Marketers are conveying brand and messaging across multiple channels, including in-store/point of sale, direct mail, online, e-mail, telephone, social media, Webinars, and mobile marketing. Marketers are being forced to do more with less in today’s challenging economy, and they want maximum value for every dollar that they spend. Marketers realize that a recession is not the time to hole up and pray that the storm will miss their house. Instead, savvy marketers are reallocating marketing budget dollars to a more effective and targeted media mix. They are utilizing multi-channel communications campaigns to drive customer loyalty, growth, and profitability as well as reaching into more lucrative customer segments. This multi-channel approach helps marketers to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and validate return on investment (ROI) against marketing dollars spent.

InfoTrends recently completed a multi-client study entitled Multi-Channel Communications: Measurement and Benchmarking. The findings of this study are based on surveys of over 200 corporate marketing professionals and over 300 service providers in the U.S. who are currently engaging in multi-channel communications. This article will focus on marketing needs, while next week’s column will provide examples of how service providers are responding.

The marketers that InfoTrends surveyed during its multi-client study clearly felt that stretching every marketing dollar would be the name of the game in 2009. Organizations are looking to cut costs as their marketing budgets shrink. When asked about their 2009 plans, 42% of marketer respondents stated that they intended to reduce their 2009 marketing budgets. Another 30% planned to reallocate their 2009 budgets for a different media mix.