Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC, means that all forms of communications and promotional tools are carefully linked together so they can work together toward a common goal.  We believe in using an IMC approach when building campaigns in order to keep our messages clear, succinct, and measurable.  Building an IMC campaign can be time consuming, but the results are well worth the effort. 

To build a successful IMC campaign, you’re going to need:

Research:  Every piece of an integrated campaign must have research backing the tactics involved in the campaign. We must study our competition and our target audiences to ensure we know them as well as we know our own company. Proper research allows us to concentrate on our strengths, understand our potential customer’s buying behavior, and differentiate ourselves from our competition. 

Emotional and Sensory Appeal: We’ll obviously appeal to the actual needs of our potential clients, but there should also be a concerted effort to appeal to their emotional and sensory needs as well. Our messaging should grab the audience’s attention, keep it, make them think, and guide them into our sales funnel.

Synchronization: Our marketing pieces should concurrently feed traffic through each channel we’re using as we pull audiences into our sales funnel. They should guide audiences from one message to another while keeping our products and services top of mind. All of the messaging should have a similar look and feel in order to help potential customers remember and recognize us.

Internal Marketing and Branding: Employees must be engaged with the branding and marketing campaign prior to the launch of the campaign. We have to keep our teams excited and allow them to voice their opinions during the planning process. We need them to become brand ambassadors and leaders after the campaign is launched.  Having buy-in from our team will make the campaign much easier to launch and communicate with our customers and target audience.

Measurement:  There must be some type of measurable conversion metric for every piece of our marketing campaign, whether it be number of quotes, phone calls, emails, sales, etc. Every marketing action in an integrated marketing campaign has a purpose and measuring conversions will help us justify any adjustments to the campaign as it matures.