Have you ever seen an advertisement for a company without needing to search for its logo? Can you imitate a company’s style of speaking even if you are not a professional writer?
The effectiveness of utilizing interrelated advertising and marketing strategies is recognized in the concept of IMC.
The concept behind IMC is that customers ought to have a consistent and effortless encounter no matter if they engage with your brand on your site, social media, or face to face.
All aspects of a company’s vocal style in addition to its visual representation need to be consistent with the objectives, principles, and aspirations of the organization.
This marketing strategy is more important than ever. Taking into account that customers interact with companies on approximately 20 different platforms prior to making a purchase decision is particularly noteworthy.
You should provide an uninterrupted experience through all of them.
This post can help you enhance your brand’s unified marketing communication. I’m going to outline integrated marketing communications, highlight its relevance, and show you how to construct a IMC plan. I’ll provide some instances of integrated marketing communications initiatives initiated by popular companies. Ready? Then let’s dive in.
What Are Integrated Marketing Communications?
First, let’s define what integrated marketing communications means.
The concept of “unified marketing” originated in the 1980s, and is defined as the integration of all marketing channels to guarantee a consistent customer experience.
IMC applies to every channel. Promoting your business can be done through digital sources, including social media and your website, as well as traditional sources such as television and newspaper. At the end of the day, no matter how people engage with your brand, they will have the same experience.
You may be considering if IMC is similar to multi-channel marketing, and you would be correct. It’s similar, but it’s not the same. Marketing that is executed on multiple channels is known as multi-channel marketing. This approach involves utilizing more than one platform when running promotions. Integrated marketing communication seeks to ensure that customers have the same experience regardless of what channel they are using.
Let’s look at this in practice. Take Apple, for example.
You can recognize an Apple commercial when you come across it, correct? No matter where one views an advertisement from a specific company, whether it be riding the subway, watching television, or visiting their website, the same atmosphere, pictures, and words will be used for the message. Even the in-store experience is the same.
Every marketing message is completely interconnected, and you are fully aware of the outcomes you will receive.
Contrast with a brand that does not make a concerted effort on its marketing.
Imagine coming across an advertisement for an online shop on Facebook. The product’s picture grabs your attention, and you’re convinced by the sales pitch, so you click on the link to the website. But the website doesn’t look the same. The brand colors are different. The messaging has changed.
You feel disoriented and probably exit the website disgruntled, is that correct? This kind of disconcerting experience encourages making a purchase.
Therefore, it’s essential to devise a marketing strategy that encompasses multiple channels.
What Is the Goal of Integrated Marketing Communications?
The aim of combined marketing campaigns is to generate a cohesive message and corporate image that customers will be able to identify throughout all avenues.
It is necessary to have a unified strategy that encompasses every type of marketing, from adverts to public relations, and from sales to customer service.
If someone spots an advertisement for your product on television, is made aware of it on the radio, and then goes to your website, they need to have an identical experience.
The information communicated in each platform should be the same and each should assist the other to better inform the audience.
Why is this important?
In today’s environment, it is evident that most customers fetch information from multiple sources prior to making a purchase; and research has noted that the purchase rate is nearly five times higher when multiple channels are integrated together. Therefore, it is extremely important that your message is delivered properly and is understood by the audience.
A comprehensive marketing communications plan can help unify all of your marketing efforts into an organized approach.
Why Integrated Marketing Campaigns Work
Integrated marketing communications strategies prove to be effective as they ensure the same message is being communicated across all channels, further strengthened with each interaction.
This type of marketing enables you to oversee the discussion about your brand and guarantee that your intended interest group consistently observes a similar message about your brand, regardless of where they are exposed to it – through paid promotion, online media, or even face to face.
Additionally, campaigns utilizing integrated marketing communications tend to be more budget-friendly than those solely relying on a single channel as it’s possible to reuse existing materials across numerous mediums.
Key benefits of an integrated marketing communications plan:
- Reach a wider audience than single-channel experiences
- Keep your brand top of mind across all channels
- Build audience trust with consistent messaging and campaigns
- Save budget by reusing content and assets
If that’s not convincing enough, take into account the fact that customers who shop across multiple channels tend to spend more. A study conducted by Symphony RetailAI discovered that people who buy groceries from multiple channels shop more often and spend 20% more than those who exclusively shop in-store.
The Harvard Business Review conducted additional research that determined that customers who utilize omnichannel shopping expend 10% more money when shopping online and 4% more when shopping in-store than those using single-channel shopping.
Do integrated marketing communication plans help drive ROI?
Absolutely. Building brand recognition and ensuring a uniform message is delivered to customers through multiple platforms increases return on investment.
How to Build an Integrated Marketing Campaign
What steps would you need to take to create an integrated marketing campaign? Follow these steps to get started.
1. Establish your overarching campaign goal.
Prior to determining what outlets will be included in your unified marketing strategy, you must evaluate the objective of the entire plan.
It could be that you have just unveiled a product, service, or plan and would love for it to be noticed by customers, like Southwest’s Transfarency. It’s possible you’ve made a total alteration to your brand, wishing to share your fresh communication, similar to what Old Spice has done with their “Smell Like a Man, Man” campaign. You may have just decided on a new slogan for your brand and want people to begin connecting your company to it, like Snickers’ tagline, “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.”
No matter what objective you are seeking to accomplish with your campaign, always ensure that it is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This will assist you in staying attentive, monitoring the success of your campaign, and finding out how to advance in the following attempt.
Your goals should be connected with one or more of the key performance indicators (KPIs) and their connected metrics, which you can watch when you get started with your promotion.
