Promotional Tools for IMC, IMC Planning Process

Integrated Marketing Communication tools refer to the use of different marketing methods such as advertising, web marketing, public relations activities, direct marketing, and sales campaigns to promote companies and spread a similar message to a larger audience. Products and services are marketed by strategically combining numerous brand communication tools.

Public Relations Activities:

Press releases, news, events, and public appearances are all examples of public relations activities that serve to market a brand. The purpose of a public relations officer is to represent the company in the best possible light.

PR is done to generate goodwill in the market and show the company’s product in a favorable light.

Press releases, public appearances, event sponsorships, news coverage, and other forms of promotion may all be used.

Personal Selling

Personal selling is also a very successful strategy for integrated marketing communication. Personal selling occurs when a marketer or sales person offers items or services to customers. Personal selling helps to build the organization’s interaction with end consumers.

Personal selling includes the following steps:

Prospecting: Prospecting allows you to discover the correct and possible contact.

Making initial contact: Marketers must make the first touch with their potential customers via emails, phone calls, and so on.Make an appointment and show up on time for the meeting.

The sales call: Never lie to your consumers. Share everything that makes your brand special with them. If you want your clients to invest in your brand, you, as a marketer, must be persuaded of its value.

Objection handling: Prepare to address any questions the customer may have.

Closing the Sale: Do not leave until you have properly closed the sale. There is no harm in giving clients time to consider their options before making a decision. Don’t be after their lives.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing allows businesses to interact directly with end consumers. Direct marketing tools include emails, SMS messages, catalogs, brochures, promotional letters, and so on. Direct marketing delivers communications to end consumers directly.

Sales Promotion

Brands (products and services) may also be marketed via discount coupons, loyalty clubs, membership coupons, incentives, profitable schemes, appealing bundles for loyal consumers, particularly tailored offers, and so on. Newspaper inserts, danglers, banners in strategic locations, glorifiers, wobblers, and other methods may all be used to efficiently promote brands.

Advertising is a very successful method of brand promotion. Advertising enables firms to reach a larger audience in the shortest amount of time. Advertisements in newspapers, television, radio, and billboards assist end users believe in your brand while also motivating them to purchase it and stay loyal to it. Advertisements not only enhance consumption of a certain product/service, but they also raise brand recognition among consumers. Marketers must ensure that the correct message reaches the appropriate consumers at the right time. Take care with the substance of the advertising; after all, you are paying for every second.

IMC Planning Process

Obtain organizational buy-in.

Integrated marketing necessitates collaboration across many functional silos within marketing, including media planning, purchasing, marcom, PR, sales, advertising agencies, PPC and SEO companies, and so on. Ensure that the business appreciates the importance of integrated marketing and communicates this to all stakeholders involved for a seamless implementation. Collect suggestions from various functional teams about how they may contribute to an integrated marketing campaign. Create explicit cooperation methods and focus on tools to assist you do so.

Perform a SWOT analysis of your brand.

A soul-searching procedure that will reveal your brand’s strengths, shortcomings, potential possibilities, and competitive and market factors that threaten its development. Identify your product’s major attributes that give it an advantage over competitors, and how you may use them to acquire market share.

Select the best communication tools.

Choose the appropriate communication tools to reach out to your audience based on your goals and the media consumption patterns of your target audience. This implies you may select between advertising, public relations, direct marketing, sales promotion, and personal selling. Whatever alternatives you choose, they must function together and compliment one another. The synergy of promotion tools is what provides integrated marketing an advantage over traditional marketing.

Within each sort of communication tool, narrow down to the specific media vehicles that will most effectively transmit your message. So, if you’ve chosen to use advertising and direct marketing, pick which medium you’ll use, such as brochures, leaflets, or email campaigns, to reach your goals.

Budgets and the expected ROI from each media vehicle are also important considerations in media mix selections. Create specific budgets for each media vehicle to help guide media purchasing choices.

Test and execute.

Once you’ve settled on your message and media mix, it’s time to test it and launch it to your target audience.

Communication testing may be performed in a variety of ways, depending on the platform being tested. Website communication can be tested using a variety of online tools, emails can be tested on the email marketing software that you use before being sent out, TV commercials can be shown to test markets for effectiveness, and group discussions can be held with sample groups to see if your communication hits the target.

Once testing is completed, address any problems that were discovered. Once the adjustments are completed, launch your campaign across all platforms. Or, in Nike’s legendary words, “Just do it.”

Measure Results and Track Progress

There is no way to determine how well a campaign worked unless the outcomes are measured against the initial goals. Obsessively monitor every stage of your marketing campaign to see if your efforts have moved the needle and how substantial the campaign’s impact has been on organizational objectives.

Tracking and measuring against numerical targets is especially crucial in the case of marketing communication, since communication may be well received and liked by the target audience but may not produce real outcomes.

Process

1. Review of the Marketing Plan:

Before designing a promotional strategy, it is critical to understand the company’s (or brand’s) existing market position, where it wants to go, and how it plans to get there. A marketing plan is a written document that describes the entire marketing strategy and program designed for a company, a specific product line, or a brand.

