Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is one of the most powerful tools available to marketers. But just what is it? Is making or producing everything a necessary condition for achieving success, in whatever type of business or enterprise one may get involved with?
To know it best, let us go through the main idea of IMC and benefits together below. You’ll see how companies can more consistently communicate, get everybody sounding the same note and most effectively reach out to all viewers in this exciting game-changing strategy.
If you’re at all interested in how businesses can achieve consistent communication, seamless messaging and maximum reach of customers, here are some practical insights. If you’re struggling to come up with a unifying message for your various pieces of marketing industry jigsaw, then the process of putting everything together under a single coherent design will seem even more impossible.
To use Integrated Marketing Communication, instead of drawing random works from unconnected sources like independent ads in newspapers or radio stations and brands that do not remotely match one another, putting all together into a single unifying idea with all constituent elements contributing to it. This way ensures that you don’t just wind up acting as if one arm knows nothing about the other when you consider the whole group; rather each force is balanced with every other force.
This also ensures that everything related to your business — from website layout and product catalogue presentation through to social media update and personal interaction with customers, as well as the entire production process itself, is designed to work together in harmony.
- The fundamental objective of IMC is to make sure that good things happen where the customer actually meets it, and these events come together all around ‘touchpoints’ for maximum impact.
Key Components of IMC
To fully understand the concept of integrated marketing communication, it is absolutely necessary to have a clear idea of its basic parts. These include:
- Consistency and Connectivity:
All marketing materials and communication channels must be uniform in tonality, tone, message style, typography, and page design, conveying a unified feeling to the audience. - Customer-Centered Approach:
IMC begins with a deep understanding of the target market and stresses delivering value at every step along a customer’s decision process. - Multiple Channels Coordination:
IMC integrates a range of promotional activities, including electronic direct mail and website promotion such as search engine optimization, so that these disparate tasks work together in harmony. - Data-Driven Strategy:
IMC thrives on research and the use of metrics to measure performance, understand customer behaviour and adjust strategies in real time.
The Advantages of Integrated Marketing Communication
What benefits does IMC have in store for companies that use this approach? Here are a few examples of how adopting such a strategy can bring tangible benefits to these companies:
Heightened Brand Awareness
When consumers encounter the same message repeatedly in many locations, the brand becomes more familiar to them such as Nike’s slogan, “Just Do It.” This saying looks like part of their advertisements (their packaging, their social media posts and even staff who work in the company). Once a brand has reached this level of unification it has gained trust from the marketplace and become recognizable.
Lower Costs for Marketing
Overall it’s frequently cheaper when everything is coordinated. Operationally convenient, all the resources of time, effort, and money are used more effectively under one roof. For example, a piece of digital campaign content might also be re-purposed into social-media posts, straight into an email newsletter and even translated into advertising copy.
Closer Relationships with Your Audience
IMC gives heavy emphasis to whether marketers involve the customer and after that meeting expectations. When customers encounter consistent interactions and messages in multiple mediums of their choice, they have great trust in those enterprises with whom they are communicating – which is made stronger because these projects all get followed through.
Boost Marketing ROI
Top IMC practitioners make use of the power each communication medium possesses as well as working a common marketing message across the respective channels. This is more than merely improving returns from the firm’s advocates; it amplifies the overall effect on our publics, raising the efficiency of any marketing campaign.
How to Build an IMC Strategy for Success
After understanding the concept and benefits of Integrated Marketing Communication, how do you apply it within your company? Here are six steps which can help guide your efforts towards a successful IMC strategy.
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience
Clearly identify the group of people you are trying to win over. The foundation of your IMC strategy is your target audience. Clearly define who your ideal customer is, including demographics, interests, pain points, and buying behavior. The more you can find out about your audience and the better your messaging will reflect what they want.
Step 2: Solidify a Unified Message
The foundation of every successful IMC plan is a central message which reflects your brand’s essence.
What is our basic value proposition? What do we want people to feel about our brand or what ideas do we want them to associate with it? It is important that you keep your message consistent across all of your digital ad spending, social media posts or email series campaigns.
Step 3: Just the Right Channels
Ask yourself what platforms your target market is most active on, and focus in those areas.
Professional people are more likely to be found on LinkedIn.
Email marketing, however, remains effective in terms of personally connecting one-on-one with clients.
Step 4: Centralize Content Creation
Instead of creating separate campaigns for each platform, you should gather together your content creation efforts in one place.
Create “master assets” like high-quality video or infographics that can be adapted for different formats and used on multiple platforms.
Step 5: Foster Strong Cross-Departmental Collaboration
IMC requires cross-department collaboration, involving sales teams, customer service and product development.
When everybody cooperates, they are less likely to miss opportunities to connect with your audience. They are better able to keep their messages coherent.
Step 6: Discretionary, Continuous Refinement
IMC is not a one-at-once, then put to bed approach.
Use tools such as Google Analytics to see how your plan is doing. Are people clicking through your ads? How are they responding to different media? Do not leave your computer for just that. Use the data and keep making adjustments. Read on Google to see what others have suggested.
Nike’s Integrated Marketing Communication
When you are in a Nike store, you can take a photo with your mobile phone and fireplace. Many click the “like” button because it is one action that they can do for positive influence towards children from other parts of the world.
Nike Advertisements Space
Coca-Cola, Integrated Marketing Communication At Work
Coca-Cola uses “Integrated Marketing Communication” on a large scale: built around thematic communication (‘Share a Coke’), national TV brands that also participate in digital and experiential marketing, adoption by businesses rather than campaigns even (traits which runs counter to the general ideal when consumers are environmentally conscious).
They guarantee that joy will always accompany consumers who buy their product.
Airbnb IMC Makes Marketing Messages Fit for Customers
Airbnb shows us how to leverage IMC by tailoring advertising, social media, mail dispatches and even app messaging to help fans with extraordinary experiences.
This personalized, multi-channel messaging not only breeds brand loyalty but also addresses the special needs of the individual customer group.
By encouraging active management and improvement of brand alignment throughout your organization and by promoting a culture of experimentation and risk-taking that keeps it operating at the cutting edge.
Do you need your Marketing Communication Strategy refined or tuned up?
Find out how our seasoned crew can assist you combine channels smoothly, reinforce messages and put money into winning ventures.
