Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston - Flickr
[Note from Lee: The growing trend towards integration of marketing and communications disciplines has brought a tremendous demand for guidance and insight. I’m happy to say that my friends Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich have published a new book about just that. We rarely publish guest posts but the message of integration and optimization in this book blend perfectly with our core messages here.]
One of our favorite books to come out in a long while is Lee’s Optimize. We love the three discipline approach — content, search and social — to online marketing. Without integration across all marketing disciplines we fail to understand the customer experience.
We just published Marketing in the Round on a overarching integrated communications, traditional and new, and see online as the backbone for all marketing today, on or offline.
Consider the customer experience. They weave between traditional broadcast and print media into online seamlessly. For example, someone could ride their local train or subway, see ads, surf the Internet on their mobile phone, read a magazine (on their tablet or not), or a host of other activities.
You get the point. Customer media use supersedes tactical practices. That’s true for both B2B and B2C, though as Lee points out in his book, these sales cycles are very different.
Multichannel marketing applies to traditional print, broadcast, mail and PR approaches, too. They should all be optimized for search, too, with messaging and keywords that will invoke familiarity with stakeholders regardless of which media form they are seen.
Think about it. Customers search when they are looking to find something. If you optimize online ads, content, social and SEO so that search indexes your company’s name first, then you absolutely need your print ads, direct mail, press documents, white papers and broadcast ads to use the same keywords.
A customer may not even realize it, but they are mentally associating these words — message components — with your brand. When they search, they will use the keywords, and your optimized content will naturally come up in the top results. More importantly, it will already be familiar to your customer.
Take it a step further and add your creative, ads and content to the web site in a the modern press room. Transcribe the broadcast media so the keywords are searchable. Make them shareable. and start real discussions on them. Even ask for feedback on the ads. All of your traditional content can be repurposed, optimized and indexed for social and search.
That’s why all marketing disciplines should be integrated and operate together as a collective whole. Marketing in the Round discusses selecting traditional tactics and newer disciplines like social, online and mobile. It’s about how to weave them together to achieve the common objective.
Geoff Livingston is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate.
Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication ?rm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round.
