Not many people are talking about integrated marketing. But they should be.
You might be asking, “What is integrated marketing?” Good question. Integrated marketing is taking your existing traditional marketing strategies and incorporating them with new media marketing, or online marketing. It is not only a powerful approach to marketing your small business, but it’s essential.
Small business marketing is an art as much as a science. You have the big budgets that large corporations have so you must get creative. That’s one of the benefits to marketing yourself online. Most Internet marketing strategies don’t require huge budgets. You can do a lot of the work yourself and achieve great results just by logging on and tuning in. But you don’t want to abandon any off line marketing that you may be doing. Therefore, you want to make sure your Internet marketing works with your current marketing strategy and not against it.
The Melberg Marketing Blue Chip Marketing Tips blog is designed to help you transition from traditional marketing to Internet marketing. Whereas I try to focus primarily on Internet marketing topics here at Small Business Mavericks, at BlueChipMarketingTips.com I’ll show you how to integrate your online marketing with your traditional marketing for maximum effectiveness. If you read just two blogs today, let Blue Chip Marketing Tips be the other one.
Caroline
I don’t know where you have been listening, but if you Google “integrated marketing” you’ll find pages of testament to the fact that everybody is talking about Integrated Marketing.
Sadly though, most of the talk is by people who don’t really understand what it is. What you describe, for example is “integrated marketing communications” which is just a small corner of the world that is “integrated marketing”. See what I mean at “Integrated Marketing – if you don’t know what it is you probably aren’t doing it” on my blog.
Hey Phil,
Well, you might be right that more folks are talking about integrated marketing than I had indicated – which is great! And, I agree with your assessment that what I’m talking about here is really focused on one aspect of integrated marketing. This post sprung from my continued experience witnessing clients who have their IT department handling their Internet Marketing and their Marketing department handling everything else – obviously no way to develop an integrated, consistent message in the marketplace.
Great comments, thanks – keep ’em coming!
Caroline
I Googled “integrated marketing” and found 1.6 million results. That’s not much. I also Googled “internet marketing” and found 63.6 million results. So it looks like “everybody” isn’t talking about it after all.
At any rate, Caroline’s right. Most companies trying to do integrated marketing have their traditional marketing departments separate from their internet marketing efforts and those that don’t aren’t doing internet marketing correctly. Most traditional marketing people don’t know anything about SEO, wouldn’t know how to write a blog, can’t get even meager results from search engine marketing, and continue to try to shove the round peg of internet marketing into the square hole of traditional marketing. Sorry Phil, but they’re not talking about integrated marketing, and if they are then, as you pointed out, they’re not talking about it in the right way.