Published on: 24 June 2019
Last Updated on: 16 November 2021
If you’re in the process of starting a business or you currently have a business and want to take it to the next level digital marketing is an absolute must-have tool. In today’s global society technology and the internet have vastly influenced how we build connections with each other and have impacted how businesses reach new customers. Billions of individuals are searching the web every day searching for the next product or service they will purchase. Take advantage of an easily assembled tool that can improve leads and revenue for your business. Most businesses must have some form of digital marketing to reach more customers. You can also check out thebusinessblocks.com for Systematizing Your Business with Low Code Tools.
If you have tried marketing resources and have found that they have not improved your business performance this can be because you have not been using the correct marketing tools. Don’t worry this is a common problem for business owners and there is an easy solution. It is important to have a clear mission statement or purpose behind your brand. You want people to visit your business and have a clear understanding as to how you can make their lives easier or why they should choose your business over others. Social Media Management is critical in promoting this message and provides a broad audience with access to what your business offers.
Did you know that there are 1 billion active users on Instagram each month? An even more shocking fact is that there are 2.3 billion daily visitors on Facebook alone. Social media is a free resource that can expand your business if managed correctly. Creating content that is targeted to your business niche can help social media users find products or services that you offer. This can be done with storybrand certified guide which is a process to implement marketing by professionals. Imagine having a resource that creates marketing that helps bring traffic to your website, engage more with customers and in return lead to more sales.
Other digital marketing tools are social media advertising, website design, and video marketing. When done correctly advertisement on Social Media can make a difference in monthly sales. Everyone is constantly on their phones checking social media several times a day and are exposed to targeted ads.
Another way to expand your business is through professional website design, have you ever gone to a website and thought this layout looks horrible? Websites are a representation of you and your business and must be clear and professional to ensure customers will want to purchase a service or product. Storybrand certified guide understands the importance of website design in correlation with monthly revenue. If you want to learn more about how social media management, advertising, and website designing can take your business to the next level read the information provided here about digital marketing.
If you’re still asking yourself how is digital marketing going to expand my business look at this business blog that elaborates on the importance of digital marketing. This article will provide all the answers to your doubts and worries and ensure you that investing in the right digital marketing is what your business has been missing. Take the leap into digital marketing to ensure you can stand out in the business world.
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It is just a simple concept of making all kinds of communication and messages linked together. This is just to ensure that there is no lack of information. This lack of information can have a negative result on the work. Do you know what is integrated marketing communication?
At the basic level of IMC i.e., Integrated Marketing Communication, all the promoting tools are linked together for smooth communication. You surely must have heard of the marketing mix. Yes, that 4Ps of the marketing mix. This promotion is one of that marketing mixes
To make all the tools work smoothly, all the tools must work together in harmony. This can be advanced when regular communication is integrated into several levels, such as Horizontal, Vertical, Internal, External, and Data integration.
Let’s go through various components of IMC:
1. The Foundation:
In this, a detailed analysis of the product and the target market is required. For the marketers it is essential to understand the nature of the brand, what are its USP (unique selling proposition) and the requirements of the end-user. It is important to have a close eye on your competitor’s behaviors. Every need of the customers is of the utmost importance.
2. The corporate culture:
There must need to be relevant in the product and the producing company. Every organization has its own vision, so while planning marketers need that to keep in mind.
For example, there is an organization whose vision is to train teenagers in the field of their interest. If they start training the middle-aged man they are deviating from the vision.
3. Brand focus:
Every organization is known by the brand they are producing or facilitating. So, it’s important to have plans which are always focused on the brand. Making their brand the center of attention.
4. Consumer experiences:
You must not forget about the consumer and how they feel about the product. Nowadays customers are more attracted to the product which looks good, has good packing, and of course, the product itself needs to be one of the best.
5. Communication tools:
It is a way via which the brand communicates with the customers. The ways can be direct selling, advertising, social media, advertisements, etc.
6. Integration tools:
Selling the product is one part of communication but also getting feedback from the customer is also part communication.
Plans for Integrated marketing communication
It integrates all aspects of the marketing mix to promote the products and services to the customers at the right place and at the right time. It is a proven fact that if you use different IMC tools at the same time it can improve the customer experience of the product.
If done correctly. IMC can improve the visibility of the brand. Whenever a customer goes to the market for shopping, they will be reminded of your brand. The impact of integrated marketing communication increases if the end-user sees the brand simultaneously multiple numbers of times.
A marketer should be well versed in time management. Because doing many things like budgeting, allocating the right resources at the right for the promotion of the product is of utmost importance.
