This process coordinates a variety of promotional vehicles, an integrated marketing communications strategy is implemented at specific times during a marketing campaign to ensure the message is consistently received by its target audience.
A sound integrated marketing communications plan requires a blend of strategic planning, design, and communications ingenuity enabling the marketer to reach through multiple channels in architecting growth for business, brands, and products. Facing the ever-increasing growth of competition in the marketplace for dominance of communication channels, businesses need to concentrate on perfecting their integrated marketing communications plan in an effort to stay on top.
Businesses cannot afford to underestimate the importance of marketing to specific target audiences. In order to drives sales, a complete integrated marketing communications strategy should be explored and implemented to include public relations, advertising, internet, etc.
Integrated Marketing Communication is more than the coordination of a company’s outgoing message between different media and the consistency of the message throughout. It is an aggressive marketing plan that captures and uses an extensive amount of customer information in setting and tracking marketing strategy.
Integrated Marketing Communication considers
View communications more broadly than media-delivered messages by planning what your brand will communicate at each contact point or touch point, and consider how to measure the results.
To whom are we communicating now?
What are we communicating?
What channels are we using?
What is working or not working?
Focus on the increasing value of the brand to the organisation and looks at the close relationships between developing brand values, building customer relationships, and satisfying partnership goals. The process starts with customer identification, moves to customer valuation, and then to the development of communication programs (i.e., brand messages or brand incentives). Goes on to address the financial issues of brand communication: the identification of brand investments, the measurement of short-term and long-term returns, and the necessary approaches for relating communication programs to partnership objectives.
The concept of building compelling brands by integrating their “total communication.” Discussion centers on how a brand communicates from the customer’s perspective and how to audit all of the elements of that communications mix. Tools are introduced to help prioritise the importance of each element from the customer’s viewpoint and reveal areas of poor integration or alignment. Discussion then covers the implications for the allocation of resources, organisational structures, and processes and metrics that help to bring a brand’s communications into alignment.
Related Articles Segmentation and Targeting, Customer Profile, Value Proposition, Engagement, Content Strategy, Integral Communications Strategy
