How Study Of Integrated Marketing Communication Helps At Strategic Level?

Amol Gawande Feb 07, 2019

Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is a communication plan that ensures all forms of communication and messages from a brand are cohesive and carefully linked. At it’s most basic level, Integrated Marketing Communication means integrating all the promotional tools so that they work in harmony. This means that communication in advertising, direct mail, social media, telemarketing, and sales promotion should remain consistent.

Why do companies need it?

In the busy world, we live in, a consistent, consolidated, and clear message has better chances of cutting through the noise. Furthermore, stretching your message across various types of communication tools leads to more avenues for customers to be aware of your brand and ultimately make a purchase. Adding to it, integrated communication also allows customers to receive timely reminders of offers, updates, and other relevant information. This makes integrated marketing communication an integral part of any organisations marketing strategy.

Let’s take a look at some benefits of integrated marketing communication:

Better Returns

Conventional methods of marketing communications meant that companies created separate campaigns for advertising, press relations, direct marketing and sales promotions. On the other hand, integrated campaigns employ the same communication across all marketing tools to strengthen each other and enhance the overall effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

In an integrated campaign, you use advertising to increase brand or product awareness and generate leads for the sales team. Using the same information in press releases reinforces the message in the advertising. Direct mails or emails can be used to follow up on inquiries that were generated from the advertisement or press release.

Creative Harmony

In an integrated campaign, different marketing tools usually feature the same creative treatment. Repeating a headline, key phrases, and images across every communication mean that prospects and customers receive consistent messages everytime they come across any aspect of the campaign.

Cost Savings

Creative consistency in a campaign can lead to cost saving. Using the same image and adapting the copy for different communication channels results in reduced efforts for copywriting, designing, and photography costs. Moreover, you could also utilise a marketing automation tool that will help you market content across multiple online channels and automate repetitive tasks. Marketing automation means that your employees will more time to do something new and eventually help the organisation grow to greater heights.

Customer Preference

An integrated campaign helps you present consumers with information in the format they favour. Organizations can an ask their customers if they prefer receiving information via email, direct mail, text message or telephone. Once an organisation has that information, they can use this data in their integrated communication plan to ensure that customers receive any communication in their prefered method. To target online customers, you can integrate your website content and design with your integrated marketing plan. Furthermore, integrated marketing communication can help better customer experience at every step of the buyer's journey.

Better Strategies

To make any of the above points a reality, organisations need to determine their objectives and select the right metrics for the marketing campaign. For instance, if a brand wants to increase their brand awareness, then the right metrics would be webpage traffic. They will further need to analyse the kind of content that is drawing the attention of the target audience and modify their strategies and targets accordingly. Therefore, integrated communication marketing ensures that individuals learn to make better strategies.

Integrated marketing communication ensures that big and small businesses get better results from their campaigns at reduced marketing costs. It can also create a competitive advantage, boost sales and profits, create a brand image, and nurture relationships with customers. Although it may seem like integrated marketing communication requires a lot of efforts, it also delivers many benefits.