Gathering information about your company and its product and the audience who buy this product is very important for planning.
While planning some points are needed to keep in mind:
A detailed summary needs to be made on the brand is going to reach its targeted audience.
Everything about the organization needs to be crystal clear.
Good knowledge of the product is required.
Choosing the right market is very important, and hoe you are going to promote it into the market needs to be mentioned clearly.
Competitors’ analysis is very important. And how the competitors are active in the target market.
Knowing your brand weakness as well as your strong points can be a good start to promote your brands.
Implementing integrated marketing communication
Integrated marketing communication is a way of promoting the brand through various methods like advertising, social media awareness, direct selling, public relation, etc. It focuses on using all the available ideas together to get the most desired result. Instead of using one integrated tool at a time, it brings all the possible tool under one umbrella and uses any viable option which is used in an effective way.
The success of integrating marketing communication relies totally on understanding the customers, their needs and expectations. Just remember one thing the customer will be loyal towards you only when you outperform their expectations. And to do so you need to be well versed in the marketing mix and need to apply that knowledge in the fields.
Just promoting your product once or twice does not make you gainer. You need to keep doing that. So that whenever they think of buying a product, your brand needs to be the first to come in their mind. This can be done only after promoting the same product several times a day to the same audience. This makes their subconscious mind active and your product makes space in their second mind.
Let’s take Colgate for example, no matter where you are, whenever you think about a toothpaste product the first name that comes into mind is “Colgate”. Why? Because it was their integrated marketing communication skills that have made you think this way. This what an integrated marketing communication does if done correctly.
What are the components of successful integrated marketing communication?
It is essential for organizations to have a well-integrated marketing communication team, who can work hard for the organization. And make the customer satisfied so that the customer can invest in the product. This can only happen if the brand can provide services that can make the customer loyal to the brand.
This can be done only by using the components effectively:
Customer focus
No matter how good your product is, no matter how good is your service is, until and unless you make a customer happy all is worthless.
Do you believe in God?
No, then start believing in the god named “Customers”. If you are a marketer then you need to have faith in this god. Only this god has the power to make your brand, organization what you hope for.
So, if you think ignoring their needs and doing and coming up with the best plan will work for you then you need to go back a little bit and have a fresh start.
Everything about the customer is very important. Their appraisal, as well as their, complains both hold the same value. But for me complain matters the most. That shows where we are lacking and where we need to improve ourselves.
Make sure whatever you are planning customer needs to be at the center of that.
Co operation
Cooperation among the marketing team is important, but it is essential that every member of the organization work as a whole, to promote the product.
Other members who are outside of the department are needed to be allowed to give their thoughts on the matter. This can help in unboxing new ideas, which can really accelerate the promotion.
Database communication
The sharing of information is one of the important aspects of good planning. This helps in formulating the best course of action. Every employee needed to be filled in on every relevant detail that they need to do their job.
Leverage
Analyze every channel on which the promotion is done. Calculate their cost estimation. See that if the ROI on that cost is relevant or not. This helps your brand’s promoting efficiency.
Profitability
At the end of the day, we have to gain revenue. So, making a plan, formulating the strategies are only helpful when they can bring in profits.
So, we have to market in such a way that it really brings in the audience to invest in our brand and stay loyal to the brand. This will help to bring in higher revenue.
Importance of integrated marketing communication
Nobody can deny the fact that integrated marketing communication is an important aspect of the promotion of the brand.
Let’s go much deeper:
It acts as a messenger between the brand and the audience
It recognizes the need of the customers, it gets the data of the competitors, locate an important place for marketing the brand and send this back to the organization for the analysis.
Brand awareness at a low cost
It is a long-term process where you gain audience trust, and convince them to invest in your brand. Integrated marketing communication is the best way to promote your values.
Think like this, if brand A is already communicating with you properly, and delivering its USP on a regular basis. Why would you go for the brand B. you will subconsciously choose brand A
Integrating marketing communication over traditional ways
IMC is taking over traditional ways because it not only focuses on getting new customers but also tries to retain the older on as well. Gaining a new customer does not mean that you forget about the older customer who has already avail of your services. Gaining new customers is very good but losing the older one is not accepted. Because once the trust is broken, it cannot be restored. The customer will never trust you again. So, doing both is of utmost importance.
It reduces the time required for the planning
If not for this IMC, strategizing the plan would take lots of time. It is due to the IMC that the time is reduced to none.
