Attract and Acquire
To address the tasks of increasing brand awareness and acquiring new customers, integrated marketing monitors changes in demand, measures the performance of marketing efforts, and plans campaigns across a range of channels to effect a positive change.
Sense Demand
Marketers must monitor demand to understand the customer's desire for products, features, and services they wish to obtain and the price they are willing to pay to obtain them. The power of the market to pull the company far outweighs that of the company to push the market.
In one case study, a manufacturer monitors customer buying patterns to determine which combinations of accessories are popular as a set among certain market segments, as a method to provide a pre-created package taht is attractive to the market, and for which customers may be willing to pay a premium.
In another case study, an airline's reward points program analyzes the search engine results to determine what travel dates, origins, and destinations are most popular as a method for operations planning in an industry where demand is seasonal and can shift dramatically over time.
Allocate Advertising Dollars
One difficulty for marketing executives is determining the most effective use of advertising budget, divided among online, brand, and direct marketing departments and initiatives, especially when the goals of these three branches and the metrics by which they measure success are disparate.
One tip is to set a goal of maximizing total returns, not merely ROI. The main problem with ROI is the problem of diminishing returns: a television advertising campaign may be perceived to have significant ROI, which would suggest that it would be wise that pumping budget into that channel will have the greatest impact on the bottom line - but the more you pump into it, the less effective it becomes (repeated exposure, beyond a certain point, gains fewer customers).
There is also the matter of indirect costs, which are typically omitted from ROI calculations: you could cut your advertising budget entirely and simply send you staff to a local mall to pimp product, which would have an extremely high ROI, but a very low impact on the overall revenue.
Additionally, focusing entirely on revenue precludes a number of important tasks. Experimenting with new approaches is worthwhile - you should face the risk (or even the certainty) of a low ROI for the sake of pioneering. There may also be strategic goals (such as entering new markets) that require marketing to lay groundwork that will not pay off until far in the future, and failing to do the groundwork today (at a loss) will make your future efforts less profitable.
In the end, the author provides no advice, but indicates that a marketer will "likely ... form an opinion over the years through trial and error."
Integrate Multichannel Acquisition Campaigns
The goal of multichannel marketing is to create "the perfect storm" of campaigns of various types (brand and promotion) across the various media.
The remainder of this section involves an elaborate, theoretical example of how this might be attempted. Hitting the highlights:
- Brand marketing is done across various channels (TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, and display) to build awareness of the product
- Certain of these messages are tailored to elicit a viral campaign, via the creation of an unbranded site to gather customer intelligence (inviting people to share their experiences). The site has several vanity URLs to track response from various channels, and visitors are cookied accordingly.
- Information gathered from the dark site is used to generate leads for direct marketing, for direct contact via phone or mail
- When individual leads buy, the information on contacts before the sale are correlated with their customer record for one-to-one marketing
The chapter goes on the mention how each step along the way can be measured: the reach of the ads versus this to the Web site, web site visitors versus registered participants, etc. The author belabors the details, which have been provided in previous chapters.