Thousands of brands compete against each other to win the audience’s attention. The only companies coming forward with an impactful marketing communication plan have a fighting chance in reaching their target audience. Keep reading to learn about the importance of a marketing communication strategy and more about the concept.
What might start as an attempt to reach the target audience with a tone of confidence might end up epitomising confusion if you don’t have a communication strategy in place. Many brands have met that fate across industries. As an owner or promoter, it is your responsibility to steer the company in a direction to generate profits. A communication strategy holds your audience’s attention and encourages them to connect with your brand. Let’s learn in detail about it.
What is a Marketing Communication Strategy?
By leveraging the offerings of social media platforms, a company reaches its target audience by devising a marketing communication strategy. Overall, a strategy can be divided into three parts; the first includes, words that you need to say (message), the second, speaks about where this message will be said (medium), and finally, who will be reading your message (target). Once you describe these three parts, your marketing communication strategy is good to go.
Behind every consistent sale of any company, a strong communications strategy is the driving factor. You must know about your target audience’s needs and how your company’s offerings will satisfy them. On having the answers to these questions, you will be equipped to deliver the right message to the appropriate target on an impactful medium.
Importance of Marketing Communication Strategy
A marketing strategy includes a wide gambit of activities, starting from paid marketing to public relations. By having a structured marketing communication strategy, you can avoid missing goals and have a clear idea of what works for your brand’s promotion. Let’s look at how a well-placed marketing strategy can help you.
- Creating a Brand Identity: Consumers trust a brand when they notice the efforts taken by the brand to communicate with them. You might already communicate with your audience on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If the message on all those platforms is inconsistent and conflicting, consumers might have difficulty identifying your brand. A marketing communication plan ensures that your brand messaging is consistent across channels.
- Crafting a Tactical Vision: Every successful company or the one that works around the clock to become one knows that the tactical vision of a company keeps changing to accommodate the demands of a dynamic market. Strategies must be created based on new opportunities to generate a high ROI. While working on a marketing communication plan, one discovers new markets to deliver your products and services. By tapping into a new market or providing new services to existing customers, your company can enjoy accelerated growth.
- Outperforming Competitors: The role of a communication strategy is to present your company as the market leader in the eyes of your target audience. Through this message, your audience must be clear why they must buy your product over your competitor’s. Some messages can explain why the audience needs your product, how purchasing it improves the quality of their life, and how your company implements its environmental responsibility.
- Retaining Resourceful Talent: For any company to grow significantly, attracting the best talent in the market is a dire necessity. With the help of a marketing communication plan, you can get your company’s name in one of the business publications—these present annual lists or awards for the best companies in a country or city. Looking at the positive reputation of your company, resourceful people are sure to join your workforce.
- Reaching the Target Audience: Dozens of offline and online advertisement mediums have widened the scope of reaching millions of people worldwide. From a marketing perspective, it is pivotal to realise the best channel to reach your target audience. Through market research methods like interviews, surveys, and focus groups, you can derive actionable insights quickly. A marketing communication strategy based on such insights will lend you a hand in delivering the content that your target audience needs.
- Stimulating an Increase in ROI: The primary aim of implementing a marketing communication strategy is to catch the attention of your target audience. Once the audience is hooked, the strategy must work effectively to engage with them and turn them into customers. If you have crafted an impactful message and the right audience receives it at an appropriate platform, your company is sure to see an increase in profits and ROI as expected. To get a competitive edge in the industry, you must integrate departments in your company to see a comfortable spike in your revenue.
Marketing Communication Channels
While staying under budget constraints, brands can convert their prospects into customers by leveraging the best communication channel. In the pool of available channels, selecting the appropriate one for your products/services requires expertise. For running a successful campaign, you will have to work more than just creating content and waiting for your audience to notice your brand. Let’s take a look at the marketing communication channels available for Indian brands.
- Traditional channels: It includes offline advertising mediums such as radio, television events, billboards, print publications, telephones, and postal service.
- Digital channels: Online marketing channels like websites, podcasts, social media, and email contrive this category.
Through these marketing channels, brands can make their customers feel like a part of their journey. As your prospects feel engaged and involved with your brand, their loyalty and commitment to your products increase. The cardinal purpose of any of these marketing channels is to help brands generate leads by increasing their brand awareness. To become an industry leader, your brand must select the channels majorly used by its prospects.
Types Of Marketing Communication Strategy
A sound marketing communication strategy casts a positive brand image among your target audience and existing customers. Starting from the brand logo to the corporate social responsibility campaigns organised by your brand, every minor factor forms a part of the marketing communication strategy.
An optimum strategy leverages the skills of multiple departments. Below are some tips for creating strategies that can be manoeuvered to turn prospects into customers.
- Choosing to be a brand: As a company selling products or services, you have a choice to be a brand or a commodity. A commodity operates with the only goal of completing the customer’s need. However, a brand gives birth to a yearning for the product in the mind of a prospect or customer. From a marketing point of view, commodities sell their services and products only, while a brand attaches emotions to create a mass appeal for its offerings.
- Pay extra attention to positioning: It is important to have clarity regarding the positioning of your company or offerings before working on a marketing campaign. By choosing your segment – entry-level or premium, you will create a perception of your offerings in the market. The prospects and existing customers will know about the work of your company. While communicating through traditional and digital channels can help create a perception, other factors like product performance, pricing, and packaging create a lasting impact on the users of your offerings.
Now, let’s look at the types of strategies for different types of communication channels.
- Digital marketing: Local search, Search Engine Optimisation, Content Marketing, inbound marketing, social media, affiliate marketing, and email marketing are the types of strategies.
- Traditional media channels: The marketing strategies for communicating through traditional media channels are joint ventures, partnerships, events, paid advertising, public relations, and direct marketing.
Marketing Communication Strategy Examples
Many companies have lucratively used marketing communication strategies for expanding their business and stimulating lead conversions. Here are some examples that explain the nature of strategies and how they work.
- Fast-food Franchise: A fast-food franchise becomes a global brand after expanding for years. The company has already reached its peak of brand awareness. So, the marketers utilise traditional channels (one of which was mailing coupons through the postal service) for connecting with the audience. As customers get motivated to visit the store for redeeming the offers, the brand notices a notable spike in sales within the first few weeks of mailing the offers.
- Instrument store: A store selling musical instruments published a video of a customer reviewing their new violin with enthusiasm. On noticing an unusually good engagement with that video, the company started posting more interactive videos that showed ‘behind the scene’ working of the store employees, tips for purchasing and playing instruments, and reviews. Through these videos, the company was able to sell its instruments online to customers who lived far away.
Conclusion
A marketing communication plan must reflect research and knowledge of prospects while communicating your brand’s position in the industry. Take your time to create the best strategy for attracting success for your brand.