Integration and the Marketing Round

According to Wikipedia, integration in the communication disciplines is defined as “the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, functions, and sources within a company into a seamless program that maximizes the [effect] on consumers and other end-users at a minimal cost. This management concept is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation.”

Imagine your organizational structure as a wheel instead of a typical hierarchy. Think of marketing as the hub. The spokes are made up of public relations, advertising, Web, email, social media, corporate communication, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, content, and direct mail. They circle simultaneously.

As the hub, your job is to ensure the following goals are achieved:

• All departments work together, and no single spoke moves into the more comfortable spot of its own silo.

• The days of one-off campaigns disappear forever. No more email campaign one month, a direct mail campaign the following month, a big product release complete with publicity the following month, so on. Your efforts are around either a series or one annual campaign, completely integrating all disciplines.

• Integration is not the same message on every platform, but you’re using all communication disciplines appropriately, with the correct messages for each.

• Sales, customer service, engineering/product development, operations, legal, and human resources interact with the marketing round for critical company initiatives.

• Information flows in and out of every discipline in a measured but easy and effective way. Processes are streamlined or removed to ensure that intramarketing and company-wide communications flow naturally.

• You find the fastest path to the end result, with the least expenditure of time and resources.

Are you already doing some of this? Perhaps you’re integrating marketing and communication around a webinar series or a trade show. Maybe you’re using Chatter inside Salesforce or creating an internal communication instant messaging system with Yammer. It may be that you regularly time your advertising and direct marketing launch to coincide with a major PR announcement. Or you’ve created an internal blog where all disciplines share information with one another.

Or is your organization so siloed that all you can do every day is protect your own turf by focusing solely on your job and not on what the other disciplines are doing?

Marketing in the round means the silos must disappear. Forever. All the disciplines must work together, no matter what turf wars or comfort boxes your organization holds dear. Sales, customer service, legal, and human resources need to advise and provide input to the marketing round as the situation demands. Those wars and boxes mean that even though you may be doing a good job of integrating marketing, public relations, and email, the other disciplines are being left out.