Marketing communications promotes your business to your current and prospective customers and to those who influence purchasing and sales decisions. All communications include an originator (source), a specific message (overt and/or subliminal), a channel for dissemination, and a target (receiver). By integrating your communications across platforms and media, you can maximize the impact of your communications resources, primarily as expended for promotion.
Promotion has expanded beyond advertising, sales promotions, and personal selling to include database marketing, sponsorships, direct marketing, alternative marketing, e-active marketing, and public relations. Promotion should be based upon an organization’s strategic marketing plan and is meant to create a unified communications program. Promotional tools, applied well, get your marketing message out to your customers. Advertising is paid promotion that is intended to support increased sales of your product or service. Examples of advertising include television commercials, billboards, and magazine ads. Publicity is free mention of a company, individual, event, product, or service in media outlets such as newspapers and magazines, in social media, or on radio and television stations.
Reinforce the Company’s Unique Selling Proposition
Your unique selling proposition (USP) becomes valuable to your organization when it is successfully communicated to your target customers and motivates initial and repeat purchasing decisions. Integrated marketing communications frame the USP in multiple media to reach targeted audiences and communicate the salient information, evoke positive emotional responses, and create effective, favorable impressions. A unique selling proposition that is not successfully communicated is worthless. A unique selling proposition that is successfully communicated can be priceless.
Promotional Planning
Vast quantities of promotional material bombard consumers and businesses daily, frequently creating unwanted clutter and noise. Nonetheless, these efforts represent opportunities for quality customer contact. The challenge for an organization is to determine the best opportunities and to create promotions that effectively cut through that clutter and noise, engage the attention of prospective customers, and generate profitable sales. Successful promotions are the result of solid planning. For promotional planning to be integrated in the operations of your organization, all of the business’s components will need to have meaningful roles in the process. The LSBF is your one-stop destination to know more about marketing communication.