Check out this hypothetical marketing conversation with your customer: They hear about your service through a radio ad, or read about you in a local newspaper. They conduct an internal discovery meeting and then go online to further research your service via a search engine or direct-to-site entry. Finally after careful research and consideration (and if the competition hasn’t already influenced them with more a more relevant message up to now), they sign a deal with you, but through an in-store visit or phone call to your telesales unit.

Face it, this story is the norm for your sales engagements. Your customers see you as one brand exhibiting one persona across multiple channels. They don’t draw the distinctions on a revenue spreadsheet or forecast model, nor should they need to. Show them one message at point A and then communicate something else at point B, and you begin to deviate from your initial promise and possibly betray their trust.

Yet one can’t help but notice that online, direct and brand marketers still act very much within their own silos, establishing KPIs that are specific only to a given channel or driving online strategy that is separate from offline media scripts, and vice versa. Your customers are, and have always been, multichannel. Can you, as a marketing organization, say the same?

That’s why I took it upon myself (with the support of my team at e-storm) to apply the lens of multichannel marketing to every one of our own clients’ programs – proving its potential beyond pie-in-the-sky snake oil to an implementable practice which can increase business performance and customer conversion. Equally important, our efforts succeeded at driving a cultural shift in the mindset of the companies’ marketing executives on how to measure success for their campaigns. And I want to tell you about it all here.

Our tale, told in four parts, begins with one of our clients in the financial services industry, who shall remain anonymous. They currently promote their services through both offline media (television and radio commercials) and online channels (display and paid search ads). These various channels also happen to spend significantly enough such that we can draw statistically significant relationships from the data.

By correlating their customers’ responses across every medium, we recommended new strategies and tactics to the client that would inform more intelligent budget allocations and dynamic customer messaging. Over the next two weeks, I’ll blog about four “conversations” that took place between customer and brand by means of PPC versus display, television, radio and other organic PR. Part 1 of 4 Conversations is live here

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