Integrated Communications defines one focused & unified message across all the marketing mix of advertising, public relations, direct marketing as well as all marketing collaterals. And in Internet marketing, you maximize your keyword SEO, links, social bookmarking, social networking, and viral marketing activities. Integrated Marketing Plan is Integrated Communications crafted with an allocated budget.

To highlight the above, I share my past experience when I was executing a 3-day advertising and marketing campaign for a national insurance company. We ran a health insurance campaign but leveraging it as a "door-opener" for financial advisors to market the company’s other product offerings. The Health insurance is IS plan.

On the original campaign draft, we scheduled prime time TV ads with hotline and email links plus brochures for the financial advisors to approach clients. Financial Advisors are situated in a large geographical area around a province with local TV network.

I redrafted the campaign to include a back-end lead generation tracking mechanism which will man the hotlines and emails as well as consisted of participating advisors’ contact details, added email announcements of the TV ads to financial advisors, uploaded all the related marketing collaterals and application forms into the advisor’s intranet for easy retrieval, created a campaign webpage and a template for potential client’s auto-registration.

This is the procedure that enhanced our sales by 240% above target for that single campaign run.

3 days before the campaign run, I sent email announcements to all Financial Advisors with the TV ads scheduled timing, attachments of all related marketing materials, instructions how to access the advisors’ intranet as well as links to the campaign webpage for clients to directly register for the IS plan. I include instructions and suggestions for them to approach potential clients at their homes at prime time when the TV ads would be running.

On the day, I sent a reminder email enclosing all the above. When the TV ads ran at prime time, the lead generation hotline staff handled incessant first level enquiries, and routed the 2nd level enquiries to a system-randomly picked advisor’s cell phone number. The advisors would either arrange to meet up or direct the client to sign up on our website. Eventually, the advisor would report back into the intranet system to update the status of the lead, be it pending, or closed.

Meanwhile, while the TV ads were run, a large number of advisors were knocking on doors, talking to potential clients at their homes, with the TV ads as "door-openers" or "conversation leads". This approach managed to warm up the potential clients much faster and expedited the IS applications. The status of the leads is also updated into the intranet system.

A daily report would be generated with all leads streaming from all channels, displaying the total number of leads closed and pending, with the channels of leads clearly tabulated.

At the end of the 3-day campaign run, there is a consolidated report displaying the grand total of the daily reports.

This is an example of the clever use of the integration of a range of integrated communications comprising of direct marketing, hotline & lead generation tracking, TV ads, marketing collaterals, which eventually gave a 240% more sales above our original target.

The marketer should be leveraging upon all his or marketing tools to extend the potency and intensity of the campaign, not simply riding upon what meet the nake eye.