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Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) are concepts implemented in a company by carefully integrating the communication channels to deliver a compelling message.
It provides consistency in messaging and blends media. Integrated marketing communication tools such as social media marketing, public relations, advertising, and many other distinct marketing elements are combined to give a holistic look to the brand.
Consumers or the public can easily recognize the brand and take the product or service to new heights. There are many integrated marketing communication examples that we will share here, so keep on learning.
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What is Integrated Marketing Communication?
Integrated marketing communication is the simultaneous promotion of your products or services via your marketing channels, often through a structured campaign. Integrated marketing also attempts to unify your principal brand messaging across your marketing platforms.
Integrated marketing communication is a multidisciplinary area that incorporates classic and new media approaches. Rather than having distinct teams or initiatives inside an organization for marketing, advertising, public relations, social media, and marketing analytics, integrated marketing communications supports the merging of different disciplines to produce a more powerful and unified strategy.
Why are brands moving toward an Integrated Marketing Campaign?
Now that you have come to know what integrated marketing communication is, you must be wondering how it can help the public and private firms, right? No worry! We are here to clear your doubts.
Before the advent of integrated marketing communication in the 1990s, marketing was a one-way street. That marketing strategy, however, was ineffective.
Marketers began to increase related positions within their businesses as they could associate promotional efforts with customer purchase habits.
Businesses have started moving towards integrated marketing campaigns for several reasons.
- There was a shift from a supplier-dominated market to a consumer-dominated market.
- The increasing popularity of serving niches demanded a more sophisticated but holistic approach to marketing.
- There was a fast-paced move from mass media communication to various forms of communication, e.g., social media marketing, and public relations.
- The increasing rate of internet users and the vast coverage of the internet
- The emergence of a performance-based remuneration system also pushed the integrated marketing communication campaign.
Why Should You Choose an Integrated Marketing Campaign?
Spreading the Brand Message to a Greater Crowd
Integrated marketing campaigns aid in the integration of all necessary marketing components to transmit a consistent message to new and existing end-users.
Cost Reduction
The costly video output may be used in various media outlets, including television, YouTube, and Facebook.
If you engage with outbound communication suppliers, you may be able to save money by using a single business that provides integrated communication services rather than many specialty agencies. Consistency in creativity in your integrated ads might also save you money.
Maintaining Long-term Relationships with Customers
Because it combines numerous integrated marketing tools such as advertising, public relations, direct marketing, and so on, integrated marketing communication is more successful.
Organizations that use integrated marketing communication actively enhance their brands among their target audiences and build trust with them. End-users do not even consider purchasing from another brand if the characteristics and merits of your brand are highlighted to them.
Aligned with Customer Preference
An integrated marketing campaign allows you to give information to clients in the manner they want. Customers and businesses may choose to get product information by email, SMS, WhatsApp messages, or phone.
Customers you do not directly target can nonetheless profit from your campaigns by watching print advertisements, hearing radio and TV commercials, or reading blogs on your website.
Saves Time
Marketers may intelligently mix and combine various marketing tactics with improving response. Newspaper inserts, signboards, and banners in strategic areas, booklets, brochures, radio or television commercials, press releases, coupons, sales promotional events, social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Orkut), podcasts, and so on are examples of these possibilities.
Huge Potential from a Career Perspective
Professionals with a background in integrated marketing communications may work in social media marketing, digital media, journalism, market research and consultancy, public relations, entertainment, and other related disciplines.
Tools to Use for Integrated Marketing Communication
The notable integrated marketing tools include the following:
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing allows businesses to interact directly with their customers. Emails, text messages, catalogues, brochures, promotional letters, and other tools are examples of direct marketing techniques. Messages are delivered directly to end customers through direct marketing.
Advertising
Advertising is any compensated non-personal marketing of a product or service by a specific sponsor. Print (newspapers and magazines), broadcast (radio and television), network (satellite, wireless, and telephone), electronic (web page, audio and videotape), and display (billboards, signs and posters) are the various media employed. The major benefit of advertising is that it reaches geographically separated consumers.
Sales Promotion
By Artem Beliakin, Pexels
Discount coupons, loyalty clubs, membership coupons, incentives, profitable programs, appealing packages for loyal consumers, specifically created offers, and so on can all promote brands.
Personal Selling
Face-to-face engagement with one or more buyers to make presentations, answer questions, and make purchases. This is the most effective instrument in the final phases of the purchasing process.
