Integrated Marketing is defined as the ability to use multiple avenues or marketing mediums to build momentum and gain more power by the use of collaboration of these tool instead of using one tool separately.

So what does all this mean? Hear is how this works.

Let's say you are doing email marketing. You have been using email campaigns on and off for years and you have seen some basic success. You know how many people open your email, how many unsubscribe or even post you as spam (it could happen).

All this data is great but it is not integrated with any other form of marketing. Now let's say you start putting links into your email like "Check out our new website". What will happen? Well, you will start driving traffic to your website. So now your website is something people can find online, but with the addition of email, you are now able to get new leads to your website. These should be more qualified leads since they know you (if you follow the can-spam rules they have signed up to receive your email - this is a best practice and highly recommended).

But let's say you now set up a profile on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. And lets say you have a link back to your website. You see how your website is now becoming a powerful resource to all these other tools?

Now, what happens if you only have a static, unchanging, 10 page website? Chances are people will stop once on the site and if they do come back a second time and nothing has changed, they will never go back.

What happens if you build a blog and share industry related news and tips to educate people on how to be better at what they do? Do you think people would check out the site more than once? Of course they would because you are now adding value. Now all these other areas (email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc.) are adding value to all the people who get the email, follow, connect or fan you/your business on these other sites.

In this situation the main hub of the marketing campaign is the website since it offers value and is changing regularly. Then building on the site by adding email with links to the website and blog articles adds power to the email, but also makes it valuable to the reader. Then the twitter followers will see your regular posts and with the value and links back to the website, your followers will start helping you promote the remarkable content you tweet by retweeting you blog articles or other posts. The same is true for LinkedIn and Facebook. Your reach will grow the more and more content you put on your site and all of these other tools feed off of the site.

This is what an Integrated Marketing campaign is all about. The hub could be your website or maybe it is a trade show you will be attending. You can just show up, or you could add pre-show direct mail and email campaigns, set show meetings for highly qualified prospects, offer demonstrations, and do post-show email, direct-mail and calling follow up. You see how the company doing multiple things that build on one another is going to be much more successful than the company doing the one off website or trade show booth? I know you're probably thinking, what is this going to cost me.

This is why Integrated Marketing is so powerful. Yes the full campaign will cost you more now, but it will be much less than trying all these things separately over several years. Worse the results will be probably 100-fold less because of the momentum an integrated campaign creates.