Over years, digital marketing sphere has witnessed tremendous transformations that enabled businesses of all sizes to reach point of greater connectivity. With a notable increase in the opportunities, marketing complexities have also increased for organizations. Especially for businesses that are juggling between multiple marketing channels, maintaining a balance proves to be a challenging task. This is where integrated marketing communication plays a vital role in helping organizations maintain efficiency and consistency in marketing strategies.
What is Integrated Marketing Communication?
integrated marketing communication is a strategic approach of creating a unified and seamless experience. For targeted consumers to interact with the brand. This is executed by amalgamating all vital aspects of marketing communication including advertising, public relations, sales promotion, social media, etc. A well-structured integrated marketing strategy goes beyond having a single slogan, ident, and brand colour across all marketing channels. It weaves a coherent story that narrates everything that a brand does.
Integrated Marketing Communication and Its Scope
Integrated marketing works with a basic principle of finding a good balance between various marketing channels. While building a profitable ecosystem for the business. Companies use multiple marketing tactics such as email marketing, SEO, PPC, etc. And finding a way to integrate them can make each of these components more effective.
For instance, when a company use hashtag across all social media channels along with relevant content. It generates more effective results than when that particular hashtag is used on Instagram pictures alone.
With numerous digital marketing channels, identifying a way to generate a cohesive and seamless presence across all of them has become critical. The concept of integrated marketing communication is not new, in the past, it was more focused on optimizing channels and connecting them together. However, modern businesses are using integrated marketing to focus on targeted consumers and their experience. Modern consumers are looking for a personalized and seamless experience. When consumers connect and engage with a brand they expect more than a faceless corporation, they want to interact with a personality that can build trust before they commit to that particular brand. And by extending a consistent message across all channels, integrated marketing communication allows brands to generate that sense of trust and reliability.
Benefits of Integrated Marketing Communication Strategy
Today customers don’t care enough to pay attention to different messages from a single brand. And not using a clear communications strategy to market the brand, the core message will be lost amongst the constant stream of content that consumers are subjected to every day. That means all of the thousands of storytelling efforts by brands are typically completely forgotten by over four out of five people. This is why sharing consistent message across all channel has become critical, because, without it, the core message will fail to make an impact.
Integrated marketing strategies are effective in all verticals as well as industries because they showcase consistent branded messages that the audience can connect to, thereby increasing the brand recall and engagement.
Following are some of the important benefits of an integrated marketing strategy:
Strengthen the Brand Image
Consumers today receives thousands of promotional messages from various brands on a daily basis. Therefore, it has become more important than ever for brand to hold distinctive identity that sets them apart from competitors. With integrated marketing campaigns, companies can use a single, unified message to summarize what their products or services represent, hence making it easier for their audience to identify and understand them.
Gain Competitive Advantage
When brands use single message on every advertising channel, consumers tend to remember them automatically. This puts them in a favourable position. Owing to the integrated approach that successfully makes the brand more distinguished, integrated marketing communication strategies facilitates better consumer awareness, hence extending them a competitive advantage in the market.
Mitigate the Chances of Confusions
Marketers often make mistake of distributing their message across various channels, ending up missing the overall point of the campaign. With different messages on various channels, they end up confusing their target audience. However, when the campaign is put in one cohesive package that showcases clear message and objective, customers get the right information of what the brand is really offering, thereby stimulating the engagement.
Helps in Building Internal Morale
Integrated marketing campaigns require the team to incorporate shared talents, resources and communicate clearly. Along with putting forwards a winning campaign, it also helps in building the morale of the entire team as they witness how working together ensures facilitate growth.
Tips to Helps Build a Successful Integrated Marketing Communication Campaign
Following are a few important tips that can help marketers create a successful campaign:-
- Ensure that the company’s logo, sizing, typefaces, and colours remain consistent across all marketing platforms.
- Formulate a marketing communication strategy that clearly showcases positioning statements and objectives at the centre of the content.
- Ensure that every member of the marketing team is a part of the planning stages. In order to keep everyone on the same page and eliminate the possibilities of any confusions in the later stages.
Integrated marketing communication plan is a straightforward and effective concept that ensures all brand messages and marketing efforts.
Are carefully linked together and work towards generating desired outputs.
Also Read: Importance of Social Media Handles for Your Business and Brand
