How to integrate media, sources and contacts from all the tools and channels of an online business

Identifying its customers in a surgical way has become a priority for every company. With the tools at our disposal we can communicate with our customers using the wide variety of online channels . In this sense, it is important to decline our message, in each of them, with a coherent and widespread language throughout the purchasing process . We call Integrated Marketing the set of all those processes that participate in the flow of corporate communication. The term use is however widespread also in other areas.

We talk about Integrated Marketing , as an integration between

 

• the media in a general sense ;
• online marketing and offline marketing ;
• online media .

 

None of the uses listed above can be called erroneous, but only incomplete or partial. So it is always necessary to specify the scope of marketing integration . In general, the term has been used to express the union between different media and methods.

Furthermore, it often happens that this concept is combined with integrated communication .   An aspect that concerns only the promotional and communicative part of the company. Marketing is distinct from simple communication, and involved in many more levers (traditional marketing mix) and many more methods (strategy, market analysis, target definition, etc.).

Ecosystem question

Nowadays, every company is intent on implementing a true web media ecosystem ; all now work on a plurality of processes and activities that participate in:

 

• Sites;
• Ecommerce ;
• Social;
• Mail Marketing;
• Adv ;
• Digital PR, etc.

 

In the modern world of the web, every company ” splits ” (borrowed from poker, ie divides) its communication through various channels and by means of different methods .   This complexity becomes fragmentation when:

 

• The activities communicate in a different and disjointed way: that is, we publish messages on their social messages that are distinct in nature from what we communicate on the websites or in the content marketing activity;
• The people who deal with it are distinct: different functions play a part of the work of the same ecosystem;
• There is no convergence of data or a comparative analysis: that is, the different sources are not measured in the same way and are not compared in terms of ROI or yield in general;
• It does not converge towards a single objective of communication or a synergy between the media.

 

A golden rule of marketing is instead to create a great synergy between all media . Communicating in a different way greatly reduces the overall volume of communication and confuses the recipients of our message. Basically, each section of our ecosystem / company requires as many communication channels.

Tools required

In detail, every business system requires operational tools such as file cabinets and file transfer, a CRM to store contacts, several analytics and so on.

The online integrated marketing can be said   that specific technology and / or set of methods that allows the integration of data , sources , media and methods with different forms .

This operating mode allows to merge all the data at our disposal, in particular those used in the analysis of the Customer Journey .

In summary, integrated marketing is that set of techniques that allows

1. The convergence of all social, web, mail, eCommerce data into a single archive;
2. The uniform management of all communication channels;
3. Customer analysis Journey ;
4. The analysis of all the sources of our communication;
5. The creation of a synergy between all the media involved in the process;
6. L ‘investment optimization and measurement of results (ROI);
7. The reduction of operating times , minimizing the number of operations required.