Integrated Marketing Communications: Strategies and Insights

Posted on Jun 6, 2024 in Other subjects

Marketing and Communication Plan Structure

A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It is the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created, and helps you connect each strategy back to a larger marketing operation and business goal.

1. State Your Business’s Mission

Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business’s main mission statement. Be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you’ll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.

2. Determine the KPIs for This Mission

KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.

3. Identify Your Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a description of whom you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, job title, and more. Each buyer persona should be a direct reflection of your business’s customers and potential customers.

4. Describe Your Content Initiatives and Strategies

• Content types, channels available, how to use them.
• Which types of content.
• How much you will create
• The goals and KPIs you will use to track each type
• Any paid advertising.

5. Clearly Define Your Plan’s Omissions

A marketing plan explains what the marketing team is going to focus on. However, it also explains what the marketing team is not going to focus on. If there are other aspects of your business that you aren’t serving in this particular plan, include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content. You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn’t on the hook for something, you need to make it known.

6. Define Your Marketing Budget: Freelance, Sponsor, Full Time

7. Identify Your Competition

Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one in this section.

8. Outline Your Plan’s Contributors and Their Responsibilities

Who’s doing what, which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

3 Principles for the Marketing and Communication Plan and Strategy

Brand Alignment: Whatever marketing channel you choose, it should have the same brand perception as yours. For example, if you sell luxury watches, build relationships with journalists from TIME magazine, not those writing in your local newspaper.

Customer Alignment: Follow the oldest rule in marketing – ‘be where your customers already are’. Pick channels where the consumers are already active. If you’re targeting younger millennials, advertise on social media platforms like Instagram, not Facebook, and certainly not day-time TV!

Budget Alignment: Choose a marketing channel that fits your budget. If you don’t have a budget, getting a print ad in MARCA will be out of your reach. But perhaps you can get a free press mention on MARCA’s website by reaching out to the journalists.

Basic Structure of a Marketing & Communications Plan

1. Analysis of the Situation
2. Public
3. Goals, Strategy, and Creative Idea
4. Mix MarkCom
5. Schedule
6. Budget
7. Evaluation and Control

Lasswell Model: Harold Dwight Lasswell

• Who: Control Analysis
• Says What: Content Analysis
• In Which Channel: Media Analysis
• To Whom: Audience Analysis
• With What Effect?: Effect Analysis

3 functions for communication: Surveillance of the environment, Correlation of components of society, Cultural transmission between generation

Lasswell model suggests the message flow in a multicultural society with multiple audiences. The flow of message is through various channels. And also, this communication model is similar to Aristotle’s communication model.

360-Degree Marketing Approach

A 360-degree marketing campaign takes integrated marketing strategies to a new level, with the goal being to cohesively deliver an offer consistently across all touchpoints, platforms, and devices at the right time, in the right place, and with the right message.

This approach ensures that every possible interaction with a prospect or customer is meaningful. It means that when your target market sees a tagline to a campaign on social media, they will also see it when they visit your website or when they receive an email from you.

It’s a user-centric concept that provides a complete view of the customer journey from beginning to purchase and beyond, helping to move customers through this process smoothly.

Key Components of a 360-Degree Marketing Campaign

• An Effective Website
• An SEO Strategy
• PPC Advertising
• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• In-store/In-person
• Public Relations
• Traditional Advertising & Print

Why a 360-Degree Marketing Campaign is Worth Doing

• Creates a cohesive and solid customer experience.
• When a company is known in one market but wants to reposition themselves into a new market
• To get the word out about the rebranding of a company
• To prioritize the cornerstone campaigns from less important campaigns
• To revive poor-performing products, especially if the company hasn’t focused on marketing that product in a while
• To build a brand image for start-ups
• To market a new product or service

How to Create a 360-Degree Marketing Campaign

• Step 1 – Study What Successful Companies Are Doing: RESEARCH & BENCHMARKING
• Step 2 – Study Your Target Market: BUYER PERSONA + CUSTOMER JOURNEY
• Step 3 – Determine the Purpose of Your 360-Degree Marketing Campaign
• Step 4 – Plan Out The Funnel
• Step 5 – Ensure There Is Cohesiveness

Integrated Marketing Communications

It’s a planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are relevant to that person and consistent over time. It should be synchronized effort among specialists.

The Main IMC Goals: The goal is to integrate all the promotional tools so that they all work cohesively. An example would be a company promoting a new logo strategy through multiple media (print, tv, web, social medias). Each approach will be different for that specific medium, but they are all directing the audience to the same exact message. The saying goes ‘two is better than one’, the tools work better when they are working all together.

