Brave New Integrated Marketing World
By: T.J. Tedesco
For:Lisa Cross, GAM
Published: September 09

Aldus Huxley was right.

Today is a brave new world. The old rules no longer make sense. At the early part of this decade, it was sufficient to put the majority of your lead generation effort toward push marketing vehicles like trackable emails and direct mail. Dressing up your website with customized landing pages was a plus. A simple but effective push marketing formula coupled with intelligent public relations, SEO work and a coordinated selling strategy spelled sales growth and success for many companies.

If this formula was so good, why doesn't it work anymore? If you said, “the economic implosion and social media explosion,” you’d be right. Thrust into a fight for basic survival, companies need to make hard choices. This means eliminating any corporate activity that isn't directly tied to survival. Sacrificing future market share gains to see another day isn't a hard decision for most executives to make.

Even though the advertising industry is down more than 20% over the past year, those of us in the sales growth business should thank Corporate America for demanding more. Our toolbox has needed to expand. Our tools need to be sharper, less expensive and more effective.

Darwin was right too.

It is survival of the fittest. Don't be shocked your customers are saying no to expensive collateral, direct mail and print advertising campaigns. Don’t complain they’re asking for leadership in new media activities. Embrace it! It’s your opportunity for the next decade.

Revisit PR. The published word, especially one with the imprimatur of a recognized authority in your industry, carries more clout than any self-promotional piece you can create or any ad you can buy. Certainly there’s a place for direct mail, advertising and print collateral, but adding PR and electronic media promotions will enhance the printed word, not replace it. When analyzing your own promotional efforts, you know that payback is everything. Just don’t forget that the same is true for your clients too.

Gorgeous websites are still critical. A well designed website is a necessary component for all strong companies. It is doubtful this will change soon. Regardless of the decentralizing effect social media has on information, your website will continue to be the go-to source for those seriously interested in your business. Though blogging has taken off with some companies as a means to bypassing a website entirely, it will be years before this is the norm, if ever. Concentrate on continually improving your website, doubling your current effort.

Embrace broadcast email. Creating email lists and sending completely trackable informational messages monthly or even weekly will not only increase your industry presence, but also position you as a frontrunner in the increasingly e-world.

Enter social media, stage right. Social media is a perfect complement to an integrated print collateral, electronic push media and public relations strategy. Social media allows companies and their employees to interact directly with their customers on a very intimate basis. Sticking your head in the sand and ignoring Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn makes no sense. It's simply too dangerous. Just ask Dell, Walmart and United Airlines, all recent targets of social media attacks.

The versatile, viral tools of social media can help position you and your company as knowledge leaders. Regardless of what you choose as your primary social media tool, you have the ability to promote your brand in a conversational, authentic and informational way as often as you wish. If your content is good, you’ll be rewarded with fans, followers and connections. If not, you’ll learn the hard way with a reduction in your social media base or possibly even negative feedback.

Knowing the mechanics of creating an effective social media presence is very important, but so is your ability to articulate why it's important in the first place. Good posts receive direct inquiries and trackable click-throughs to websites. Separate landing pages for each social media tool help, as does constant monitoring of where your web traffic is being generated. Then, appropriate follow ups on these new leads via traditional sales and marketing activities will close the loop and generate the best results.

Social media is now at the early stages of showing return on investment. Earlier this year, Dell announced it had crossed the $3 million mark in revenue directly associated with its social media activities. Although this number is a miniscule percentage of total Dell sales, nonetheless it was a very important announcement. Dell has made social media a core component of its customer acquisition strategy. After all, more people now communicate by social media than by email, a statistic I still find amazing. In the early 1990s, Dell had to convince customers that ordering online was safe and easy. Today’s challenge is similar: how can the company use their army of Tweeters to help achieve their revenue growth goals?

The ramifications of this social media onslaught are both good and bad. Those of us in the promotional business – which includes the printing industry, by the way – must learn new tools and incorporate them into our marketing mix.

Last month, one of my colleagues passed on a stat that she though would blow a tire on the social media highway. She pointed out that online advertising revenues for social media have slowed its rate of growth to a mere 8%. While this is a significant decrease from last year’s hot hot hot 17% growth, if ever there was a stat that proves my point, this is it. Compared to a 20% decrease, social media’s 8% growth looks amazingly robust.

The bottom line is that social media is just one piece of the puzzle, and a small one at that. An integrated marketing campaign of email, PR, websites—coupled with traditional B2B advertising—will be the primary way to get leads and make sales in years to come.

Brave new integrated marketing world? You bet.

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T.J. Tedesco is president of Grow Sales, Inc., a full-service sales growth firm that has served the graphic arts industry since 1996. Grow Sales services include marketing, public relations, Web site design and sales support. T.J. is the author of “Binding, Finishing & Mailing: The Final Word,” “Win Top-of-Mind Positioning,” and the ever popular “Direct Mail Pal,” all published by GATFPress and available at Amazon.com. T.J. can be reached at (301) 294-9900 or tj@growsales.com.