Integrated Marketing Communications - 5 primary tools of communication

The communication is always one of the most important and vital strategic success of an organization. You can have the best or most innovative products or services, but if your internal and external communications are weak, then the demand for your products or services raises a personal flag of concern. When communicating the value of your products or services, you want to focus on how they can benefit your customers.

When planning the strategy for the Integrated Marketing Communication IMC, you want to have a dialogue with customers by inviting interaction due to the coordinated efforts of content, timing and delivery of your products or services. By providing direction, clarity, consistency, timing and appearance of your messages, sent to the targeted audience, these factors will help avoid any confusion about the benefits of your brand, through the connection of the instant product recognition.

If looking at your marketing mix, you are looking at the price, distribution, advertising and promotion, along with customer service. Integrated marketing communications is part of the marketing mix included in your marketing plan. IMC strategies define the target audience, setting objectives and budgets, analyzes the social, competitive, cultural or technological, and conducts research to evaluate the effectiveness of your promotional strategies.

If companies are ethically planning, communication, and following the industry guidelines, they will most likely earn the trust of their customers and target audience. There are five basic tools of integrated marketing communications:

1. Advertisement:
This tool can get your messages to large audiences efficiently via routes such as radio, TV, magazines, newspapers (ROP), the Internet, billboards and other mobile communication technology. This method can effectively reach a large number of consumers, although the costs can be quite expensive.

2. Sales promotion:
This tool is used for coupons, contests, samples, prizes, demonstrations, exhibitions and incentives. It 'used to accelerate sales in the short term, by building brand awareness and encourage repeat purchases.

3. Public Relations:
This tool integrated marketing and communication is initiated through public appearances, news / press releases or sponsorship of events, to build trust and goodwill presenting, product company or a person in a positive light.

4. Direct Marketing:
This tool uses e-mail, mail, catalogs, direct answers to encourage radio and television, in order to reach a targeted audience to increase sales and test new products and alternative marketing tactics.

5. Personal Selling:
Setting sales appointments and meetings, home parties, making presentations and any type of one-to-one communication, to reach your customers and strengthen your relationship with customers, starting this tool IMC.

The decisions that link the general objectives and strategies during the planning stages of marketing help evaluate and optimize the specific activities of integrated marketing communications. Before choosing an instrument of IMC, marketing, product and brand must look at social, competitive, legal considerations, regulatory, ethical, cultural and technological. One thing you want to avoid the activation of integrated marketing communication tools are reaching the public inappropriate and causing controversy. This could be detrimental when trying to build brand awareness and encourage consumer spending with your company. When the marketing manager to examine the beliefs, emotions and behavior of their target audience to their brand, they can influence their beliefs in order to attain knowledge of the product by attracting attention to their campaigns.