The Business Dictonairy provides a pretty good summary definition of Integrated Marketing as “Strategy aimed at unifying different marketing methods such as mass marketing, one-to-one marketing, and direct marketing. Its objective is to complement and reinforce the market impact of each method, and to employ the market data generated by these efforts in product development, pricing, distribution, customer service, etc”

Although fairly comprehensive in scope, that definition lacks one key component of Integrated Marketing that really brings home the ROI.  Not only should it employ the market data generated by efforts for the benefit of sales, pricing, etc – the data should funnel back into the overall campaign elements to better inform targeting efforts overall – creating a continuous cycle of campaign improvement and a very long run-on sentence.

Integrated Marketing is about better leveraging your Marketing budget investment for improved results across the communication channels and beyond.  It’s a single message broadcast in many channels – online and offline – in the social, sales, marketing and PR spaces.  It requires customizing that message to suit the medium – and it requires intelligent design to incorporate measurement throughout.  It’s often complicated – and it’s always worth the effort.