- Understand the difference between integrated marketing communication and the promotion mix
- Recognize the advantages and disadvantages of common marketing communication methods
Promotion
Promotion is an attempt by marketers to inform, persuade, or remind customers to influence their opinion or elicit a response. Because company goals vary widely, so do promotional strategies. The goal is to stimulate action from the people or organizations of a target market. In a profit-oriented firm, the desired action is for the consumer to buy the promoted item. Mrs. Smith’s, for instance, wants people to buy more frozen pies. Not-for-profit organizations seek a variety of actions with their promotions. They tell us not to litter, to buckle up, to join the military, or to prevent forest fires.
Promotional Goals
Any promotional campaign may seek to achieve one or more of these goals:
- Creating awareness about the business’ existence, what it does, or how a product works (Examples: ads, coupons, or flyers)
- Getting consumers to try products (Examples: offering free samples, trial sizes, coupons, or celebrity endorsement)
- Providing information (Examples: ads or informative packaging)
- Keeping loyal customers (Examples: ads reminding customers about a brand’s superiority or when a product or service has improved)
- Increasing the amount and frequency of use (Examples: Frequent flyer or frequent user programs)
- Identifying target customers (Examples: directing customers to a website or collecting customer emails to send out additional information)
- Teaching the customer (Examples: a product demonstration for a potential client or a customer service representative explaining product features)
promotional mix
The combination of communication methods used to promote a product is called the promotional mix such as:
- Advertising
- Personal selling
- Sales promotion
- Public relations
- Digital Marketing
Each firm creates a unique promotional mix for each product. But the goal is always to deliver the firm’s message efficiently, consistently, and effectively to the target audience.
Integrated Marketing Communications
Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) involves carefully coordinating all promotional activities—advertising (including direct marketing), sales promotion, personal selling, public relations, digital marketing, and e-commerce, packaging, and other forms of promotion—to produce a consistent, unified message that is customer focused. Following the concept of IMC, marketing managers carefully work out the roles the various promotional elements will play in the marketing mix. Timing of promotional activities is coordinated, and the results of each campaign are carefully monitored to improve future use of the promotional mix tools. Typically, a company appoints a marketing communications director who has overall responsibility for integrating the company’s marketing communications.
Organizations may conduct many types of IMC campaigns, and several may be run concurrently. Geographically, a firm may have a local, regional, or national campaign, depending upon the available funds, objectives, and market scope. One campaign may be aimed at consumers and another at wholesalers and retailers. Different marketing campaigns might target different segments simultaneously, delivering messages and using communication tools tailored to each segment. Marketers use a marketing plan (sometimes called an IMC plan) to track and execute a set of campaigns over a given period of time.