Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC): Best of Both Worlds

In this post, i’ll share the advantages and disadvantages of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) and the five steps of IMC framework.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

The Integrated Marketing Communications, or known as the IMC, is a combination of online and offline effort of all promotional tools to get consumers awareness and retention for the best results. It drives brand value by managing and maintaining consumer relationships.

Advantages

The IMC have diverse benefits to a business such as creating competitive advantage, boosting profit and sales and promoting brand awareness.

IMC help consumers in the buying process through the various stages. Businesses can understand the consumers better by analyzing their purchasing patterns and time spend. This can better help businesses to develop a dialogue and eventually lead to sales revenue (Marianne Chrisos, 2018).

IMC can also boost sales through several promotional communications tools. Its advertising messages such as direct mails, advertisement and social media platform creates more avenue to reaches its consumers and potential consumers. Thus, causing arousal, building brand awareness and ultimately, consumers making a purchase (Jenna Bruce, 2015).

Disadvantages

However, IMC sometimes can create a backfire towards business as well. Consumers can perceived the wrong information from advertising effort and can misunderstood its intended messages. This can cause public relation issues that are potential harmful to a business.

While information are shared with the general public from your business, it can potentially risk of someone misleading the information in the harmful way. This can damage your business reputation. Thus, keeping tight control of the information shared with the general public and within the organisation is important (Rajesh, 2019).

At another level, too much advertisements and promotion will over-saturate the market and allow consumers to perceive your branding as “CHEAP”! This will send the wrong message to the consumers and can affect your brand reputation and image (Jared Lewis, 2018).

Five Steps of IMC Campaign

Step 01: Clear Understanding of Targeted Audience

“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.

Sun Tzu

It is important to recognize and understand your target audience as of their purchasing intention, motivation of purchase, how to reach them and how to communicate with them effectively. With these data, you can productively attract these group of consumers.

Step 02: Pick Your Channels

Understand the strengths and weaknesses of all IMC channels is important in this stage. Marketers have to decide which promotional tools channels does the target audience mostly use and deliver the advertising message that can effectively reach the target audience.

Step 03: Have A Consistent Look

Lets be honest here, human beings are animal creature and we like beautiful things that trigger our mind. We tend to remember something we’ve seen before via orientation, size, shape and color recognition (Tea Romih, 2016).

Keep a consistent look for your brand product can help consumers better on remembering your products and create a Top Of Mind Awareness (TOMA) effect. This will build on brand reputation and image.

Step 04: Create Clear, Consistent Content To Suit Different Media or Channel

Be sure to be clear with the words in advertising effort to ensure that target audience received the right message. Engage their interest for all promotional channels in further drive them in searching for your products.

Step 05: Ensure That Promotional Message is Integrated

Last but not least, ensure that your team is working together in sync throughout the promotional period and always keep track of the promotional campaigns. Be ready to adapt to changes and provide immediate remedies to the problem!

Conclusion

In conclusion, IMC play a important role in business marketing by reaching out to target audience and public in creating brand awareness, positive brand reputation and image. Marketers have to clearly understand the uses of every promotional platforms to further boost and better reach everyone. After all the promotional efforts, it is also important to continuing keep track of the promotional campaigns and monitoring sales figure in order to adapt to new market changes.

Which steps of the Integrated Marketing Communications do you think is the most important? Leave a comment and share your thoughts with me!