DJ Sprague

Integrated marketing today means that we need to start with our buyer personas in mind.

We need to get inside the head of our customers, and create not only the right media channels, touch-points, venues and impression opportunities, but we need to use the language, verbiage, short-speak and lingo they would expect from someone who knows them. Next, we need to integrate the imagery, colors, design themes and fonts appropriate to their taste, style and expectations.

Integrated marketing is advanced marketing, because we need to understand, use, leverage, and integrate every planned and unplanned customer touch point, and we need to understand the basics of psychology, sociology, interpersonal and mass communications.

We also need to integrate our brand message and personality across the entire company, so we need to have a working knowledge of sales, customer service training, accounting, CRM programs, purchasing, packaging, PR and more.

In other words, we need to preach the integration model to the entire organization, so that they really understand and support the integration strategy, and why it is so important to building a powerful and sustainable brand that has meaning, equity and differentiation in the market. Call it job security for everyone.