IMC Tools: Let us go through various integrated marketing communication tools: Integrated marketing communication effectively integrates all modes of brand communication and uses them simultaneously to promote various products and services among customers effectively and eventually yield higher revenues for the organization.

Advertising: Advertising is one of the most effective ways of brand promotion. Advertising helps organizations reach a wider audience within the shortest possible time frame. Advertisements in newspaper, television, Radio, billboards help end-users to believe in your brand and also motivate them to buy the same and remain loyal towards the brand. Advertisements not only increase the consumption of a particular product/service but also create brand awareness among customers. Marketers need to ensure that the right message reaches the right customers at the right time.

Sales Promotion: Brands (Products and services) can also be promoted through discount coupons, loyalty clubs, membership coupons, incentives, lucrative schemes, attractive packages for loyal customers, specially designed deals and so on. Brands can also be promoted effectively through newspaper inserts, danglers, banners at the right place, glorifiers, wobblers etc.

Direct Marketing: Direct marketing enables organizations to communicate directly with the end-users. Various tools for direct marketing are emails, text messages, catalogues, brochures, promotional letters and so on. Through direct marketing, messages reach end-users directly.

Public Relation Activities: Public relation activities help promote a brand through press releases, news, events, public appearances etc. The role of public relations officer is to present the organization in the best light.

Personal Selling: Personal selling is also one of the most effective tools for integrated marketing communication. It takes place when marketer or sales representative sells products or services to clients.

Personal selling goes a long way in strengthening the relationship between the organization and the end-users. It involves the following steps:

1. Prospecting – Prospecting helps you find the right and potential contact. 2. Making first contact – Marketers need to establish first contact with their prospective clients through emails, telephone calls etc. An appointment is essential and make sure you reach on time for the meeting.3. The sales call – Never ever lie to your customers. Share what all unique your brand has to offer to customers. As a marketer, you yourself should be convinced with your products and services if you expect your customers to invest in your brand. 4. Objection handling – Be ready to answer any of the client’s queries. 5. Closing the sale – Do not leave unless and until you successfully close the deal. There is no harm in giving customers some time to think and decide accordingly. Do not be after their life.

Benefits of Using Integrated Marketing Communications

1. Improved results:

With the traditional marketing approach, businesses set up different campaigns for separate marketing streams. Press releases, advertising, direct marketing and sales promotions. Each of these marketing teams will have their stomping ground, and never meet while carrying out their duties.

However, an integrated approach ensures that all these units come together to form one big and beautiful marketing machine. The information released by the press is backed up by blog posts and articles, external marketing agencies, sales teams etc. This way, the communication becomes clear enough to your target audience, obviously leading to improved sales.

Integration, not repetition

Integrated marketing does not mean to run the same ad on all channels.

Repetition reduces ROI and increases the risks of repelling prospected customers.

Integrated marketing is all about delivering the message in a pleasant way, so that it helps the brand to be easily recognized by the customer.

For integrated marketing to work, we must use interrelated messages, short and seductive, plus a planning of objectives and specific calls to actions.

2. Improve brand image

Not only will the message stay consistent in all the platforms, but your brand’s elements will line

up seamlessly as well. Always strive to ensure that content, style guides, logos, voice, and headers work in tandem as this will ensure that we maximize the market impact and carve out the niche or industry.

3. Cost effective

To run a successful business, we have to reduce unnecessary costs as much as possible, and this is precisely what integrated marketing campaigns bring to the table. Using the same images and copy for different media, which in return reduces design, copywriting, and photography costs.

Some big brands, adapt the assets to regional markets, like the case of Coca-Cola.

4. Increase morale

IMC is great when it comes to building trust in a business/brand and increasing revenue. It also helps a business internally because the marketing team will have to pull together to run an integrated campaign effectively.

When a team works together, they’ll become one well-oiled machine that is capable of taking up any campaign challenge. In turn, they will undoubtedly achieve great results, which can also act as an excellent morale booster for the employees.

5. Improved efficiency

Consistently delivering a message will not only ensure that we have a stronger impact on the market but also make us more productive and save money too. We can create advertisement images once and then proceed to use them across several marketing channels. We can also decide to perfect a piece of content and use it on different media.

Alternatively, we can choose to work with a single marketing agency that specializes in providing an integrated marketing approach, rather than using a whole host of different agencies. This way, we’ll save money on agency fees as well as time cost compared to when we’re dealing with multiple providers.

6. Reduce confusion

With integrated marketing, buyer’s confusion can be significantly reduced when choosing a particular product or service, as opposed to advertising via different communication methods.

Additionally, IMC helps buyers get all the information about special offers and new product releases. Consumers can then purchase the products as quickly as possible, thereby avoiding competition from other brands who sell the same products.

