Traditional media advertisers learned way back in the early 1990s that there was a need to develop a holistic approach to their marketing messages, but this fundamental principle is often ignored by marketers operating in the digital advertising space. Why exactly is this?

Well, a primary reason is that with the increasing need for online marketing, far too many professionals with segmented skill sets have, well - fallen off the wagon, so to speak - into an industry that requires tight tolerances across platforms and strong cohesiveness.

All of a sudden we now have computer programmers, web designers, bloggers, and data analysts coming into the digital marketing mix who lack the ability to understand how their work synergistically contributes to a campaigns objectives and needs.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m envious of any dude who has the technical chops to turn marketing ideas into a reality via the web – but are these the types of people that I want driving the creative bus within marketing campaigns?

Not really. And yet, this is exactly what’s been happening as companies continue to get on the technical prowl with online advertising.

If there is one thing that springs to my mind when thinking about online marketing, it is that necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

With the accelerated proliferation of search engines, social media channels, can-spam compliancy, and consumer databases that are packed full with more information than 300 years of advertising has ever had the ability or scope to capture – we’ve suddenly created a need for those marketers who can bridge the gap between being marketing savvy and capturing technical know-how.

Drilling down to classical SEO methodology, I’ve seen first hand the types of brand mismanagement problems that can arise from not being careful about your link portfolio.

Let’s just get something straight here – you don’t want to do a directory buy for a PR6 that has loads of adult content. Nor do you want to clog your clients ‘blog’ up with low-level marketing clutter (think lots and lots of messages with lots and lots of exclamation points here) or content ‘for the sake of content’ – oftentimes created with the false illusion that it will be some magical wildfire linkbait.

SMO strategy is even more off course. Although I think people have finally gotten beyond the “bigger is better” schema in terms of followers and friends – social media marketers still often time spend too much time talking and not enough time listening to their audience.

Take a look at any Fortune 100 Twitter account and you’ll see that what’s going on there certainly is not adding any value to the brand.

Consumer databases are now ripe with information. Even within some direct-response ad agencies, no RFM or psychographical modeling is pursued – just a sellout of consumer information to vulture list agencies (does this sound eerily familiar to the Middle East selling off precious oil resources for a quick profit and an unavoidable decline in long-term growth?)

What's the solution?
We want to focus and align all of our messages across all of our mediums to create a single integrated campaign. This immediate benefit in many different ways.

For starters, consumer attitudes have a history of improving under consistent experiences of brand value. With a cohesive campaign, you also can improve work cohesion, rate, and creativity.

Suddenly, not every single department has to literally think for themselves when it comes to marketing messages – suddenly we don’t have a media buyers trying to create worthless linkbait articles because they don’t align with the marketing mix.

Also, cost effective synergies have been shown to take place across a well positioned and highly consistent IMC campaign. Increased employee cost/customer added value ratios contribute largely to this due to the fact that you have workers playing on their strengths, and not their areas of confusion.

How do we get there?
Theodore Levitt postulated in his Marketing Myopia paper that:

"An entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as producing products that is providing customer-creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means that requires) into every milk and cranny of the organisation. It has to do this continuously and with the kind of flair that excites and stimulates the people in it. Otherwise the company will be merely a series of pigeonholed parts, with no consolidating sense of purpose or direction."

Pigeonholed parts? No sense of purpose? No isolated areas of expertise and efficient flow of work?

Sound familiar yet?

Moving forward, companies need to begin the process of segmenting online marketing skill sets, not just “getting by as best we can” with limited (and often times traditional media focused) staffing resources that have been charged with becoming experts in the realm of digital marketing.

Acceptance of the realization there that are some very serious dysfunctions in the planning and execution of company-wide marketing communications is equally important.

Fix your lack of standardization in planning methods, objectives, and thinking. Companies need to incorporate a parallel and simultaneous development of “real” CRM processes to achieve integration across different touch points.

All of a sudden you’ll be empowered to understand exactly what elements constitute objectives for a successful SEO or PPC campaign, what a corporate message or blog post needs to communicate to a consumer, what an email blast should really accomplish, and how to effectively splice and dice a consumer database for information that’s far more valuable than any “list agency” will pay you for.