• by Joe Marchese , January 11, 2011

Most people in media or advertising would agree that good marketing strategy is developed by starting from a position of being channel-agnostic. That is, you should decide what the best channels are after you've developed goals and strategy -- not the other way around. Planning advertising strategy the other way around is how people end up with "What is my ______ strategy?" "Where is Facebook/Twitter/Google/Zynga/YouTube/mobile etc.?" Come on, we all know we've not only heard it, but have probably said it ourselves.

Another drawback to having a "channel-specific strategy" is that program integration becomes very difficult, if it's even possible at all. If a plan starts with a mobile strategy, the likelihood is that the same program will work on Facebook, Twitter or Zynga, and the other way around. But with each of the new digital channels reaching a critical mass in the planning process, it's more important than ever to understand how the programs integrate.

Program integration used to just mean getting coherency across television, print, radio and digital. Now digital is large enough that it takes work to ensure it coheres across various digital programs.

The key is defining the ideal consumer experience from a marketing program perspective, then figuring out how that experience can best be adapted to each of the major digital channels where your consumers are. It is not always an easy task to figure out how the mobile app program extends into Twitter, but there are always natural extensions if one considers how consumers use each platform. Maybe people are sharing content to Twitter from inside your app, maybe people are discovering your app on Twitter in the first place.

The key is not to try to make the program so custom to a channel that it cannot scale, but at the same time, to make sure that in each disparate digital environment, your message still makes sense.