Companies Integrating Marketing Efforts – – Questioning Effectiveness.

From Facebook to the phone book to ebooks, companies hardly lack available marketing channels.

But as companies disseminate budget and resources across multiple ad formats and channels, it becomes paramount for internal stakeholders to integrate messaging, programs and ad measurement to ensure a concentrated brand experience across mediums.

Findings from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) show companies are integrating key elements of their marketing programs, particularly their messaging, launch dates and select marketing data.

Companies were most likely to integrate messaging across channels (93.4%) and coordinate the launch of marketing channels (88.6%), indicating the perceived importance of presenting unified messaging across channels.

Data integration was also a top priority for companies: More than 80% are combining customer and prospect data, and using data analytics across channels.

Although companies are integrating key marketing campaign and customer data, the majority of them don’t find their integration efforts very effective.

Only 14.3% of companies felt they were effectively deploying data analytics across channels, and just 14.8% believed their customer and prospect data integration successful. Companies found themselves most effective in messaging alignment (27.4%); still, on the whole, marketers lacked confidence with integration efforts.

Specific aspects of integration, like cross-channel ad measurement, have plagued marketers for years, particularly as more ad dollars move online and marketers seek to effectively tie online and offline customer data and campaign performance.

The DMA found the most common roadblocks to effective integration were organizational barriers and unclear business objectives, findings echoed by Unica in research that reported the top barrier to cross-channel interactive marketing adoption was lack of conducive organizational structure.

In spite of corporate and departmental barriers, the majority of companies are still integrating elements of their marketing programs, even if they consider their efforts ineffective. Yet perhaps the perceived lack of effectiveness also indicates a group of marketers always looking to perfect their craft and make their current work even better.

For more information at http://www.emarketer.com