Marketing Communications – Meaning and its Process

Marketing communications is essentially a part of the marketing mix. The marketing mix defines the 4Ps of marketing and Promotion is what marketing communications is all about. It is the message your organization is going to convey to your market. You need to be very particular about different messages you are going to convey through different mediums.

Traditionally printed marketing was the whole sole method of conveying the messages to the consumers. However, in recent times, emails, sms, blogs, television and company websites have become the trendy way of conveying the organization’s message to the consumers. It is important though that the message you give in one medium should tally with the message provided in other medium. For example, you should use the same logo in on your website as the one you use in your email messages. Similarly, your television messages should convey the same message as your blogs and websites.

For the above reason, people controlling the marketing communication process are very important for the company. These executives make it an integrated marketing communication process. You would now understand why it has to be ‘integrated’. The reason is that the messages to be conveyed through different mediums should be the same.

Let us now look at the marketing communication process. It is very important to have a process in place because then your advertising will reap proper benefits. There is an old advertising joke “I know my advertising works, I don’t know which half.” That’s why if the marketing communication process puts a tab on advertising because companies cannot bear to lose dollars on wrong type of advertising. Things have to be well-defined and integrated to get maximum revenues. Your marketing communication process would look like:

The marketing communication process identifies where the investments are being done and what is bringing more return on investment. Therefore, you can alter the advertising campaign to reap maximum benefits.

The process begins at the strategic development stage. You start by creating a marketing communications program. At this point, you decide what all will fall in your advertising bracket. At the next stage, you capture responses of your consumers. These responses are then recorded and maintained as advertising data. The executives then analyze and evaluate the collected data. They generate the all important reports which will help to allocate the integrated marketing and communications budget.

The integrated marketing communications is a data-driven approach which identifies the consumer insights and develops a strategy with the right combination of offline and online channels which should result in a stronger brand-consumer relationship. It has grown manifolds in recent years due to several shifts in the advertising and media industry. This is the reason why it has developed into a primary strategy for the developers. Some examples of shifts are from media advertising to the multiple forms of communication, from general focus advertising to data based marketing and so on.

Selecting the most important communications elements is crucial for the success of company’s business. The advertising campaign should be effective across all platforms. Once the integrated marketing process is set, the company can reap rich dividends from it. These days, there are companies that specialize in creating the marketing communications process for you. So you can either do it on your own or take their services. But an effective marketing communication process is the order of the day!