What is Integrated Marketing Communication?

Introduction

Integrated Marketing is an approach to creating a unified and seamless experience for consumers to interact with the brand/enterprise; it attempts to meld all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and social media.

You want your business to grow -you want to win more customers and make more sales but how you can do that when your budgets are tight and your time is limited? some of your competitor have plenty of  cash to throw around and make noise. They can run expensive tv ads or can buy full page expensive spreads in the national news papers to build their brands, so how can you the smaller business  owner can compete, the answer lies in the integrated marketing.

To understand this concept let me explain you with an example of a business man name John, who owns an independent travel tours company which is not that big but he is doing  business with great efforts, he creates one of a kind travel  package for  his customers, he is not competing directly with  the big holiday companies, but in the past he struggled to get his voice heard. He used Facebook and twitter when he had the time, and every now and then took adverts in newspaper and magazine. The problem was his marketing was irregular and his messaging inconsistent, his brand didn’t build up any momentum. Then he adopted Integrated marketing for a fix monthly  budget, now John’s tours publishes a weekly blog post with travel ideas and tips. The posts are then promoted through social media and a monthly email newsletter, the newsletters also feature content from the john’s tours  youtube channel, where customers are encouraged to uploads their holiday videos. In the peak holiday booking period, the company runs prints, online and radio ads and in quitter months, they give special  offers and do promotions. And one or twice in a year he publishes survey and reports that gets him free media coverage in newspaper and magazines, now a potential customer experiences a consistent messaging across a multitude of marketing channels and because each element of marketing is no longer working in an isolation, they serve to amplify each other, now John’s voice is now being heard.

Why it is important ?

In the traditional approach to marketing communications, businesses and their agencies plan separate campaigns for advertising, press relations, direct marketing and sales promotions. Integrated campaigns use the same communication tools to reinforce each other and improve marketingeffectiveness.

The important tools of Integrated Marketing Communications are: