Integrated Marketing and Frozen Yogurt

My 7-year old daughter loves frozen yogurt with toppings.  She loves going to one of those self-serve places where she can pull the lever for her yogurt and then create an artistic and culinary masterpiece from a wide variety of toppings. Typically she gets vanilla and chocolate yogurt and goes for a variety of toppings, including gummy bears, sprinkles, gummy worms, Oreos, chocolate chips, coconut, and kiwifruit. The other day I asked her which frozen yogurt she liked best and then which topping she liked best. She looked at me quizzically and said “Daddy, they only taste good together! Why would I eat a gummy bear and then some kiwifruit?!”

While I was amused by her 7-year old logic, it also got me thinking about the importance for businesses and salespeople to use the same approach to address and solve marketing needs. Just as her yogurt concoction doesn’t taste good to her unless all the ingredients are present, marketing campaigns that aren’t integrated are typically less effective.

Developing an Integrated Approach
There are a dizzying number of choices today in both traditional media (TV, radio, print, and outdoor) and digital media (social, mobile, video, blogs, and display). Separately, each one of these has distinct capabilities that could address a marketing need, but leveraging the specific strengths of several traditional and digital options in an integrated fashion always makes for a more effective campaign.

 Here are four questions to consider:

1. Do you, as a salesperson, understand and feel confident to develop integrated solutions that include traditional and digital media? If not, how can you become more confident?
   
   
2. Do you understand how your products and capabilities can address the needs of your client? If not, how can you get a better understanding?
   
   
3. Do you know how each product may produce a better result for your client? If not how can you learn more?
   
   
4. Does your client feel confident integrating the various capabilities of traditional and digital media to address his or her needs? If not, what kind of expertise and guidance can you offer them? 

I had a sales person tell me recently that they had a client that “just wanted to concentrate on social.” I really didn’t know what that meant. It did say to me that neither the client nor the salesperson understood how to leverage all the capabilities they had at their fingertips to create an effective campaign. It was a missed opportunity by the salesperson to demonstrate his expertise to his client. and it was a missed opportunity by the client to discover a solution to his needs.

I promised my daughter I would take her out again for frozen yogurt later this week. She knows what tastes best to her, and it’s not kiwifruit or gummy bears or chocolate yogurt alone.  The next time you get ice cream or yogurt with toppings, think what tastes best to you. And the next time you are with a client, think about how best to leverage specific media options to create an integrated marketing campaign that will work best for them.

For more information about digital sales training from The Center for Sales Strategy, contact us. Or click here to learn about our Digital What & Why online course.