Integrated Marketing Management

Improve efficiency and effectivness through IMM

As marketers, we know that integration across media, channels and campaigns is important, but it's not discussed as often as practices and examples of individual channels. So I thought it would be interesting to summarise this talk by Lorna Loney, Senior Applications Consultant for Teradata Applications (Aprimo). She gave an insightful presentation at Connect2013 in London, on 'Integrated marketing management, you can also download her full presentation here on Integrated Marketing Management.

The focus of her presentation was on how poor internal structures, systems, processes and a lack of integration across the organisation can impact the customer experience and marketing/business performance. This diagram shows the nature of the challenge.

Marketing challenges

From her experience, she has seen many marketing challenges which include:

• inefficient and manual processes
• poor internal audit trails
• poor performance management
• lack of processes to manage problems and
• lack of speed to turnaround new ideas.

How to overcome these in 3 steps? Leverage marketing efficiency, data and the customer experience which equals a successful customer experience. 

Her talk also homed on the importance of marketing operations. Why use technology to automate processes to optimise internal and external marketing resources?  

• 1. Helps with planning and budgeting
• 2. Helps create marketing programs and content
• 3. Helps to collect content and knowledge
• 4. Fulfil and distribute marketing content and digital assets.
• 5. Measure, optimise and analyse performance

She has seen technology become an enabler and given true ROI, to allow marketers to free up their time from administrative routine tasks from searching for information or ensuring it reaches the right people, to allowing them to focus on marketing. Some clients have admitted this takes 80% of their time!.

Unite resources for integrated marketing planning

Companies can be defragmented even though they are working on the same campaign at times, and it can become inefficient and effective - so often it's about internal communications, engagement and sharing information.

Her tips were to:

• Be visible with information; share a marketing operations calendar (identify resources, milestones, channels, content, responsibilities). Sound familiar - about project planning?
• Collaborate: Be open and upfront with information and progress, ensure a communication audit trail
• Manage and monitor budget throughout the cycle, and use tools or technology to support this. Gartner have forecasted that those who invest in this, can reduce overspending by 75%.

Lorna shared that 'If you can’t measure marketing efficiency, you can’t improve it, if you can’t improve it, you can’t optimise it'