The marketing strategy contained the following fundamental elements:

A complete scenario study that includes both an internal marketing audit and an external review of market competition and environmental variables.

Specific marketing goals that offer direction, a timetable for marketing operations, and a way to measure success.

A marketing strategy and program that includes choices on target market(s), as well as strategies for the four marketing mix components.

A plan for executing the marketing strategy, which includes identifying particular activities and responsibilities.

A procedure for monitoring and analyzing performance and giving feedback in order to retain adequate control and make any required modifications to the marketing plan or techniques.

A promotional campaign is an essential component of the marketing strategy. It will provide an understanding of the function that advertising and other promotional mix elements will have in the overall marketing strategy.

2. Promotional Programme Situational analysis:

The next stage in creating a promotional campaign is to undertake a circumstance analysis. A scenario analysis includes both internal and external examination. Internal analysis evaluates key aspects of the product/service offering and the company itself.

The firm’s skills and capacity to plan and execute a successful promotional programme, the structure of the promotional department, and the success and failures of previous programs are discussed.

The research examines the relative benefits and drawbacks of performing promotional duties. For example, internal investigation may reveal that the company is incapable of planning, executing, and controlling certain aspects of the promotional strategy.

If this is the case, it might be prudent to seek help from an advertising agency or another promotional facilitator. If the organization already works with an advertising agency, the emphasis will be on the firm’s work quality and the outcomes of previous and/or ongoing campaigns.

Internal analysis also includes examining the firm’s or brand’s image strengths and flaws. Frequently, the image that the organization projects to the market has a substantial influence on its advertising strategy.

Another aspect of internal analysis is assessing the product or service’s relative strengths and weaknesses in comparison to its competitors, as well as its unique selling points or benefits, price, design, and packaging to assist creative personnel in developing advertising messages for the brand.

External analysis focuses on the company’s clients, market segments, positioning strategies, and rivals. An essential component of the external study is a thorough examination of consumers’ characteristics and purchasing habits, decision processes, and variables affecting their purchasing choices.

Consumer opinions and attitudes, lifestyles, and frequently utilized buying factors must all be considered. Marketing research studies are required to address some of these questions.

Market evaluation is an important component of external analysis. The attractiveness of different market segments must be assessed and a choice made on which segment(s) to target. Once the target markets have been identified, the focus will be on defining how the product should be positioned. What picture or location should it evoke in customers’ minds?

The external part of the promotional plan scenario study entails a thorough assessment of both direct and indirect rivals. While rivals were examined in the overall marketing scenario study, more emphasis is placed on promotional considerations at this stage.

The emphasis is on the firm’s major competitors: their individual strengths and weaknesses; their segmentation, targeting, and positioning tactics; and the promotional techniques they use. The size and distribution of their promotional expenditures, media, methods, and messages sent to the market should all be examined.

3. Analysis of the Communication Process:

This stage entails determining how the firm can successfully interact with customers in its target market. It includes communication decisions on the use of diverse sources, messages, and channel characteristics. It entails examining the impact that different sorts of advertising messages may have on customers and determining whether they are acceptable for the product or brand.

Establishing communication goals and objectives is a key step in the promotional planning process. Communication goals relate to what the company hopes to achieve with its advertising programs. Russell Colley has identified 52 potential advertising goals.

Communication aims may include raising awareness or understanding of a product and its qualities or advantages, establishing an image, or building positive attitudes, preferences, or purchasing intentions.

4. Budget Determination: To determine the budget for a promotional campaign, ask two simple questions: how much will it cost? How will these money be allocated? The budget determination process includes choosing and combining several budgeting approaches. The budget is often a work in progress at this point. It may not be complete until certain promotional mix techniques are devised.
5. Developing the Integrated Marketing Communications Programme: This step involves determining the function and relevance of each element, as well as their synchronization. Each promotional mix element has its own set of goals, money, and method for achieving them.

Decisions must be made and actions taken in order to carry out the promotional programs. Procedures are designed for assessing performance and making required modifications.

The message formulation and media strategy are two critical components of every advertising campaign. Message development, also known as creative strategy, involves determining the advertiser’s intended message for the target audience.

Media strategy is deciding which communication channels will be utilized to convey the advertising message to the intended audience. Decisions must be made on the kinds of media to be employed (e.g., newspapers, magazines, radio, television, billboards, etc.) as well as specific media selections, such as a certain magazine or TV show.

This process requires a thorough examination of the media alternatives’ benefits and drawbacks, prices, and capacity to successfully convey the message to the target market.

Once the message and media tactics have been decided, they must be implemented. Most major corporations use advertising firms to design and create their messaging, as well as to analyze and acquire the media on which their advertisements will appear.

However, most agencies work closely with their clients to design advertisements and pick media, since the advertiser ultimately accepts the creative work and media strategy.

6. Mentorship, Evaluation, and Control:

This stage determines how successfully the promotional strategy is reaching communication objectives and assisting the organization in achieving its overall marketing goals. This stage is intended to offer management with ongoing feedback on the efficacy of the promotional campaign, which will be utilized as input for future promotional planning and strategy development.