The Six Cs of Integrated Marketing
Marketing consultant, professor and Ferris State University, and ANA instructor Susan Jones breaks effective integrated marketing down into six elements, which are drawn from her ANA on-demand training course, "Integrated Marketing in the Digital Age."
Customer-Focused
Jones maintains that authentic integrated marketing must be "customer-focused," contrasting this with being "customer-centric." Customer-centricity concentrates on how much you can get out of the customer (by maximizing sales and lifetime value); to be customer-focused is to concentrate on how much you can give them — how much value you can provide.
Adopting this approach is to be experiential, not transactional. As one example of such an experiential focus, Jones cites the apps that Nike provides to its customers, which allow them to track their fitness progress.
To be customer-focused, you must monitor customers' actions and preferences to be able to provide the best possible experience and options in real time.
Comprehensive
Integrated marketing requires you to disseminate your message across a multiplicity of channels, from TV to cinema to the web to social media to newspapers and magazines.
Consistent
The customer should recognize your brand identity across all these channels, from your logo to the feel of your communications to your approach to doing business. This consistency of brand identity should extend through all communications, whether that takes the form of a message on the side of a car, a banner ad online, a TV ad, or a sandwich board. Conduct a marketing audit to ensure that all your messaging is singing from the same songbook.
Compelling
Effective integrated marketing spreads its message by word of mouth and viral sharing. It inspires customers and spurs them to action.
As an example of compelling integrated marketing, Jones cites a Dove campaign in which the brand strove to spark a global conversation about how women frequently underestimate their own beauty.
Dove had a sketch artist create portraits of a variety of women based on their own descriptions of themselves, without ever laying eyes on them himself. He then executed portraits of the same women based on others' descriptions of them, which illustrated the gulf between these women's' self-perception and the world's perception of them.
The content from the campaign ran in an array of formats on an array of channels, generating massive social media buzz, garnering extensive earned media coverage, and ultimately generating 3.8 billion impressions worldwide.
Clear
Effective integrated marketing should:
- Keep sentences short and simple.
- Use short, familiar words.
- Adopt the active voice and avoid the passive voice.
Conversational
The days of advertisers engaging in one-way communications with consumers are over, and an era of dialogue has emerged.
Marketers engaging in this dialogue should respond in human ways to customer feedback and comments, being good-humored and kind. The dialogue should strengthen the relationship between brand and consumer whether a transaction takes place in each moment or not.
Moreover, the communications marketers craft as part of this dialogue should be customized to directly connect with consumers in personalized ways.
The tips above represent just a morsel from the banquet of insights and best practices offered by the ANA's on-demand training course "Integrated Marketing in the Digital Age," which goes on to address the use of digital media and how to leverage data to inform one's marketing efforts.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COURSE AND REGISTER, CLICK HERE