How to create an Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy

How to create an Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy

I think we can all agree when we say…

There is no one size fits all approach in terms of Comms and Marketing. Each strategy is applied differently for every business. Testing and trying tools and tactics is the only way you’ll figure out what’s best for you as a business, bearing in mind you have a strategy in place.

We’re now going to focus on how to create a strategy.

Marketing and communications provide a lot more opportunities than ever before. There isn’t just one successful strategy we have to follow, there are various routes you can take in order to find what works best for your business.

This is an area where leaders tend to rush the plan, and it’s important to take time, do some research, and then create a strategy that can help you grow over 5 years time. If you can do this with an expert then you’ll get even more out of it.

In today’s changing environment, the plan may change, but the how shouldn’t need to change too much as it should be truly reflective of your mission, vision and values and your ideal customer.

Key steps to creating an integrated strategy.

1. Identifying your audience/ideal customer

You cannot know them enough. who your target audience is going to be, their demographic, age, what are their hopes and dreams, where do they live, do they have pets, what do they like to do in their spare time etc. Also, think of which part of their lives you are looking to benefit/transform.

Your audience can be customers, colleagues or even communities such as the people who can influence the running of your business.

Consider the below:

• Who is your audience?

• How and where is your audience engaging with you? What seems to be engaging well with your audience?

• Is it turning into brand loyalty or sales?

• What does your audience think of your business?

2. Develop a Marketing/Comms Plan – It’s best to research where your audience spends most of their time and focus on building up your platform there. Remember that your audience wants your product or service to transform a pain point in their life into something really easy and positive. What social media platforms do you plan on using? Have you thought of what your messaging around your brand will be?

3. Stay on top of brand consistency and messaging – Your brand is your business’s identity; it helps to create a positive image for your customers, clients and maybe your competitors. After all, consistency is key.

4. Awareness, Consideration and Decision – This helps you to understand your customer’s decision-making process. You need to understand the problem the audience is having and how to go about solving it for them.

• Awareness – Customers are identifying their potential problems and opportunities to solve it.

• Consideration – Identified they have a problem and are looking at how they can solve it.

• Decision – The audience will decide on their approach and aim to solve it using a business product/service.

5. Implement your strategy – This is the fun part, where everything comes together and helps work towards a successful MarComs strategy.

Look at what your strategic intent is going to be. Remember that your audience wants your product or service to transform a pinpoint in their life into something really easy and positive.

• Schedule your posts – Use Facebook Business Suite, Hootsuite or Canva Content Planner to put out your posts.

• Analyze your insights – If it didn’t work as well as you thought, look at what you could do better next time, is it the timing of the post or the hashtags or keywords you used? Monitor your engagement through the use of Google Analytics or Instagram Insights.

Here are a few tips for when it comes to using active insights as seen in your strategy workbook:

• Do NOT ASSUME – make sure your insights are based on facts.

• Check-in on your audience regularly; it is amazing how quickly things change. Make sure your segments are not too general.

• Your internal audience should have segments too

• Keep up with the trends – What’s current, what is your audience looking for most at the moment and how can you appeal to them? You can read more on our previous blog post on trends here.

We have some tools listed that you may find useful when it comes to keeping up with trends and insights by staying on top of hashtags and keywords most commonly used. As seen below:

• Use a search listening tool like Answer The Public.

• Market research can be found online.

• Google Analytics (for intranet sites too) and Google trends.

• Website analytics, Facebook groups and Facebook Audience Insights (and other social platforms including internal ones)

Implementing Integrated Communications means businesses can have a positive impact on your customer loyalty, creating a more engaging consumer base and putting you on the steps to long-term success.

Throughout writing this piece we found this blog very useful on the topic of Integrated Marketing/Comms >>>

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