Overcoming Marketing Channel Bias
The usual argument for integrated marketing is that when your marketing channels are coordinated, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That’s very true, and you knew that already.
The other reason, which is not often discussed, is that it helps overcome channel bias. PPC people will always favor PPC. Social Media people will always favor Social. Print people will favor Print. The job of your marketing strategist is to allocate your budget most effectively, without favoring any one channel over another.
The question is not whether PPC is better than SEO, or whether print is better than digital, or whether Facebook is better than Instagram. The question is which channel will yield the highest ROI at the margin.
Because you always want to get the lowest hanging fruit first, that means that all marketing efforts will yield diminishing returns if you are doing it right. The more you spend, the higher you are climbing the tree to get the fruit.
The job of the marketing strategist is to know when to switch trees in order to maximize the fruit gathered. More literally, they need to decide how to allocate the client’s budget in order to maximize the ROI overall. A biased specialist is unlikely to have the perspective to make that decision – especially if they benefit directly from having a larger share of the budget. Incentives matter.
At Ethical Digital, every project has an Account Manager whose business is marketing integration. You already knew that an integrated strategy will beat a piecemeal strategy on quality. But by overcoming channel bias and making sure your budget is allocated effectively, it can beat a piecemeal strategy on cost, too.