Furthermore, whilst attaining increased engagement and generating fresh leads are always invigorating, a multi-channel campaign should ponder over the entire scope: how your campaign could affect possible sales and the business’ revenue. Spend some time plotting how your effort will have a positive effect on your financial performance.
2. Choose your marketing channels and set goals for each one.
Once you have established the main purpose of your overarching combined marketing effort, you should have a better understanding of which channels (at least some of them) will assist in accomplishing that goal.
If you want to introduce a new logo and collection of brand identity materials, radio advertisements are not a must. Conversely, if you are wanting to reach a new location or area, advertisements through the radio, billboards, television, and other area locations can be helpful.
The ultimate deciding factor in picking your distribution channel(s) is how you want your combined marketing effort to be successful. There are 10 different routes of dissemination you can take when it comes to distributing your marketing content.
- Advertising (both print and PPC)
- Direct marketing
- Email marketing
- PR
- Personal selling
- Sales promotions
- Digital marketing (e.g. website, content marketing, and SEO)
- Social media
- Events and sponsorships
- Packaging
Your promotional strategy should utilize multiple forms of communication to achieve the most extensive viewership and firmly establish the campaign’s message. Do not wait to introduce, delete, or assess different channels if you observe an individual or several networks reach a level of stagnation.
3. Define your buyer personas by channel.
Every marketing channel targets its own specific buyer persona. Therefore, instead of creating an extensive individual description for your initiative, you need to characterize your crowd by the avenue it utilizes.
It is advisable to make sure you comprehend who exactly you are addressing on each platform and how you can tweak those precise resources to have the most achievement. However, it is unavoidable that there could be some crossover.
Be aware that in certain promotions, you may be attempting to reach out to a particular group of people. In this situation, it would be beneficial to determine your target consumer before figuring out which ways of communication to use to reach them.
4. Identify your channel managers.
The size of your marketing group will determine how you disperse responsibilities, with some individuals or multiple divisions handling varied outlets. Determining who will be responsible for making sure that their channel(s) is consistent with the multi-channel marketing campaign is a necessity.
There are two key points for this: Firstly, the manager has the expertise to make the campaign work best for their individual channel through understanding the audience, creating a schedule for postings, optimizing the content and coming up with ways to measure performance. Secondly, it would be too difficult for a single person deliver effective content and manage a campaign across multiple channels.
Perhaps your marketing staff is limited in size, and one person has to take care of various platforms. No matter how small your team is, allocate responsibility for the channels across multiple people — with one individual in charge of one or two channels ideally.
5. Create adaptable marketing assets and messaging.
At present, you have determined your desired outcome, the individuals you are intending to reach, and the methods of communication you are going to use. Now is the period to produce your unified marketing campaign material. In this phase, composing written material, visual design, and other imaginative activities are undertaken.
Before I get into the details, we need to discuss a key factor of effective integrated marketing content: the ability to be adapted. In order to make sure your campaign is uniform (and to lighten your workload), you should be able to take any content and modify it to be used on different platforms.
An illustration of this could be a joined marketing strategy targeted at revealing a new 3-minute brand video. You could repurpose this video into:
- 30-second and one-minute “trailer” videos
- Still images
- Quotes
- GIFs
- Hashtags
- Blog posts
- Soundbites
As you create and utilize these pieces of art, make sure they fit with your company’s standards while keeping them similar. It could be useful for you to compile your own brand regulations for your comprehensive marketing plan to pass along to your work staff and any channel administrators.
This documentation could include a few things:
- Visual guidelines (logo, color palette, typography, etc.)
- Any developed and repurposed assets in multiple file formats
- Voice and tone guidelines (taglines, preferred language, words to avoid, etc.)
- Messaging guidelines (pain points, goals, types of content, resources, etc.)
- Buyer persona information and guidelines
Integrated marketing is all about a consistent brand experience. Ensure that your marketing material accurately presents your message no matter which platform your viewers are engaging with.
6. Establish your plan for collecting leads.
Be prepared to get leads regardless of if you are aiming to acquire them from your campaign. Don’t forget about this aspect of your campaign after you have already launched it. Even though you may be trying to just promote understanding of your business, think about how someone visiting your site may become a lead and eventually turn into a buyer.
Think about how you can get someone who visits your page to become a lead. Would they subscribe to your newsletter? Input their information to download a content offer? Create an account on your website? Make sure your campaign’s conversion elements go along with the other visuals and messages associated with your brand.
Think about how to nurture the people who have converted into leads. Would they roll into an automated email workflow? Would you pass them along to Sales? No matter what method you take, ensure that you don’t neglect the people who willingly provide their data.
Be sure to confer with Sales to make sure they know of your campaign and have accepted your plan to get new leads and customers.
7. Launch, measure, and iterate your campaign.
Ready to launch your integrated marketing campaign? Now is the moment to make your endeavor become a reality… yet you should not relax just yet.
Remember those KPIs and metrics from step one? Monitor the KPIs that link to your primary campaign objective (e.g. improving brand recognition, rebranding, new product launch, etc.) every week, month, and quarter (depending on the duration of your campaign) to measure how effectively it is accomplishing the goal.
Always use the knowledge gained from one marketing campaign to inform future promotions. You can create an ongoing system of linked marketing efforts that produce positive outcomes by getting the proper leadership, tactics, and applications into position.
Final Thoughts on Integrated Marketing Communications Plans
Creating an organized marketing communications strategy is essential for any company to be successful.
A plan should be formulated that outlines the main methods used to promote the company and its products. Doing so will guarantee that all of the activities related to marketing will be unified in conveying the same message.
This can result in heightened recognition of the brand and greater commitment to the brand from customers, both of which can contribute to higher sales and higher profits.
The end result? A company that is better equipped to thrive in the current business environment.
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