organization that produces educational and networking events to help people explore business and technology. More info at https://ncet.org/biz-bite-elevating-results/
Chad Hallert is Chief Digital Officer at Foundry (www.foundryideas.com) and is recognized as one of the top digital marketers in the country.