Integrated Marketing
Communications
Integrated marketing communications is “a
planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received
by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are
relevant to that person and consistent over time.”
Marketing Power Dictions Integrated marketing communication can be defined
as a holistic approach to promote buying and selling in the digital
economy. This concept includes many online and offline marketing channels.
Goal of Integrated Marketing Communication
A management concept that is designed to make all aspects of marketing
communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations,
and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting
each to work in isolation. In practice, the goal of Integrated marketing
communications is to create and sustain a single look or message in
all elements of a marketing campaign.
Practitioners such as the
Oct Group, however, remind clients that Integrated marketing communications
should “permeate every planned and unplanned communication at every
contact point where the customer or prospect may receive an impression
of the company. Integrated marketing communications incorporates the
corporate mission, the compensation plan, the management style, and
the employee training.
The goal of researching
the elements of proposed integrated marketing communications is to create
a campaign that is effective across media platforms. Some marketers
may want only ads with the greatest breadth of appeal: the executions
that, when combined, provide the greatest number of attention-getting,
branded, and motivational moments. Others may only want ads with the
greatest depth of appeal: the ads with the greatest number of attention-getting,
branding, and motivational points within each.
But, just as media buyers
multiply reach by frequency to get a measure of the net effectiveness
of a media buy, a calculation can be used in Integrated marketing communications
research to determine, when comparing campaigns, which combination would
be most effective.
Although integrated marketing
communications is more than just the ad campaign, the bulk of marketing
dollars is spent on the creation and distribution of the advertisements.
Hence, the bulk of the research budget is also spent on these elements
of the campaign.
Once the key marketing
pieces have been tested, the researched elements can then be applied
to other contact points: letterhead, packaging, trucks, customer service
representative training, and more, to complete the Integrated marketing
communications cycle.
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