Consumers get benefits because of the tailored message for their specific needs. This, in turn, creates a long-term connection.
Social Media Marketing
Promoting businesses or websites using social media platforms is referred to as social media marketing.
Companies may gain widespread attention on such platforms and connect with customers when surfing the internet. They are capable of being very engaging and up-to-date with customers.
Events
These are events and initiatives sponsored by the firm intended to promote brand-related communication with consumers.
Companies give customers a product experience, which results in greater brand recognition than competitors. Sponsorships increase the company’s presence. These event experiences demonstrate that they engage the audience.
Ten Integrated Marketing Communication Examples
Take a look at some of the best examples of integrated marketing campaigns.
1. Apple’s Engaging Storefronts
Apple has a soaring amount of brand awareness around the entire globe, and the company has continuously offered a high level of brand integration regardless of where consumers encounter it.
Have you ever noticed how every Apple retail store has a look and feel that is remarkably similar to that of the company’s website?
Few organizations can aggregate geolocation with the online presence in such a complete manner, providing customers with a recognizable user experience wherever it occurs.
2. Southwest’s Transfarency
Southwest Airlines’ marketing message has consistently emphasized its inexpensive rates while providing excellent customer service.
To sustain in the growing competition market, Southwest launched its new “Transfarency” campaign in 2015, reinforcing its long-held promise of being the best deal in the sky.
The campaign’s value proposition is communicated across television, print, radio, and internet mediums. A ‘minisite’ was built to compare Southwest airline prices with other carriers.
3. Snickers’ Hunger
Snickers is a popular nutty chocolate bar among many people. This Snickers commercial, which debuted during the 2010 Super Bowl, has remained top-of-mind for chocolate and candy fans everywhere.
One factor for this is the campaign’s wit. Still, the other, more significant reason is that Snickers plastered its movement everywhere… on its website, social media, TV, print advertisements, and so on, with lots of celebrities to boot.
Shoppers now picture Snickers when they want a sweet snack due to the company’s presentation of a unified, coherent, and integrated marketing strategy.
4. Coca-Cola’s Sharing Coke
By Mike Mozart, Flickr, Copyright
Coca-Cola’s Coke campaign was unusual in that it featured names and amusing words from its consumers. This provided an infinite number of advertising angles, but it also resulted in an infinite number of user-generated materials from consumers who wanted to promote things with their names.
500,000+ consumer images were used to spread the #ShareaCoke hashtag. Others appear to have followed suit, as the promotion increased Coke consumption from 1.7 billion to 1.9 billion daily servings.
5. LinkedIn’s Togetherness
You might not have imagined it, but this social media titan began a campaign with a TV ad in 2018 under the banner–In it Together.
It was especially intriguing because it featured a variety of businesses in black and white documentary-style films. Outdoor advertisements, video commercials, and movies were just a few of the other tactics they used.
6. Nike’s Innovation House
In 2019, Nike created a blended artwork product in the middle of their leading shop in New York City. The artwork represents historical athletic events done by athletes utilizing Nike.
It bridges the gaps between branding, art, marketing, and technology. Additionally, the whole flagship store offered clients a fully unique shopping experience.
People may design their footwear, and there is a level dedicated to customized apparel where clients can change the colours and logos and switch out fabrics and combine two distinct articles of clothing to make a brand new unique product for themselves.
7. Uber’s Apnapan
Uber, the ridesharing software transforming urban transportation worldwide, has announced that it will start an integrated marketing campaign in India in 2017.
The campaign’s fundamental subject was ‘Apnapan,’ It attempted to develop daily brand relevance and reinterpret personal mobility.
This also marked the debut of Uber’s first television commercial in India. It instilled in them the phrase “Isey Apni hi Gaadi Samjho.”
8. Budweiser’s Wasssup
In 2000, “Wasssup” had the chance to capture the attention of millions of football fans. And it surely did not waste its chance! The commercial showed friends repeating this remark while drinking Budweiser and watching a football game.
The “Wasssup?” greeting became popular at the time, inspiring spoofs and parodies. Given that the internet was still in its infancy, the brand established itself as a visionary by directing users to the website.
Website visitors might learn how to pronounce “Wasssup” in over 30 languages! In this new marketing campaign, only one sentence boosted traffic to Budweiser’s site and secured the marketing effort’s success.
9. The New York Times’s Hard Truth
The New York Times was in peril, dropping subscriptions and dwindling trust in the news. This well-known publication needed to develop fresh techniques to obtain widespread confidence.
