Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy - Assignment Example

Integrated marketing communication strategy refers to coordinating and integrating various communication channels of the company in order to deliver a consistent, clear, compelling message about the company and its products. It refers to recognize all such touchpoints where the customer can encounter the company and its brands. Each contact with the brand will give a message, good, bad or indifferent. The company will want to deliver a positive and consistent message with each of the contacts. It will lead to a total marketing communication strategy that will aim at building stronger relationships with customers by showing how the customers can get help to solve their problems from the company and its products. The integrated marketing communication strategy will make a tie of the company’s images and messages. A blended mix of promotion tools can be used for promoting our company’s products. It can be advertising, personal selling, public relations, direct marketing, and sales promotion. Now a day, customers get bombarded with the messages of the company from all directions. The company’s print advertisement and television will have the same look, message; feel similar to its personal selling communication and email. The material of its public relation will project the same image as its social network presence and website. Under the plan of overall marketing communication unique roles played by different media must be coordinated carefully by the company in order to attract, inform and persuade consumers. It must coordinate all the touchpoints of customers for ensuring clear brand messages. Provided with a marketing budget of $1million for 6 month period, different kinds of promotion tools can be used according to the following allocation: Advertising $0.40 million, personal selling $0.20 million, public relations $ 0.18 million, direct marketing $0.10 million, sales promotion $0.12 million. More spending should be made towards advertising as advertising is a very good form of informing and persuading customers about a company’s products. 

It is a paid form of nonpersonal promotion and presentation of goods, services, and ideas by an identified sponsor. Advertising can be informative, persuasive, and reminder. Creating an advertising strategy needs two major elements. It consists of creating advertising messages and selecting a media for advertisement. Public relation is another promotion tool which aims at building good relations with various publics of the company by building up a good corporate image, obtaining publicity, handling off unfavorable stories, rumors, and events. Several tools can be used for public relations like news, speeches, special events, written materials, audiovisual materials, corporate identity materials, public service activities, marketing campaigns, and social networking processes. Personal selling is an interpersonal arm of the promotional mix. Through the process of personal selling, the salespeople of a company communicate and create customer value through personal interaction with the customers. It is a form of a personal presentation by the sales force of a firm for the purpose of boosting up sales and building relationships with customers. The management of the sales force is required to be considered here which includes planning, analysis, implementation, and controlling of sales force activities. It also includes the design of sales force strategy, recruiting, structuring, training, selecting, compensating, supervising, and evaluating the salespeople of the firm. Further, sales promotion is the shortest term among the tools of the promotion mix. It refers to the short-term incentives provided in order to encourage the sales and purchase of products or services. Certain tools can be adopted for sales promotion like consumer promotion, trade promotions, event marketing, and business promotions. The sales promotion campaign calls for setting the objectives of sales promotion, selection of tools, development, and implementation of sales promotion program using consumer promotion tools, trade promotion tools, business promotion tools, deciding on the size of incentive, promotion, and distribution of package of promotion, conditions of participation, length of the promotion. After completion of this process, evaluation of the results of sales promotion is done by the company. Direct marketing is the process of directly connecting the individual targeted customers in order to obtain an immediate response and maintain a lasting relationship with customers. Direct marketing is the form of online marketing that is explosively growing. It is at the heart of the process of building a closer and more interactive relationship with customers.  Online direct marketing is growing at a fast pace. There can be several domains for online marketing like business to consumer, business to business, consumer to consumer, consumer to business. Online marketing can be done by creating a corporate or brand website and designing effective websites, placing online ads and promotions and participating in online social networks, and using email (Kotler & et al.,p.340-347).

Conclusion

Previously, no department or person was responsible to think through the roles of communication of various tools of promotion and coordination of promotion mix. For effective framing of integrated marketing communication strategy, a marketing communication director is appointed by some companies who take the overall responsibility for the efforts of the company’s communication. It helps to produce better consistency in communication and a larger sales impact. It puts the responsibility in somebody’s hand where no one has existed before who unifies the image of the company as reflected by the activities of the company. So, an effective integrated marketing communication strategy plays a leading role in driving up the sales of a company.