Does anyone know where it all started? Who was the one that came up with the idea of advertising their possession in order to attract tribemates to barter or trade with them? Nobody knows exactly, but the first artifact that included advertising content dates back to 4000 BC Egypt. It seems that the ancient marketers were pretty good at making sales messages and wall posters.
Of course a lot has changed since then.
Unfortunately ancient Egyptians did not have access to the internet, or else, pretty sure, they would be good at digital marketing too.
Marketing is a tough topic that needs a throughout breakdown. Here, we are going to talk about integrated marketing communication, Guerilla marketing, salaries and all there is to it more or less in details.
If you are hooked, let us begin.
Marketing Communications and Strategies
Basically what marketing communication means is creating messages about products the brand is going to sell, and conveying them in a way that attracts your targeted audience. The goal here is pretty simple – persuading the customers to purchase your product.
The important aspects of marketing communication are: the message – what do you want to say/convey with your product? The Medium- the source it will be retrieved through or from; Target- who is the message intended for; and time- could take up the entire season, months, days or few hours.
Have you ever heard of 4P’s of Marketing? Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. The promotion part here is directly connected with the medium. That basically means building a friendly and beneficial relationship with journalists, influencers and important people that will be involved in promoting your product.
So, a medium that a company adopts for exchanging information about products and services to the targeted audience can be termed as a Marketing Communicator.
If you ever tried to explain what your product is all about but ended up with a long, not-so-clear, unfocused monologue that no one understands, then you might have an idea why people pay a lot of money to hire professionals who are able to create a crisp, snappy and clear messages that really target their potential customers.
Integrating Marketing Communication to Build Brand Equity
Integrating marketing communication means using different kinds of promotion strategies with the same ongoing theme. To put it simply, you are using various promotional means on a number of different platforms but with the same goal, same message, targeting the same audience. It’s like fighting from all fronts at the same time.
Integrated marketing communication helps your brand build a distinctive ‘tone of voice’- communicational style- across all different platforms; thus, making the brand stand out and be recognizable among customers.
7 Steps for Developing Integrated Marketing Communication Program
There is no 100% formula as to what will surely work, but here are the steps that are recommended to consider while working on creating integrated marketing communication:
Step 1: You Must Know Your Target Audience
Having a clear understanding of who is your targeted audience is utterly important. If you want to create messages that will work and invoke the action, then you need to know the overall psychographic attributes of your customers. What do they like, what is the overall attitude, what type of communication do they prefer- including even such a thing like the tone of voice and place where the process of communication takes place. For instance, you should consider whether it is better to use traditional marketing communication or be more focused on digital marketing- Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and such.
One of the most important things in marketing communication is insight. And having a clear insight is impossible without analyzing targeted audience and understanding what may be their emotional ‘trigger’.
Step 2: Analyze The Situation
Have you ever heard of SWOT analysis? If you are familiar with it, it is exactly what happens here. Evaluation of internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as all the external factors- both good and bad- that may affect your brand in the future, will help you come up with a more effective marketing communication strategy. Observe the situation from all angles, and any resistance that may come in the future will not be a shock to you.
Step 3: Set Marketing Communication Objectives Straight
On the contrary to sales promotion marketing communicational objectives is a long-term goal and is focused on building up loyalty in customers. The question to be asked here is: What is the goal of your communication in the long term?
Step 4: Determine The Budget For Your Project
This will help you shape the tactics with which you are going to operate in the future. What will be the most cost-effective solution to your problem? The goal is to be able to come up with a clear response to this question.
Step 5: Strategies and Tactics To Bear in Mind
Having a specific goal in mind is not enough. You need to come up with a plan that will help you execute your strategy. You need to have a step-by-step guide including every level of your strategy. Make it as detailed as possible.
Step 6: Evaluation and Measurement
This basically means documenting all of the accomplishments that your marketing communication strategy has achieved. How effective was the method you chose to work with? Was there anything that did not work at all? Knowing this will help you be more clever with your resources in the future.
Step 7: Having a Consistent Image
It is highly recommended to have a distinctive style concerning visual aspects when it comes to presenting your company or a brand to the audience. That may include a logo, colors you choose to create different graphic design patterns, fonts and such. In short, everything that will help to create a strong association between visual representations and your company in customers’ eye.
What Is Guerilla Marketing?
The word Guerilla means a small army that has a distinctive style of confrontation and can go against much bigger army forces.
So what is the purpose of using this word in the same context as marketing?
Guerilla Marketing is an unconventional way of marketing in order to reach bigger audience at a low cost. Obviously, this process demands lots of creativity and innovative ideas.
To give you an example, in 2010 Coca-Cola used Guerilla Marketing strategy by creating a “Happiness Machine” video featuring students and a Coca-Cola vending machine which dispensed not only a cold can of cola but other little surprises with it. The video got several million views on YouTube and was one of the best examples of how effective Guerilla Marketing can be.
How Much Do Marketing Managers Make an Hour?
The career path of a Marketing manager is often very attractive due to pretty high salaries, but hourly wages depend on the area you are working in. The average hourly wage for a Digital Marketing Manager in the United States is 51$ as of October 28, 2020, but the range varies between 44$ – 61$. As for the best-paid positions in marketing here is the list:
1. Corporate Communications Director- Average salary- 124,054$
2. Marketing Research Director – Average salary: $111,907
3. Director of Digital Marketing – Average salary: $99,040
4. Content Marketing Director – Average salary: $95,854
New Product Development Strategy in Marketing
Creating a good enough product or service is not enough, especially nowadays when every platform has come to be the space where other businesses are promoting their products and competition is way too high. Your product should be top-notch in order to compete with others. But as is known price is not always a sum of the cost of the material used in creating it, and the product is not just a sum of the material things that the customer is looking for. Therefore, developing a product that is valuable for customers and new to the market is key to a successful business.
So what are the marketing strategies used in the development of a new product?
Define Your Product
The exact definition of your product helps you in identifying what purpose it serves. What problem does it solve? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the product? What exactly does it offer to the targeted audience? How can your product be differentiated from all the others’? The point is to scrutinize your product from different angles and analyze it as if you are a customer thinking about purchasing it, not a marketer.
Identify Market Needs
This will help you understand how to introduce your product to the market, which pricing strategy to use, what aspects you need to consider before competing with other businesses that might have the same service as you.
Establish Time Frames
This means having a short and long-term time frames for the goals you are going to achieve with your products. This will help you evaluate how effective your strategy is, what changes need to be made in order to get desirable results, and how much time is left for the main goal of your strategy.
Know Your Target Audience
This cannot be stressed enough. Without analyzing the audience and considering the characteristics, needs, motivation and everything else there is to it, all is lost. Product or service is solely created for the customer. If you cannot emphasize with the client and think as one, the product that you provide will not be what the market demands want it to be.
Have you ever used a gadget- headphones or USB cable for instance and thought, “why on earth is this cord so short?” Precisely. That is because someone skipped considering that step while creating the product.
Test The Market and Adjust Accordingly
Test the market with smaller product runs, observe the sales, get feedback from your customers, and use it to adjust your product. Better safe than sorry.
Integrated Marketing Communication Includes All of The Following:
Effective management of integrated marketing communication is based upon the clever usage of the resources. Here is the list:
Advertising
Promoting your brand while using mass-communication means like television, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, direct mail and radio.
Direct Marketing
To use simple terms, direct marketing is a form of direct communication with your customers without the second party or a medium channel.
Public Relations
Using mediums for promoting your product; establishing friendly relationships with journalists, influencers, etc.
Sales Promotion
Sales promotion is a short-term incentive to initiate purchases to stimulate market demand.
Integrated Advertising Promotion and Marketing Communication
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
In case you want a deep dive into integrated marketing communications, I highly recommend checking Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing Communications (7th Edition) by Kenneth E. Clow. The book provides an insightful read for anyone who is interested in knowing how brands are built. It helps you understand the fundamentals of brand-nurturing. One of the best things about the book is that it’s rich in the number of examples that elaborate more on the concepts discussed. For this exact reason it won’t be tough even for someone who has no experience in marketing. So even if you are a beginner, give it a shot.
Positioning As a Type of Marketing Strategy
Market positioning is the ability to influence customers’ perception of your brand or product in relation to your competitors. Basically, you are ‘making’ a customer have a certain perspective regarding your brand.
3 Traditional Types of Product Positioning Strategies
- Comparative: Placing your product right next to other brands to emphasize the competition between the two. For example, placing two bottles of the same product from different brands next to each other while the price is clearly different.
- Differentiation: Is your product unique enough that it stands out? Does it have distinctive features and offers customers something that no other brand does?
- Segmentation: Making your product in a way that is intended for different segments of audience so it will be affordable and useful for everyone. Like printing the hardcover and softcover books! You are creating a product that will satisfy the needs of all types of people.
And The 3 Main Types That Can Be Unfolded Even More:
- Product attributes/values- having certain distinctive characteristics that will be associated solely with your product
- Product Price- being distinctive through the price- be it low or high (AKA Low price strategy & High price strategy)
- Product quality- you have heard about this before! People are only loyal to brands because of their quality products.
And that pretty much sums it up. Good luck on your marketing journey!
