Is your marketing plan all over the place? Does your message get diluted by the number of competing priorities and interests within your company? Do you often feel like you’re wasting your budget?
In this tip I’d like to introduce you to the simple wisdom of Integrated Marketing Communications. It’s one of those concepts that seem so obvious; you can’t imagine why you didn’t come up with it yourself.
Currently, your company is represented on many platforms. You have the website somebody built for you. You have the social networking effort you manage in-house. You have an advertising campaign produced and implemented by an outside agency. There’s a consultant who handles your PR. There’s the sales staff who communicates directly with customers. You also have your database marketing, your customer servicing department and your retail sales promotion team, all of whom report to different managers. These department managers operate in functional silos. They may also be protective of their ideas, their budgets and their power bases. In short, you have many types of company spokespeople, and they are not all on board with a unified game plan.
This situation is common. It is also a template for mixed messaging, miscommunication and inconsistent branding to your target customer.
But hope exists right here in this blog article, in the form of IMC. Essentially, Integrated Marketing Communications is a customer-focused, coordinated effort to align all the marketing and business operations of a company into a seamless program that provides a consistent and constantly reinforced central message. IMC is not a strategy in itself, it’s the tactical delivery of a communications plan.
That’s a lot of words. But, if you can get your mind around this concept and implement it, each of the independent channels along which your business operates can reinforce the other and advance your goals exponentially.
Here are some integrated marketing suggestions followed by an example:
• Conduct research directly with your target customer through social networking, focus groups, online surveys or review sites. Establish dialogues and learn from them.
• Assess your business and determine a unique selling message that not only separates you from your competitors, but directly addresses what you learned from your target customers.
• Include all communication channels – marketing, sales, advertising and press relations- in a unified message, with feedback mechanisms at all consumer touch points.
• Train all of the people in the organization with any degree of customer contact to embody the tone and message of the brand. Keep them current on all promotions and marketing efforts.
• Ensure that your branding looks the same across all marketing channels, with the same logo, typeface, color palette, balance and emotional quality. This includes everything from your letterhead to packaging to point of sale materials to your Facebook page to your magazine ad.
• It is extremely important that your website’s home page perfectly matches the theme of your advertising and marketing campaigns.
• Link any advertised promotions and specials directly to a website landing page that deals specifically with that promotion. Consumers should not be asked to navigate multiple pages in their quest for a 15% discount.
• Use each marketing medium for its unique strengths. Your campaign should combine the scale and brand building abilities of traditional media with the nimbleness and precision of online options.
• Use traditional media to encourage consumers to seek out more information on your website or your social networking channels. The sites should include a call to action and a follow up from a trained sales or service staff member.
• Your brand’s image, emotional tone and central message should remain consistent across multi-sensory delivery vehicles: through sight on television, sound on radio, and the tactical and kinetic experience online. It should all reinforce the consumer’s impression of your brand as he seamlessly travels the arc from discovery to engagement.
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