5 Steps to a Better Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy
What Is Integrated Marketing Communications?
As a brand, you need to convey the same message across all platforms. If you have differing messages across your social media platforms, you will confuse your audience, and they won’t trust you. Consistency is critical when it comes to communicating with your target audience. If you are inconsistent, your audience will not know who to trust and which platform gives the best information about your brand or company.
This is where Integrated Marketing communication comes in. Integrated communication is the concept that requires all forms and mediums of communication to link with each other, making sure they put forth the same narrative.
An integrated marketing communications strategy incorporates all communication mediums so that they work together and have the same output. The different departments include sales, mail, advertising, among others.
An integrated marketing communications strategy is an ongoing strategy that goes on to accomplish multiple goals. It consists of planning, goal measurement, and then strategies to achieve those targets. The IMC strategy stands apart from an average marketing strategy. It does not focus on advertising alone but also on how the audience perceives the message put forward. An Integrated Marketing strategy is critical if you want your brand to succeed and be seen in a good light. To come up with an excellent integrated marketing strategy, you must follow the five steps mentioned below:
5 Steps to A Better Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy
Identification of Customers
To come up with an effective strategy, you must make sure that you identify your target audience. Identification of who your audience is and what they are looking for is very important, and for the identification process, you must look at two key components:
Demographics- This includes basic information about your customer base, such as the age of the targeted audience, their gender, and their location. If you have this information, you will see exactly where your target audience is coming from. You can develop an integrated marketing strategy that is hyper-focused on the demographic and can yield better results.
Behaviors- A brand needs to review what kind of behaviors their targeted audiences exhibit. This helps them build their strategy around their targeted audience’s behavior patterns, which is important to increase sales. When noticing behaviors, marketers should keep details of what their customers do or how they act to a stimulus related to the services or products the client offers.
Consumer Research
Now that you know your target audience and what kind of behaviors they exhibit, you must keep digging deeper. Consumer research is important to understand all the extra details. Such as their financial values, interests, and what they are looking for in a product you offer.
Extensive consumer research will help you develop a very personalized strategy that remains consistent across all communication mediums. In IMC, marketing is an investment that focuses on bringing in more money.
You cannot invest with your eyes closed. Conducting in-depth research on your customers helps marketers come up with the revenue they must spend for the return on investment according to their expectations.
Once the marketers know the revenue they need to spend, they will be able to develop a plan that integrates that revenue in the best way possible.
Creation Of Content
After deciding the revenue, marketers can come on to establish goals. Marketers are to decide marketing goals that fall in sync with the financial goals of the client. Cater to both of them simultaneously, and base your content creation on that. When coming up with meaningful marketing strategies, you must focus on the content you create and deliver it.
Integrated Marketing Communications demand that marketers have to come up with all the possible channels to convey their message. Once the marketers have decided on the channels, they can move on to content creation accordingly.
The content you create should be according to what your client wants to deliver. Consider using the consumer research you have done in the previous steps and create content that encompasses your client’s motives.
ROI Estimation
The return on investment is the main goal here, and in this step, you must estimate how much return on investment you can receive with the strategies you formulate. Getting high returns on your investment is the main goal for most clients, and everybody looks forward to making more money.
A well developed marketing strategy yields a high return on investment. When coming up with your strategy, you need to look at all the possible outcomes. If you can come up with a thorough estimate, your client will readily agree to the budget you present them.
To estimate your ROI, you must analyze all the strategies you devise by quantifying them in real-life situations. You can make educated guesses about the strategies and investments that will yield the highest ROI. Moreover, you can also decide the placement of your strategies to determine which order will work best for you in yielding results.
Budgeting
The last step of an Integrated Marketing Communications strategy is to come up with a budget. To get your client’s approval, you must present them with a comprehensive budget that addresses all expenses from start to finish.
When making the budget, your client would want you to think about the core concepts of budgeting. This could include the money that the marketing strategy generates over time and the amount invested by the client.
The 5 steps discussed in this piece can be the solution to the plummeting business of your client. High-level communications firms must pay attention to the IMC strategy and ensure the client is happy with the result.