The success of a business is highly dependent on its customers. Whether your business is product-based or service-based, there is quite a fierce competition in all industries. As an observing business owner, you might have seen your rivals racing ahead by spending heavily on marketing campaigns. For example, your competitor might be purchasing ads to get to the top of search engine results pages or running TV advertisements. If you are looking for a strategy that is highly effective, then an integrated marketing campaign may be the right fit for you.

What Is Integrated Marketing?

An integrated marketing campaign is a unified approach to the communication channels of an organization. This means that organizations use conventional mediums like radio and TV with the latest online channels like blogs, social media pages, and e-books. The objective is simple: spread a consistent message. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6WF0O1Mnvk[/embed]   For example, imagine that you have a business that offers plumbing services and you are looking for a solution which can increase the number of your clients. So your main objectives will be: - Get more clients to use your services. - Increase revenue by 30%. Now, if you use an integrated marketing campaign, then you can post blogs on your website on a weekly basis. This content can include suggestions on how to detect a pipe leak. You can then promote this content on your social media pages by posting on Twitter and other platforms to ensure that consistent and unified content is delivered to audiences on different channels. Similarly, you can use this content for your email marketing and send them to your contact list through a tool like MailChimp. To understand integrated marketing further, let us consider one more case. During rainstorms, drains are often damaged when they are not powerful enough to withstand the raging water inflow. In such instances, you can run an integrated marketing campaign where you can use TV advertisements and online advertisements together to deliver a powerful impact on your audience. At times, when the demand is low, you can advertisement discounts on all your channels to increase your client base quickly. Overall, this approach can help your business seamlessly deliver a single, meaningful, and strong message to your target audiences on multiple channels at once.

Why Is Integrated Marketing Important?

Build Brand Recognition and Trust

If your brand can reach potential customers multiple times, across various communication channels, your audience begins to resonate with it.  If the various communication channels do a perfect job of communicating your brand message consistently, customers are more likely to recognize and trust your brand. The adoption of an integrated marketing strategy makes this consistent delivery achievable. Without integrated marketing communication, your audience will receive a disjointed brand message and experience.

Helps you to reach larger audiences

Utilizing several channels to communicate a brand message increases the number of individuals a company can reach. For example, if you launch an advertising campaign on subway car posters, you would miss individuals who drive to work listening to the radio and looking at billboards ads. Understanding the potential of integrated marketing helps a company to develop a multi-prolonged campaign that targets a much wider audience.

Aligning with customer preference

An integrated marketing campaign allows you to provide your customers with the information they desire. Customers can specify if they want to receive product information via text message, telephone, direct mail, or email. Potential customers who you can’t reach directly can still benefit from your campaigns by listening to the radio or viewing print ads. Integrated marketing ensures that both customers and potential clients receive similar information in all communication channels. You can also integrate your website content and design with other communications to meet the needs of customers who surf the internet for product information.

Cost Savings

Creative and consistent integrated marketing campaigns can save you lots of cash. Naturally, broadcasting a single message across various channels will help you reduce waste and conserve resources. Avoid changing your brand message every time you communicate with your customers. Reduce the time you spend creating messages, and maximize your marketing budget by circulating. If you adopt the same copy and use the same images for several media, you reduce the cost for design, copy-writing, and photography. You can also integrate costly video production output in multiple media like Facebook, TVs, and YouTube. When working with external communication companies, try to reduce the agency fees by using working with a single company that offers integrated communication services, instead of using separate specialist firms.

Results

Integrated marketing campaigns reinforce the same message in the mind of your consumer and keeps your message and goa clear within your company. When all the parties are working in sync, then you can truly create an impactful campaign. Furthermore, the better you can communicate the same message both internally and externally, the greater your returns will be.

What Are the Five Components of IMC?

As we’ve mentioned earlier, not having an integrated strategy can be costly.  Businesses often lose revenue when consumers or customers don’t buy, since there’s a disconnect between their marketing and sales. Cost increases when there’s a breakdown between service and marketing. Achieving the right synchronicity between marketing and service will benefit both the company and its customers. That being said! Here’s a list of the key components of integrated marketing communication:

The Foundation

Foundation here means the detailed analysis of both the targeted market and product. Marketers need to understand the brand, what it’s offering, and its end-users. You need to make the customers your top priority; understand their needs, attitudes, and prospects.  Marketing targeted at established customers cost less and generated more income. These customers understand and trust your business, so they don’t need a hard sell to order your products. You also need to observe what your competitors are doing.

The Corporate Culture

The features of your products and services need to be in line with your company’s work culture.  Marketers need to keep in mind the organization’s vision when designing products and services. So, if your company vision is to promote a clean green work. Marketers ought to design products that are eco-friendly and bio-degradable. The products or services have to be in line with your company’s vision.

Brand Focus

Brand focus stands for the corporate identity of the brands. Consumers and business customers want more than products and services; they want to support brands that have meaning and represent something.  Before you can ask for loyalty from your customers, you need to understand what is it you’re offering them; and how you’ll consistently offer them that experience every time they select your product and service. Your brand focus needs to be relevant. This way you can win the trust and loyalty of your customers.

Customer Experience

Most marketers look at IMC from the message, cross-channel, and campaign optimization perspective too often.  The customer experience is mostly overlooked. This should not be the case. Marketers need to focus on optimizing integrated marketing for customer experience, so business optimization and customer experience go hand in hand.   You need to focus on what the customer feels about the product. This includes the design of the product, its packaging, product experience (i.e. in a retail store), and services. The product needs to meet and even exceed the expectation of the customer.

Communication tools

Integrated marketing communication combines various communication tools like advertising, online marketing, public relations, and direct marketing to create a seamless experience for customers. These tools will not only help an organization promote its brand to end-users, but to compete with competitors and stay in the market for a long time.

Conclusion

Integrated marketing communication beautifully merges traditional, digital, and experiential channels to create a unique, memorable, and effective customer experience. This defines your brand image. In the process, a stronger message, vision, and identity is achieved. Besides, effective collaboration and clear communication become inherent. And a company becomes better prepared and inspired to deliver on the brand promise. Consequently, both the consumer and business understand each other. Each interaction has purpose and value. Also, employees are provided with the tools and technology they need to succeed. With the help of integrated marketing, a brand can realize its full potential, leading to an increase in awareness, engagement, loyalty, and eventually, revenue.