Integrated Marketing used to be a no-brainer affair — you made a TV commercial asking people to come to your store and offered a 10% discount. Customers came, you explained that it applied to your newest televisions, and customers bought your newest televisions. That was it. You successfully integrated your TV commercials with your in-store experience, and the entire strategy took less than 5 minutes.

Of course, new technology has made Integrated Marketing more complicated. You can no longer link TV commercials to your in-store sales pitches alone. Now you need to link to your Facebook feed, your feed to your Twitter account, your Twitter account to your radio ad, and then, maybe, maybe, you’re actually ready to sell something.

Bearing this in mind, and bearing that the situation isn’t projected to get simpler, Search Engine Watch has come up with 4 takeaways to give some sense of order to the Global Integrated Marketing process.

1. Make It Regionally Authentic — This rule is fairly straightforward. Just as products don’t automatically sell better in the south because you slammed a still of buttermilk biscuits into your ad copy, products won’t sell better in Greece because you slammed a photo of the Parthenon on your website. Spend some time to make your site feel Greek, and it will be appreciated by the Greeks.

2. Organizational Alignment — Another straightforward principle is that if your online material is not integrated within your own company, chances are it won’t be integrated well with the global marketplace.

3. Process Excellence — Even the best idea will fail if it isn’t properly integrated. Search Engine Watch suggests that you test your new integrated model in a few test regions before expanding your sytem nationally, than globally. We agree.

4. Enthusiastic Perseverance — Since Integrated Marketing is a system that people are constantly expanding, remember to expect the worst but persevere anyway. The whole world is learning how to do this, after all.