Marketing communications need to be so much more sophisticated these days — we have more channels, more feedback mechanisms, more distractions.

Such a variety of tools available to business often results in a frenzied approach to marketing. So how do you ensure cohesion and focus your marketing on what works best?

Don Schultz is a professor at the Integrated Marketing Communications Department at Northwestern University in Illinois. He advocates a five-step process to ensuring an effective approach to marketing communications. We discuss each of these steps in this edition of BTalk:

• Use behavioural databases to understand your customers and prospects 
• Identify and value customers and prospects
• Develop and deliver messages and incentives
• Estimating/measuring the return on customer investment
• Budgeting and allocation of finite resources

Don is in Australia to present at the Australian Marketing Institute’s Master Class workshops: Sydney (15 June) and Melbourne (16 June, 2011).

First published on CBS News