7. Stay focused

IMC is also another way of maintaining a good working relationship within an organization. Employees will get the message clearly, as well as the goals, and work towards achieving them. When we sync all the parties within the company, we create an impactful campaign. What’s more, we’ll communicate the same message both internally and externally, which will enhance the chances of making good returns on the investment.

Roles Of Integrated Marketing Communication:The roles of integrated marketing communications is: to increase brand awareness and reach a larger audience.

Levels Of Integration:

There are levels of integration that can take place beyond the obvious/usual communication tools. There are five in total and they help strengthen integrated communications.

Horizontal: happens across marketing mix and business functions. This approach to marketing brings together different departments that may be working on the same initiative but in different ways.

Data: requires a marketing information system, and it collects and shares relevant data to different departments.

Vertical: the objectives for marketing and communications have to support the higher-level corporate objectives and missions. This strategy demands that a product being developed fits in with corporate policy as well as the structure of the company.

Internal: this requires internal marketing and requires that all the staff involved is kept up and informed as well as motivated about any new projects, partners, and standards. This ensures that employees are happy and excited about new products being developed.

External: this requires external partners who can work closely together to deliver a solution.

Barriers Of IMC

IMC has amazing benefits, but not everything is perfect. There are barriers that IMC has to deal with on a regular basis. Some of the restricting barriers include:

• Resistance to change
• Restrictive creativity
• Time scale conflicts
• Communication problems

Communications of problems with a wide variety target market, and lack of management knowledge.

IMC strategy has previously stated, restricts creativity, this means that there isn’t anymore ‘wild’ sales promotions unless it fits into the strategy.

Agency Brief, Importance, What to Include in It

• Be unequivocal about what you want: be clear, put numbers… more explain reason, business objectives.
• Align your communications mk and business objectives: set priorities.
• Provide a budget with your brief: to know what level of resource they can commit to your campaign.
• Clarify your priority audiences: B2B/B2C, premium/budget: set a hierarchy, be realistic and make research on that audience.
• Include useful background: context is always important, to know how you can stand out to help bring objectives to life.
• Highlight any no-nos: mention what you don’t want.
• Keep your shortlist short.
• Set realistic timescales
• Provide feedback
• Trust your instinct.

12 Brand Archetypes, List, Examples, Explain

Archetypes are commonly associated with characters in a story. However, they often tie to themes and emotions that extend far beyond the boundaries of a script.

According to Archetypes in Branding, ‘archetypes represent a pattern of ideas and way of thinking that is consistent across time, generations and cultures.’

Archetypes remain consistent over time because they represent values, traits, and motivations that are intrinsic to human nature.

For example, people are constantly inspired by heroes. Heroes represent the courage that lives inside of each of us. Brands like Nike, which embodies the hero archetype, inspire us to become the strongest, bravest versions of ourselves. Nike shoe styles may change over time. But, heroes will always make humans feel empowered and motivated, no matter what year it is.

Marketing Insights: Insight is the combination of life/work experiences with systematically-collected and analyzing data. Data without added business context isn’t valuable because it doesn’t show you what you should do next.

Marketing insights meaning is therefore the process of developing a deep understanding of consumers, customers, competitors, and the industry in general.

The understanding of the truth of a situation. The ability to understand a person or a situation very clearly.

Why Are Insights Important? The Benefits of Marketing Insights

• Better understand what our customers want
• Provide improved, and more personalized, customer experiences
• Increase revenues becausewe can better influence over response rates, when people buy, average order value (AOV), and reorders
• Outsmart the competition, rather than just outspend them
• Maximize ROI because insights direct business actions that cut costs and improve results at the same time. Optimization

How to get insights?

• By following and analyzing people’s digital footprint.
• Collect data from across online channels (social media, your website, your competitors’ websites with competitor analysis tools, etc.)
• Organize and analyze that data. This is big data, so these tools must
• be able to work with vast amounts of data that no room full of analysts could process alone.
• Present that data in a useable form

How to identify them

1.- Watch: To get to understand the mind of consumers we must find the key moment. It is essential that we observe all their steps to be present at the moment in which they manifest an answer towards the brand. Either positive or negative.

2.- Listen: One of the most important steps to find a good insight is to listen. Take advantage of all your communication channels, social networks, calls, email marketing, polls, survey, what’s said in the brand’s forums and the competition’s forum… Be immersed in information about what the target thinks about us and what they really want.

3.- Investigate: Thanks to the Internet, we have the enormous advantage of accessing thousands of data and statistics that capture the behavior of our target audience. But, beyond that, we can start by paying attention to our own information.

4.- Put yourself in the client’s place: Beyond researching and obtaining data and percentages, a technique that will help us to know what an insight is and to find it is simply to be empathetic.