They came up with “The Truth Is Hard,” one of the most powerful integrated marketing campaigns, which debuted on February 26th, 2017.
Viewers in 2018 were engaged and forced to explore what truth meant to them. Following the start of paid social media marketing, this content was spread globally.
Consequently, its subscriber base increased by 100%, boosting the public’s impression of the popular newspaper.
10. Cancer Research UK
They went over and above for a good cause. They even went back to print and television before integrating everything with an online footprint.
The initiative asked individuals to leave anything in their will to benefit cancer research. Through the campaign, cancer survivors and scientists were shown on television.
How to Implement Integrated Marketing Communications?
Now that you know about all the integrated marketing communication tools and have a vivid view of what other brands have done in terms of integrated marketing campaigns, it’s time to know how you can build a robust integrated marketing campaign.
There are a few simple yet mind-blowing steps to build and implement the campaign.
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Chalk out a campaign goal
Before deciding which channels will be included in your integrated marketing plan, evaluate the overall purpose of the campaign.
Suppose you’ve created a new item, service, or program that you’d like to promote in front of customers, such as Southwest’s Transfarency. Perhaps you’ve revamped and want to share your new message.
Maybe you’ve just picked a new positioning phrase and want your audience to begin identifying your brand with it, as Snickers did with You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.
Whatever your campaign’s aim, remember to keep it SMART. This will help you track the performance of your campaign and develop it better the next time.
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Choose the marketing channels and select goals for them
You probably have a better notion of what channels may assist you in attaining your overall integrated marketing campaign objective now that you know what it is. It all comes down to what you want to achieve with your integrated marketing strategy when selecting your channel(s).
There are various primary marketing “channels” via which you may deliver campaign information. An integrated marketing campaign should use several platforms to reach the broadest audience.
If you see that one or more channels have stopped growing, don’t be afraid to add, eliminate, or test new ones.
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For each channel, define the buyer persona.
Each marketing channel targets a distinct customer profile. As a result, you should specify your target by channel rather than develop a broad persona for your campaign.
There will undoubtedly be some overlap, but it’s important to understand who you’re communicating with on each medium and how you can adapt those unique attributes to be the most effective.
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Choose your channel managers.
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Determined by the size of your marketing division, different people (or entire teams) may be in charge of various channels. When operating a multi-channel marketing campaign, you must decide who will be responsible for ensuring that their channel (s) are in sync with the campaign.
Regardless of team size, do your best to distribute channel management tasks among a few individuals—ideally, with one person overseeing one or two channels.
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Emphasize on adaptability
You now have a campaign goal, target audience (s), and marketing channels. Now it is time to produce the content for your integrated marketing campaign. Copywriting, graphic design and other creative activities are used at this stage.
Keep these creative assets linked to your brand guidelines and congruent with them as you produce and reuse them. Creating your own brand rules for your integrated marketing strategy to share with your team and any channel managers may be beneficial.
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Have a good plan to collect leads
Whether or not you aim to collect leads with your campaign, you should be prepared to accept them. Even if your goal is to build brand recognition, examine how your visitors could convert to leads and, eventually, customers.
Analyze how a visitor may become a lead. Make sure that the conversion parts of your campaign are consistent with the rest of your visual and message materials.
Consider how you will nurture your leads once they convert. Would they be included in an automatic email workflow? Would you forward them to Sales? Do not forget your leads once they freely give you their information, however you approach this phase.
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Launch and audit the campaign
Are you prepared to begin your integrated marketing campaign? Maybe it’s time to place your campaign to work. Start analyzing those subsequent data each week, month, and quarter to determine how effective it meets your main campaign goal (e.g. growing brand recognition, rebranding, new product.)
Use what you’ve learned from each integrated marketing effort for future initiatives. You can establish a never-ending cycle of integrated marketing efforts and victories with the correct plans, management, and technologies.
Final Words
Conventional Integrated marketing communication tools (Advertising, Sales Promotion, Public Relations, Direct Marketing, and Personal Selling) are proving to be a foundation on which modern tools (Events and Experiences, Social Media Marketing, and Mobile Marketing) are emerging in the modern era of digitization.
Modern tools improve the customer experience and the effect of communications on the audience.
Undoubtedly, there are several moving parts in a great integrated marketing communication strategy. However, the results are stunning when it succeeds.
Description: This article explains integrated marketing communications and how to use the integrated marketing communication tools currently in use. It also focuses on how to implement an integrated marketing campaign.