The Essence of Integrated Marketing Communication for Marketers

Marketers must explore new methods to leverage all elements of the communication mix—including advertising, sales promotion, PR, direct marketing, search, web, and social media—into a single, cohesive, holistic approach.  This environment demands the rise of the new IMC plan, one that incorporates interactive and social technologies—including corporate blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and mobile devices, etc.  Marketers must simultaneously learn to adapt in a social media ecosystem that is in perpetual evolution.  Marketers are beginning to understand that their brand lives in the connections.  They must seize the opportunity and create a powerful content strategy to deliver the right message to the right audience in the right place. Today, the new point of difference for your brand will come from merging the quest for profit with brand purpose.

The effective integrated marketing communication help –

- To create an effective, well integrated IMC plan, blending offline and online tools to maximize customer value

-  To strategically link and leverage all elements in the communication mix across channels

- To evaluate the contribution of each Marcom element—including advertising, direct marketing, Facebook, Twitter and blogs—on its contribution to maximize communication impact

- To integrate and coordinate across company communication channels (traditional, digital and social) to deliver a clear, compelling and consistent message

- To orchestrate all of the key consumer touch points where your customer meets your brand

- To develop an effective content strategy to ensure delivery of coordinated and synergistic messages across all touch points and channels

- To understand and apply the Social Media marketing to create engaging content to reach, impact and engage customers 

Example: Vodafone ZooZoo 3G Campaign

Vodafone is on a roll. They have been the highest gainer in terms of the people who have decided to port out of their existing operator and switch to Vodafone. But as predicted earlier, MNP has not been a game changer. Less than 1% of the total subscribers have decided to switch their operator. But this post is not about MNP, its about the 3G campaign featuring Vodafone India's brand ambassadors "The ZooZoo community" and their hero "Zoo 3G".

If the tales of zoozoo weren't enough on television you will still not miss the ZooZoo 3G avatar. If you fare high on the geek meter (a nerd like me), you'll catch him on YouTube, Journal websites, Google ads and news portals. If you toil through the streets like a bus driver or a rickshaw puller, you'll catch him on almost every second billboard. If you are a frequent flier, you'll not miss on the airport. If you happen to be at the Delhi airport around this time, you'll see a Zoozoo city out there.

Every aesthetically sound corner for advertising has a Zoozoo banner. And if that's not enough, the community kids are spreading the most popular form i.e. Word-of-Mouth. The important thing to note is that the whole campaign is "Integrated".