The following is an interview with Karen Talavera, an email marketing expert with Synchronocity Marketing.
1) Karen, can you tell me a little bit about your company and what you do? No marketing speak is allowed for this question?
Yes, Synchronicity Marketing can be thought of as a strategic sherpa
for marketers transitioning, evolving, and expanding beyond traditional
direct marketing channels to new ones. We help companies integrate new
communications channels – like email or mobile messaging – into their
traditional ones, and avoid the pitfalls in the process. The goal is to
help marketers move away from a channel-siloed way of marketing to
thinking holistically, so that the whole (constellation of efforts)
produces a far more powerful impact than the individual components
could on their own.
2) Integration is a pretty common buzzword in your line of work – what
does it actually mean, and can you talk about an example where
integration actually led to more revenue?
Integration to me means connecting the tools in the toolbox so that the
whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It means different
marketing channels and tactics work to reinforce and create incremental
benefit for one another, rather than each operating in a pigeon-holed
fashion. Consumers are multi-media savvy so marketers need to assume
their customers will experience their brand in many environments,
including some like social media sites (MySpace, Second Life, You Tube)
which can’t be entirely controlled. Today there are so many channels,
formats, and devices let alone points of presence through which a
target audience member can be reached and communicated to that if
marketing campaigns are not cross-channel integrated, meaning if we are
not helping people “connect the dots”, the alternative is our messages
will be hopelessly fragmented and therefore, lost or unintelligible.
