Marketing Mix Strategy IV: Integrated Marketing Communication Strategy

The Promotional Mix

Advertising:

  • Broadcast
  • Print
  • Online
  • Mobile
  • Outdoor

Sales Promotion:

  • Discounts
  • Coupons
  • Displays
  • Demonstration

Personal Selling: the personal interaction by the firm's sales force for the purpose of engaging customers, making sales, and building customer relationships.

Public Relations: entails fostering positive relationships with the company's diverse audiences through securing positive press, enhancing the company's reputation, and managing or averting negative rumours, tales, and incidents.

Direct and Digital Marketing: entails having direct communication with specifically targeted individual customers as well as customer communities in order to receive a quick reaction and create enduring relationships.

Digital and Social Media Marketing

Online Marketing: internet-based marketing using blogs, online video, e-mail, online advertisements, and company websites

Marketing Websites: In order to encourage a direct purchase or other marketing goal, engage customers.

Branded Community Websites: offer brand content that captivates customers and builds a brand community.

Online Advertising: advertisements that show up when users are exploring the internet. These can be display ads, search engine-related ads, online classifieds, and other types.


E-mail Marketing: include sending email marketing communications that are highly personalized, highly targeted, and relationship-building.


Viral Marketing: digital word-of-mouth marketing in the form of viral videos, advertisements, and other material that consumers will actively seek out or recommend to others.


Online Video Marketing: entails publishing digital video material on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and others, as well as brand websites.


Blogs: online diaries where individuals and businesses publish their ideas and other material, typically pertaining to certain subjects.


Social Media: Independent and for-profit online communities where users gather, interact, and share opinions and information

The New Marketing Communication Model

Content Marketing: generating, motivating, and disseminating brand messages and dialogues with customers via a flexible combination of owned, earned, shared, and paid media.

Steps In Developing Effective Marketing Communication:

  • Identify the target audience
  • Determine the communication objectives
  • Design the message
  • Choose the media to send the message
  • Select message source and collect feedback

Setting the Total Promotion Budget and Mix

Setting the Promotional Budget:

  • Competitive-parity method: sets the promotion budget to correspond with the expenditures of rivals.
  • Objective and task method: creates the promotion budget based on specified goals for the campaign and the expenses associated with the tasks required to meet these goals.

Shaping the Overall Promotional Mix

The Nature of Each Promotional Tool:

  • Advertising: can repeat a message multiple times and reach a large number of geographically scattered purchasers at a cheap cost per exposure.
  • Personal selling: the most effective method at certain stages of the buying process, particularly in building buyers’ preferences, convictions, actions, and developing customer relationships.
  • Sales promotion: includes coupons, contests, cents-off deals, and premiums that attract consumer attention and offer strong incentives to purchase.
  • Public relations: very believable form of promotion that includes news stories, features, sponsorships, and events.
  • Direct and digital marketing: an immediate, customized, and interactive promotional tool that includes direct mail, catalogs, telephone marketing, online, mobile, and social media.

  • Advantages


    • Digital and Social Media: High Selectivity, Low Cost and immediacy
    • Newspapers: Flexibility, timeliness and good local market coverage
  • Disadvantages


    • Digital and Social Media: Potentially low impact
    • Newspapers: Short life, poor reproduction quality
  • Advantages


    • Persuade customers
    • Clear excess inventory
    • Upselling and cross selling
  • Disadvantages


    • Changes customers' price perceptions
    • Limit your revenue
  • Advantages


    • Get instant feedback
      • Build up trust
      • Persuasive of form marketing
      • Easy reach target audience
  • Disadvantages


    • Expensive method of selling
    • labor intensive method
    • Training time consuming and costly
    • Only reach limited number of peoples
  • Advantages
    • Influence
    • Reach
    • Cost - effectiveness
  • Disadvantages
    • No direct control
    • No guaranteed results
    • Evaluation

Direct Marketing

  • Advantages


    • Targeting
    • Personalization
    • Affordable
    • Measurable
    • Informative
  • Disadvantages


    • Intrusive
    • Environment
    • Low response rates
    • Competition
    • Cost

Digital Marketing

  • Advantages


    • Global reach
    • Lower cost
    • Trackable, measurable results
    • Personalization
    • Openness
  • Disadvantages


    • Skills and training
    • Time consuming
    • High competition
    • Complaints and feedback
    • Security and privacy issues