Strategic Marketing and Communications: A Comprehensive Approach

Posted on Jan 26, 2025 in Marketing

Marketing Plan

An instrument for directing and coordinating the marketing effort. Strategic: Lays out the target market and the firm’s value proposition based on the analysis of the best market opportunities. Tactical: Specifies marketing tactics like product features, promotion, pricing, and sales channels.

Communication Strategy

Push: To influence end-user consumers, they use the manufacturer’s sales force, trade promotion, and money. Pull: Uses advertising and promotion to persuade consumers to demand the product from intermediaries and develop relationships. Profile: To influence a wide range of stakeholders and build up reputation.

Identify Target Audience

Potential buyers of the company’s products. Describing your target audience makes it easier to work with, to explain to others, and have a good point of reference.

STP Model

  • Segmentation: Divides a market into well-defined slices, being a group of customers who share similar needs and wants. We find descriptive characteristics and behavioral considerations.
  • Targeting: Take a close look at external and internal sources. They follow three strategies:
    • Mass Marketing: Goes after the market with one offer.
    • Targeted: Different products to different segments, used for smaller companies with limited resources.
    • Targeting Multiple: It can go either through product or market specialization.
  • Positioning: Is about what the buyer thinks about the product/firm, occupying a clear, distinctive place relative to competing products from competing brands, giving them an advantage in the market.

Determining Communication Objectives

To get from the business goals to the communication objectives, we use marketing plans. Four communication objectives are:

  • Category need
  • Brand awareness (fostering the consumer’s ability to recognize or recall the brand within the category to make a purchase)
  • Brand attitude (helping consumers evaluate the brand’s ability to meet a current need)
  • Brand purchase intention (encourage the consumer to make a mental commitment to buy a product)

Design Communication

  • Message Strategy (what to say): Define the topic of our communication, reflecting the business goals and brand position.
  • Creative Strategy (how to say it): Process of translating a message into specific communication through:
    • Informational appeals (elaborate on product benefits or attributes, requires high attention and engagement from your audience)
    • Transformational appeals (elaborate on a non-product-related benefit or image, stir up emotions that will motivate purchase)
  • Message Source (who should say it): Wide range of sources like media, situations, and people. Messages delivered by attractive or popular sources can achieve higher attention. Three factors for the credibility of a message source are expertise, likability, and trustworthiness. Customers’ impressions and associations of the entity will determine if they want to use your product. Through communication, the brand can distinguish itself from competitors and be broad and flexible to translate into different media, markets, and time periods.

Select Channels

  • Personal Communication Channels: Two or more people communicate face-to-face or person-to-audience. Information received from these channels is more persuasive, trustful, and more effective because of feedback. Personal influence carries great weight when products are expensive, risky, or purchased infrequently and when products suggest something about the user’s status or taste. Three channels:
    • Advocate (company salespeople contacting buyers in the target market)
    • Expert (independent targets making statements to target buyers)
    • Social (friends, family members talking to target buyers)
  • Non-Personal: Communication directed to more than one person, using advertising, sales promotion, events, and public relations. Mass media might have an effect on sales: consumers might believe a heavily advertised brand must be of good quality. Two communication and media channels:
    • Short-term (temporary over well-defined time periods like sales promotion and event communication)
    • Long-term (more permanent character like brand design and packaging)

Establish Budget

Determine how much to spend depending on factors like the type of market, available resources, competitive communication, stage in the product lifecycle, and message complexity. We find four methods:

  • Affordable Method (set the communication budget at what a company thinks they can afford, used by companies that are product-oriented). Downsides: Leads to an uncertain annual budget, making long-range planning difficult.
  • Percentage of Sales Method (set communication expenditures at a specific percentage of current or anticipated sales). Downsides: Budget set by the availability of funds rather than market opportunities.
  • Objective and Task Budgeting (focuses management attention on the goals to be accomplished). Downsides: May not generate realistic budgets; actual costs are unknown.
  • Competitive Parity Budgeting (spends the same amount of money on advertising and marketing as its competitors). Downsides: Find out the size of the budget.

Decide Media Mix

Three media channels:

  • Paid (advertising, sponsoring)
  • Earned (get your brand into free media rather than having to pay for it through advertising; consumers become the channel using word-of-mouth; the risk is the communication and the difficulty in predicting the outcome)
  • Owned (through fully owned media like websites and partially owned like Facebook fan pages; this media can create brand portability, meaning you can extend your brand’s presence)

Eight types of communication:

  • Advertising (any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion, reaching geographically dispersed buyers, building a long-term brand image, and boosting short-term sales like TV advertising)
  • Online and social media
  • Events and experiences (to create brand-related interactions with consumers)
  • Public relations and publicity (attract attention to the company and its offering without paid advertising; with public relations, they build reputation and relationships with the community, and with publicity, they build credibility awareness, boost sales, and play an important role in launching new products)
  • Packaging (buyer’s first contact with the product, used for differentiation and visibility)
  • Personal selling (sellers try to convince the buyer to purchase a product)
  • Direct marketing
  • Word-of-mouth

Factors: Budget, type of market, how to reach our target group, geographical area, availability, and timing.

Manage Integrated Communication

Managing an integrated communication campaign through a coordinated use of different communication tools to enable the company to achieve its strategic goals, trying to establish a permanent and efficient relation with potential and actual consumers.

Advantages: Stronger message consistency across channels, unified brand image and message along communication; consistency leads to better results.

Disadvantages: Managing the number of channels and communication platforms, focus on internal organization instead of the consumer, complexity in developing creative assets.

Factors: Type of product market, product lifecycle stage, position of the company.

Digital Marketing Communication

Encourage consumers to participate in the marketing process. Benefits: Low-cost entry, dynamic adaptability, immediate connection with customers, build relationships with customers.

Digital Marketing Funnel: Describes the different stages that a user goes through from a marketing perspective, based on the AIDA model (attention, interest, desire, action). Everyone enters the funnel as prospects, but only a few end up as customers.

  • Short Funnel: Easier to convert web visits into purchases; low-cost, fast buying.
  • Long Funnel: Expensive, high-involvement goods, more effort to create web visitors into customers.

Inbound Strategy

Customers initiate contact with the marketer in response to various methods used to gain their attention.

SEO

Methods of making sure that the address of a website is shown near the top of the list of results of an internet search; easy to track and update.

Outbound Strategy

Pushing people to the top of the funnel with ads, used to influence consumer awareness and preference for a brand.

SEA

Used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages; easy to implement and no minimum investment needed.

A/B Testing

Method to optimize conversion rate and test digital assets; efficient and cost-effective marketing strategy to optimize marketing campaigns, better understand the customer base, and develop relevant content.

Targeting and Retargeting

Find the balance between detailed targeting options and handling communication effort and date; not every target and retarget is possible due to privacy laws and tech restrictions.

DC Brands

Means direct one-to-one conversations with consumers about products.