A new survey from Hotwire PR finds marketers struggling to integrate campaigns across marketing channels.
The survey of 300 senior marketing decision makers across industries found that nearly half (45.7 percent) generally admit that campaigns tend to work in isolation, with different channels being used to implement different campaigns. Only a third of companies think their campaigns work across channels, and over one third (35 percent) are developing specific campaigns for each channel.
"While this shows a clear focus on the channel, it can also point to the existence of silos in the department: once a campaign has been created, it is more difficult to adjust to fit other channels if everyone has started to use their budget and developed parallel campaigns," Hotwire wrote in the report.
The most common challenge companies say they face is that campaigns are not designed for multichannel integration (30 percent). Nearly the same percentage (29 percent) believe a lack of resources is to blame and 23 percent claim the difficulty to integrate campaigns is also due to the disconnect between teams implementing them. Other integration issues faced include: uncertainly of the appropriate channels to use, 21 percent; timing/planning issues, 20 percent; and too much disconnected data, 18 percent.
Source: Hotwire
Asked how their marketing spend was split across channels, the leading areas were: online advertising, 52 percent; PR, 47 percent; and events, 40 percent. Rounding out the list were: offline adverting, 32 percent; social channels, 27 percent; SEO, 21 percent; and CRM, 20 percent.
Among the recommendations for creating multi-channel campaigns:
- Plan multi-channel: Identify which channels are right for delivering a campaign. Wrote Hotwire, "If you can only think of one channel — think again, no one in the modern media landscape just consumes information from a single source."
- Plan together: Encourage teams — including agencies — to work together at the planning stage so internal silos never get a chance to appear.
- Tell a story: The story "makes or breaks a campaign" while channels sell it. The story should be able to be summarized in a tweet.
- Allocate budget by needs, not by channel: All teams should understand how they can benefit from the activities on other channels or disciplines, and how to leverage them.
- Track aggregate results: Add up the channels (cost, results) to gain a full picture of the marketing activity.