The Case for an Integrated Online Marketing Strategy

By co-ordinating all areas of online marketing as an integrated approach will give you the greatest rewards and value. The traditional view of ‘horses for courses’ which may have served offline activity well, works less well when there is, in the most part, a single destination – a website (or a business sitting behind the website).

The Challenge of the Multiple Supplier Approach

Say, for example, you want to achieve more incremental business: you contact an email specialist, a search-marketing agency and even a social media supplier… as well as liaising with your incumbent web developer – the time investment alone needed to co-ordinate and measure all this activity is substantial and then, beyond this, it is often difficult to pull together the fuller reporting structures to identify which aspect really worked for the campaign. With all suppliers claiming effectiveness – it is difficult to work out what needs to change to improve.

On a broader level, it also makes it very difficult to carry out sustained strategic marketing campaigns as it need an ongoing assessment of performance in order to evaluate where to go next.

The Advantage of Using a Sole Supplier

It is our view, therefore, you need to be able to pull everything together in a workable structure to sustain and develop your marketing efforts. In this way you will be able to more fully measure and gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns in a central point. Analytics is crucial in all of this, and you should consider whether extra items like telephone tracking have a place in your overall measurements to ensure you know what levels of business your activity is generating.

It may be that you use specialists here and there for specific campaigns, but they need to be managed and directed and participate in the broader plan. Some will shy away from being measured – but this will only ensure that the confident and competent will remain. The first thing Ergo always does is put metrics into a site – we don’t shy away from this.

Furthermore, with an integrated approach, the time investment becomes more ‘what next’ than ‘what happened?’…

Continual Improvement = Success

‘Optimisation’ is not just a buzz word for the industry – it is crucial that it is a part of the overall picture – to continually adjust and tweak marketing to achieve greater success. If your website has not changed much in the last year or two, have you noticed how it has faded into the background of what you do as a business? In the end, you get what you invest… and a website that has been neglected is as obvious as one which is current.

So, if this all sounds appealing to you and your business… then please get in touch, we’re more than happy to have a conversation…