Streamline Your Marketing
Is your marketing plan all over the place? Does your message get diluted by miscommunication between staff members or by competing priorities within your company? Do the people representing your business often appear at cross-purposes?
For example, one person may be charged with managing your website, while others focus on your social networking effort, ad campaign, public relations, direct sales, client servicing and accounts receivables.
There is a solution in the form of integrated marketing communications, or IMC. It’s a customer-focused, coordinated effort to align all the marketing and business operations of a company into a seamless program. This program must provide a consistent and frequently reinforced central message to symbolize your brand. Once it’s implemented, each of the independent channels in which your business operates will reinforce the other and advance your goals exponentially.
Here are six suggestions on how to integrate your marketing strategy:
• Conduct research directly with your target customer through social networking, focus groups, online surveys or review sites. Establish dialogues and learn from them. Then, assess your business and determine a unique branding message that separates you from your competitors.
• Include all employees in a presentation about your brand message. Train everyone who has contact with customers to embody your message's tone and image. Keep them current on all promotions and marketing efforts.
• Aim for consistent communication with your customers. Enable customers to interface with your company at any point in the buying cycle and receive a consistent experience, whether through an online conversation, a voice on the phone or an in-person sales call.
• Make it easy for customers to contact you. Create feedback mechanisms at all customer touch points so you can determine if there are any departments within the organization that don’t honor your brand’s image.
• Make sure your branding has a consistent look across all channels, with the same logo, typeface, color palette and balance. This includes everything from your letterhead to packaging to point-of-sale materials to your website, social networking and advertising.
• Your brand’s image, emotional tone and central message should remain consistent across multisensory delivery vehicles. Keep it the same through television, radio and online. Everything should reinforce the customer’s impression of your brand as he seamlessly travels the arc from discovery to engagement to purchase.
IMC is a tactical process that involves big-picture organizational vision and an ability to communicate between departments. If you’re an entrepreneur, this may be something you can manage independently. If you’re an executive at a larger company, you may need to regularly host meetings with departmental managers to ensure everyone is on message. As another alternative, companies can hire a single employee or consultant to manage the branding effort across all marketing and operational channels.
Initiate a process that will unite your staff. Nurture an environment in which all employees, both laterally and vertically throughout your organization, present a uniform branding message, tone and character. This will result in smoother internal communication and a more consistent image to your customer base.n
Jen White is president of White House Media Inc., a marketing consulting firm in Grafton. She can be contacted directly at jenwhite@whitehousemedia.org.
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