Other industry professionals are thinking the same way as us, so what is the future of integrated marketing?

Mel Carson, Founder of Delightful Communications

Companies are finally getting their act together with regards to combining their marketing and PR efforts with the right technical infrastructure to amplify both like never before. In 2013 businesses should focus on approaching their customers (and potential customers) with more useful and actionable content by marrying inbound marketing techniques like SEO and social media with more traditional marketing, advertising and PR strategies and tactics. Some technical training should also be given to marketers so they understand the basics of how the web works which will enhance their work and propel it further with more enduring amplification.

Doug Wheeler, CMO of Optify

To succeed in 2013, companies need to focus on tying cross-channel campaigns including offline events such as direct mail, tradeshows and city tours, with online experiences and find ways to measure the impact of these cross-channel campaigns.

Louise Thompson, Director of PR at Badoo

It’s now a given that an integrated content marketing strategy can pay real dividends for brands. But in 2013, we can expect to see more companies than ever before adopting this approach. I think it will be interesting to see who really tries to do something different and crucially, who can nail the analytics behind all of this activity, linking marketing to business outcomes in a clear and effective way.

Mark Cooper, CMO and Co-Founder of Offerpop

In the coming year, marketing teams will need to share intelligence across functions in order to stay competitive. Social marketers in particular will need to become more collaborative — sharing the insights they’ve gained from social data, and empowering team members to run more targeted, socially informed campaigns. We’ll see the demise of the “social silo,” and the elevation of the social marketing function as a key revenue-driving channel.

Pawan Deshpande, CEO and founder of Curata

In 2013, marketers will have to think outside the box to meet the challenge of providing content for their toolkit of channels – whether social media, SEO, emailing marketing video channels or blogging. Today’s internal content creation efforts are not keeping pace with the range of online channels, and marketers must find ways to produce content that will drive their programs. This can include outsourcing content creation beyond the marketing team, curating content outside of the organization, or crowd-sourcing content among their user base.

Dennis, CEO of ReadyPulse

In 2013 we will see social media teams working much closer with e-commerce teams, and ‘integrated digital marketing’ will take shape. The laggards will be email marketers who will still feel comfortable in their established metrics and existing silo’d processes.

Ben Plomion, VP, Marketing & Partnerships, Chango

Integrated analytics are changing the way brand marketers think about integrated marketing. Until now organizational hurdles limited integrated marketing. It was tough for a brand marketer to coordinate a multi-touch points program when social is managed by the PR department, web experience by marketing and SEM by an agency.

When I was at GE, we had 8 distinct P&Ls and dozens of agencies. Implementing a global digital campaign felt like chasing cattle.

Integrated analytics are changing this. Integrated analytics bridge the gap between one channel to the other. The best examples of this are marketing automation platforms (Marketo for example) that help understand the impact of one channel. Social media tracking and tag management companies also fill some of that void to an extent. 

Integrated analytics as a result bring people closer to each other, by providing an integrated view of the customer.

The PR department may still manage the company’s Twitter activities but tools such as HootSuite tracking features feed valuable data to the web team that sits in marketing. The SEM agency can in return grab the most popular keywords to expand or optimize their keyword list.

This is a simple example of how better analytics can expose valuable insights from one department to the other, and in essence bring everyone together.