Expert Explains Why You Need to Integrate Internet Tactics with Traditional Marketing

While the Internet may be revolutionizing marketing, it may not be revolutionizing your sales. Many companies are busy assembling their online assets – strong Web sites, email campaigns, banner ads, social networking profiles and more – but they still can’t seem to draw the sales necessary to make good on their investment in cyberspace real estate.

This doesn’t have to be the case, according to Shawn Elledge, chief engagement officer of the Integrated Marketing Summit (www.integratedmarketingsummit.com), the only regional educational marketing event in the U.S. that deals specifically with the integration between marketing channels. He believes the main reason this happens is because the Internet tactics are treated separately from the company’s primary marketing tactics. “The first hurdle for businesses in the Internet age was just to get online with a Web site that was engaging and thought-provoking,” Elledge said. “Soon, the challenge became devising a way to use that site to engender and even close sales. Today, however, many companies are missing the boat because they aren’t truly tracking their online efforts in ways that could help them get even more business. They still don’t understand the technology completely, so instead of finding comprehensive ways to integrate it with their marketing strategies, they compartmentalize it and keep it separate. If they want to be competitive, that dog just won’t hunt.”

Forrester Research reported that an integrated marketing strategy can outperform a non-integrated marketing strategy by as much as 800 percent. That’s why Elledge, a marketing veteran of more than 20 years, is such an advocate of integration and automation in modern marketing.

Elledge’s tips for companies who want to get on the integration bandwagon include:

• If you want to become more efficient, you have to add automation. You cannot hope to integrate your myriad online and offline marketing tactics if there isn’t some level of automation in both the execution and tracking of your marketing arsenal.
• If you want to become more effective, you must integrate all your online channels, and ensure they connect to your offline marketing strategies.
• The need to learn new technologies in today's market is imperative for success. If you’re not up to speed on the current marketing technologies available, you can bet your competitors already are.
• If you are selling a product or service today, you must adopt technologies that will track and score prospected online behavior, otherwise you’ll forfeit the ability to tell hot leads from cold ones. That results in wasted time, inefficiency and lost sales.
• “If you know what you’re doing, you can use automation and online tracking to get a clearer picture than ever before of what works and what doesn’t work,” Elledge said. “That’s the soul of efficient marketing, because it gives companies the ability to stop spending money that doesn’t generate revenue, and focuses the marketing budget on what does. And at the end of the day, it’s all about spending the least amount of money to drive the most revenue you can.”