Sharing your pail and shovel in the proverbial sandbox can lead to building the biggest and best sandcastle on the beach. Don’t you want to give your client the best possible “castle”? Show the competition that we have what it takes to give and be the best. If we share and work as a team, we can only succeed. Successful integration means all components – search, online, traditional – working together to maximize marketing goals.
As discussed in our previous post on SearchFuel, “Let’s All Play in the Sandbox Together,” it takes multiple steps to create and maintain a successful search marketing integration. Over the next several posts from the two of us, we will touch on each step and try to keep the sand out of our shoes while building our castle. Planning, communication, budgeting, goal setting, messaging and building/maintaining relationships are all important steps in working together.
Let’s start with the foundation: PLANNING!
This is where it all starts. Getting together to understand the advertiser’s business goals for the year, plan your annual campaign strategy and gather ideas are key. Without planning you won’t know when to start digging the moat, where to put the draw bridge, where you pen your pigs. You get the idea, there is nothing too small or insignificant to discuss. Timing is everything and you need to work together for the better of your client and the account.
Speaking of timing…when to start integration discussions is an important part of the planning stage. How about now? ‘09 planning is underway for most advertisers, so what better time is there to start the discussion than the present.
Where to start when integrating search with your cross-channel planning:
- Put together a benefit statement. Outline why various media, brand and IT teams working together is in everyone’s best interest, and give your basic ideas for the architecture of the castle.
- Gather input from the teams and identify opportunities to integrate and leverage the advertiser’s marketing program. Search out a contact from each group who can share the ideas with the rest and be the best lead contact moving forward. Determine if any team is not on board, and try to find out why. Do they fear they will get a smaller budget by working together? Do they worry about additional time spent? At this point, you may need to re-work the benefits statement or think through the challenges from their point of view – maybe they have a closet architect brimming with ideas for the castle. Remember: your ultimate goal is to deliver the best plan that will put your client at the forefront of consumer consideration.
- Deliver your holistic, integrated plan to your advertiser. Keeping focus on how your integrated approach brings value to their organization and will help solve their business objectives will get them excited about the potential of their marketing and communications platform. Support from your client can prove beneficial when additional endorsement is needed for other brands or groups that may be tentative about leverage certain media channels. Share with your client the benefit statement that collectively the media teams of built and ask for their input – it is, after all, their castle.
- To keep the media teams moving in the same direction, schedule a call or a meet-and-greet with the team leads – perhaps not a trip to the beach, but a chance to talk openly and discuss processes and potential challenges from all of the builders.
- Get moving on finessing a cohesive and integrated plan together – re-work the benefit statement yet again, to address everyone’s concerns and consider this the first tower of your castle.
Obviously, by working as a team this can all come together and benefit everyone. But this is only the first step. In our next post we will dive deeper into the second level of the castle – communication. Stay tuned!
