IBM’s Study on the Success of Integrated Marketing

IBM just released their study entitled “The State Of Marketing 2012:  IBM’s Global Survey of Marketers.”  The study (as reported by CMSWire), surveyed more than 350 Marketing IT Professionals.  While one of the main outcomes of the study was that IT and Marketing need to work more closely together (unfortunately, some things never change), the focus of the CMSWire summary of the survey was all about how Marketers could be more effective if they used an Integrated Marketing Approach.   I say, “Hear Hear!”

It is so important to integrate all of your marketing channels via your content, messaging, branding . . . all the way down to your color scheme.  While using an integrated marketing approach is not a new idea . . . it is amazing how few companies actually are able to accomplish it.  According to the article, only 29% of those companies surveyed have a solid strategy in place today to integrate marketing channel efforts.

Most of the problem has to do with the siloe’d organizational structure that exists today in large corporations.  And, bringing “big” data together across different organizations and platforms, constructing an organized and cohesive strategy and then implementing that across all channels — direct mail, telemarketing, email, social and mobile — is easier said than done.

IBM (and other marketing automation companies) has a suite of services that can help to enable this — but even with these types of solutions, most companies are having challenges, particularly with the email, social media and mobile channels.

However, the outlook is more promising for the future. According to the article, companies really do understand the need to use an integrated approach.  As the article points out, “they also need to break down silos, integrate information, as well as define metrics and analytics that keep even executives happy.”  I think that once leadership teams see how campaign success metrics will be positively impacted, they’ll sign on for the time and expense to get this done.

One step at a time, though, right?