Integrated marketing communications help businesses engage their consumers by combining proven marketing techniques with the latest trends in communication technology. It allows brands to reach a wide audience in the process.
Essentially, integrated marketing communication mixes a number of relevant marketing approaches that complement each other. The goal is to put all the channels to work in an integrated way instead of working in a vacuum.
Here we’ll go through some best practice steps for integrated marketing communication plans.
Step 1: Use behavioural data to identify your audience
Before getting into any marketing communications activities, it’s always good to conduct thorough market research. Make sure you have identified your ideal audience, or else you risk not knowing who you are talking to.
Targeting specific audience groups will look different for everyone. It depends on what you are marketing and how you are selling it. Insights from behavioural data will allow you to identify what your potential consumers do and give you information about their likes and dislikes.
Demographic data allows you to learn about your target audiences’ location, age, gender and education, among other things. This information can come in handy later on because many of these factors can be used to target ads, keywords and social content.
Step 2: Establish your integrated marketing communication goals
Defining the objectives for your marketing campaigns involves specifying what you want to achieve with your integrated marketing communications. You also need to clarify what your brand needs to communicate to your target audience and how this is executed across different media channels. An integrated marketing agency can help you define and achieve these goals.
Below are some examples of goals that you can establish at this stage:
- Developing brand awareness
- Enhancing your brand image
- Amplifying your product sales
- Encouraging customer loyalty
Of course, this is just to give you an idea. Any goals you set need to be individual to your business and marketing requirements.
Step 3: Set your marketing budget
Before drawing up any plans, it is important to know the resources allocated for your integrated marketing communications strategy. This helps you to stay within your budget and set expectations of what can be achieved within your means.
Typically, businesses allot a percentage of the profits or a percentage of the sales as the budget for their marketing campaigns. Marketing budgets are also often defined by the company’s size and what amount they can spare.
Step 4: Outline your integrated marketing tactics
Now, it is finally time to define your strategies and outline the methods that will help you achieve your marketing goals.
Integrated marketing strategies offer an in-depth plan of how you expect your marketing communications to pan out across all your channels. They also outline how your efforts will allow you to reach your goals.
It is important to stick to the budget you have set while creating these strategies, otherwise you are setting yourself up for disappointment. However, with integrated marketing communications it is much easier to stay within your budget as it lets you maximise the impact of your content across different platforms.
Step 5: Measurement and assessment
Lastly, it is important to assess and measure your marketing efforts. Based on different metrics including clickthrough rate, cost per lead, customer engagement and more, you can evaluate the performance of your marketing campaign. This in turn helps you understand what works and what doesn’t.
These insights then allow you to identify any tweaks that you can make to your strategy for the next campaign, as integrated marketing is cyclical.
At Nifty, we have created an in-depth marketing environment that acts as an extension to these steps: the Niftyverse. We utilise it as a tool to create winning integrated marketing strategies and achieve our clients marketing goals. If you want to learn more, get in touch and we will walk you through how we can help improve your bottom line.
