• Integrated Marketing Starts With the Customer - put the customer at the center of your strategy and ensure excellent execution across all channels. 
• Integrated Marketing Emphasizes Customer Processes - understand and coordinate how each channel and customer touch point helps the customer achieve her goal.
• Integrated Marketing Transcends Campaigns - evaluate metrics that transcend an individual campaign, such as engagement, value, and profitability.
• Integrated Marketing Requires Interaction and Dialogue - utilize two-way communications that are responsive to customer behaviors.
• Integrated Marketing Is a Fusion of Sales, Marketing, and Service - leverage all aspects of customer contact with the company to create the right image
  

Bottom-line: CMOs must establish an integrated marketing strategy that creates "relevant communications, interactions, and content, regardless of channel and customer interaction point...that crosses product, channel, geographic, even functional boundaries."

While technology is not a cure-all for these issues, it can help through automation (campaign management), collaboration (marketing resource management) and integration (marketing application suites). At the same time, they must work without the help of technology to mature their skills, consider new metrics and overcome organizational silos.

Marketing must also make sure that everyone understands how critical technology has become to marketing operations. Ideally, technology expertise should be brought into the marketing organization, "either internally or through a trusted service partner that behaves as the marketing team's extension." On this level SaaS  solutions are very promising as they cost less upfront, shorten time-to-market and reduce the need for IT involvement.

Posted by Universal Ad