Jo Lynn Deal, integrated marketing consultant and founder of My Marketing Cafe, a boutique marketing firm, shares her insights on how UNDP can incorporate integrated marketing into our digital communications workflow.
Years ago, when it came to marketing, everyone had their own way of doing things. The process was fragmented. Departments worked independently from one another. Today, things are different. As digital communications bring everyone into a shared space, the possibilities for how we can work together across departments are endless. In this episode, we take a step back with marketing expert, Jo Lynn Deal, to consider how all of the departments at UNDP affect our audiences and how together, we can bridge this gap in communications to ensure integrated messages across UNDP.
Elyse:
Welcome to Digital What?, a podcast series where we join UNDP personnel and experts in conversation about the digital communications questions you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.
Today we speak with Jo Lynn Deal, an integrated marketing consultant and founder of the nonprofit, Marketing Academy, and also of My Marketing Cafe, a boutique marketing firm that helps companies come up with the best marketing plans for their business and sales goals. Like so many good ideas, the inspiration for My Marketing Cafe started in the kitchen.
Jo Lynn:
I started it because I had this long desire to own a seaside cafe that sold coffee and great pastries. And that wasn't going to happen. It wasn't my real world. So I wanted to kind of make both dreams come true. I have a marketing love for marketing as well.
Elyse:
And the dish she’d be known for is….
Jo Lynn:
I love seafood. So I'm going to say it's a seafood chowder. I'll tell you, I do make one. That's incredible. It has whitefish, scallops, crab meat. It's delicious. It's a white chowder. And I never give the recipe out. But that's why you can only get it there.
Elyse:
Okay, so now that we’ve savored some seafood chowder, it’s time to get down to business. Let’s begin with understanding the difference between marketing and integrated marketing.
Jo Lynn:
Years ago, we used to have departments that worked independently from one another. You would not see sales and advertising working together. Sales had their own way of doing things. Marketing and advertising had theirs. And in fact, in larger companies, that might have even been even more fragmented because we had media relations, public relations, and basically every department had their respective roles and would follow their own guidelines. But integrated marketing makes you take a step back and look at all of these departments and how they're affecting the consumer. It looks more like a marketing wheel where every single department that affects the consumer is now going to be engaged in marketing. And so we look at the ways each department talks to the consumer and we make sure that our messages align and that the brand is acting, if you will, the same across the entire enterprise.
Elyse:
In addition to the departments Jo Lyn mentioned, today integrated marketing has evolved to include social media channels, and other departments that you might not expect.
Jo Lynn:
Now, for the evolution of integrated marketing and how it has evolved, I think what we're seeing is an expansion to other departments that don't necessarily come in direct contact with the consumer but they may in some other way. And they do represent the brand and here’s what I mean by this.
One example for me is the Microsoft design team. And so we might not initially think that this team comes in contact with the consumers. But what you might not know is the Microsoft design team has their own publication on Medium.com. Their whole team shares their philosophies. They share design, best practices, what Microsoft's approach is to certain things. But basically, anyone who has access to the Internet can find that content, which is why it needs to adhere to Microsoft's branding guidelines, because can you imagine if they went rogue and had no guidance to what was posted and it was just really way different than what Microsoft wanted. So it's exciting to see how other departments that you normally wouldn't think would affect a consumer are starting to affect them. And that's how it's expanding with integrated marketing.
Another big influencer that I think no one ever considers is the H.R. Department. And about eight years ago, I was in the market for a job. And it's when I realized how huge of a missed opportunity HR communications were. And here's why. If you consider how many applications a company receives for each job position, it's incredible. Now ask yourself, how is H.R. communicating with these hundreds, maybe a thousand applicants? These are all people and they're interested in our organization. So what market opportunities are we missing when we focus on process and automation versus brand and employee culture? Only one person is going to get the job. So how have we made the hundreds or a thousand other applicants feel about our communications or our brand?
Elyse:
So how would we introduce integrated marketing at UNDP?
Jo Lynn:
For me, I think it's all about employee buy in. I don't think this can be something that we announce at a staff meeting and expect people to implement it. And we can't expect to influence others if we're not willing to be influenced ourselves. And all of that really starts with buy in and engaging employees. And so they really need to be involved from the beginning, because that's what builds momentum and excitement and the best implementations I've seen with large scale change, and this might be an organization that's spread out over the globe. Is to start in one location and conduct your research there. This is a great place to test theories, get the whole team involved. And then you can branch out to the larger organization and build a team that's made up of representatives of every single department. Because I think whether we like it or not, integrated marketing is already being implemented largely by social media. We don't know how our employees might be behaving when they go home or how they're representing our business and our brand on channels. So I think if we educate them about that and its impact and the effect it has, the better we're going to have control over the brand and our message.
Elyse:
One important consideration is how can we all stay consistent across channels for an organization as large as UNDP?
Jo Lynn:
For me, integrating itself is building an incredible employee culture with employees who are not only knowledgeable about their own specific role, but they have a macro view of the organization and they can see how what they do affects the next department and how their work was affected by the department prior to them. And so they see the value that they have and how everything works together. And I think our customers have the same experience all throughout their journey in the organization. No matter who they're dealing with, it becomes the brand, it becomes the culture. And so when they see our brand interacting in the media or in the real world, they recognize it, because it's exactly the way that they experienced it.
Elyse:
I asked Jo Lynn why we should familiarize ourselves with integrated marketing. What’s her secret to making it work?. And although she wouldn’t share her chowder recipe with me, she was willing to share this marketing secret.
Jo Lynn:
Again this really boils down to employee buy in. When an employee knows how they affect a customer, that may be their type of reaction or their performance lost business or helped gain business. That's really impactful. With integrated marketing, you're going to set goals, you're going to measure and track those goals. Some things are going to work. Some things aren't. If we share about all of those and let people see themselves in the process and how they are impacted or affected the process, I think that you'll see consistency fairly easy. And it's also important to share the good with the bad and engage the employees in solving the bad. How did this problem happen and then turned to them again, “This was great!” How can we expand on this even more?
It's bringing people together. It’s learning about each of the departments and how they affect the others. And I think the more invested your employees are, the more valuable they're going to feel and even the more invested they'll become because they see that they're appreciated. You're asking them for their buy in and they feel really valuable and more engaged in their own role.
Elyse:
From the perspective of someone who has never thought about integrated marketing before, Jo Lyn’s advice sounds like a great way for us at UNDP to collectively support one another and meet our goals, especially during a time where digital communication is essential to how we stay connected.
Jo Lynn:
As you dig deeper into an organization, that’s where some really good storytelling can be found. Because the more we engage every department with our mission and message, the more invested they're going to become. It makes for a stronger company because people feel valued. They feel like they're going to contribute beyond their specific role. And really stories of success can come from anywhere in an organization. We just have to be willing to listen to them and encourage our staff to share them.
Elyse:
This episode of Digital What!? is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Our theme music is by Lemon Guo, and additional music is by Chris Zabriskie, and sound design by myself. Special thanks to our expert, Jo Lyn Deal, founder of My Marketing Cafe, for taking the time to speak with us. To listen and subscribe go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow dot UNDP dot org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Stay with us.