IMC tools
It is essential for organizations to have a well-integrated marketing communication team, who can work hard for the organization. And make the customer satisfied so that the customer can invest in the product. This can only happen if the brand can provide services that can make the customer loyal to the brand.
Let us go through the tools which are used in IMC:
Advertising
It is the best way of promoting the brand. It can reach a huge amount of audience in the shortest time frame. Advertisements on the television, newspaper, radio can reach many audiences in a small frame of time. This also increases the authenticity of the brand. Now it is the marketer’s job to make sure that the right messages are sent to the audience.
Self-promotion
The promotion which the brands do with the promotional code, discounts, attractive offers, etc. brands itself can pay for advertisements to the newspaper, distribute leaflets for the promotions.
Direct selling
There are various tools like mailing, text messages, brochures, which the brands use to promote themselves.
Personal selling
Personal selling here is referred to the selling of the products from their showrooms, via their agents and making sales call.
Public relation activities
Well, have you seen brands presenting themselves in the community meetup, in fairs, in public events? If yes, then you can understand what public relations mean.
It’s all about communication with the public by going in between them. This makes them feel closure to you. This creates a friendship bond with potential customers. Even if they had never thought of investing in your brand, but due to your public appearance. They may think at least once of buying your services.
Managing IMC
It is essential for organizations to have a well-integrated marketing communication team, who can work hard for the organization. And make the customer satisfied so that the customer can invest in the product. This can only happen if the brand can provide services that can make the customer loyal to the brand.
Just making the strategies and implementing those can be said that only half work is done. The rest half is managing and maintain those plans.
There are different modes of communication, so it needs to be managed effectively so that all work in the same synchronization to deliver the same message to all the audience. This can be done with the help of proper managing plans.
The first step is to identify the right audience
Finding the right audience is the best way to make your promotion fruitful. You need to understand who is your audience. what can be done to find the relevant audience for providing services, and who are willing to invest in you. After you find out the answer to these questions, only then you can move on with the second phase of the IMC.
The second step is to think of what to communicate
The kind of message you send to the customer is very crucial for gaining their trust. You need to have a proper crystal-clear message for audiences. This makes your brand much more authentic.
The third step is to plan your message in a way that convinces them
Having clear messages will not do, you need to present them in such a way that the audience likes it and get the meaning of it.
Make sure that your messages are all properly formatted.
The fourth step is to identify the various channel via which you can communicate with them
Choosing the best course of action is very helpful in making a promotional platform. It needs to be efficient that it reaches the right person at the right time.
The fifth step is to allocate the right source at the right time
Investment is needed to be done properly so that ROI gains a profit rather than a loss. So investment needs to be done after analyzing ever aspects of the promotional platforms.
Lastly, it’s important to measure the reach of Integrated marketing communication
You need to monitor constantly that the promotion is reaching the people or not, doing a blind job is just like walking on the edge of the mountain blindfolded.
Conclusion
As a whole, integrated marketing communication lays down a bridge between the organization and the audience. Without the IMC informational gap is created which can lead to malfunctioning of the whole organization.
There are many strategies that can be implemented to overcome any possible crisis faced by the organization.
Each and every detail on integrated marketing communication is given in this article.
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Enterprise content management is a great way to organize unstructured data and information of an organization. Many factors impact the functioning of ECM systems and determine their effectiveness. When managing your enterprise content solutions, you should define their processes accurately. Several service providers offer enterprise content management consulting services. These service providers understand the needs and requirements of companies in terms of managing data. Thus, can advise business owners with the right solutions.
Proper ECM helps organizations to create, enrich, manage as well as deliver data and information. Business owners should identify their requirements and determine the solutions of the right enterprise management systems that will cater to those requirements. There are several solutions that such systems may include, such as management of documents, managing website content, document imaging, management of records, and management of digital assets as well as managing your business data and providing support for collaboration and management of business processes.
Managing content is one of the most important tasks that organizations need to take care of. It is important to preserve data so that it can be reused for other purposes later. Preservation of data in a systematic order also ensures that it can be searched and found easily whenever required. There are a number of factors that affect the choice of a proper enterprise content management system. Some of the factors which affect the choice include, the number of people and the processes involved in the organization, technology involved, budget and so on. Keeping in mind all the required elements and choosing the right content management system will help an organization to share and edit content efficiently and in an orderly manner.
Top features of enterprise content management (ECM) systems:
Central Repository
Document Scanning
Secure Email Files
Client Portal
Document Retrieval
Mobile Accessibility
Easy Integration
Automated Workflow Manager
Advanced Analytics
Cloud-based Accessibility
Top benefits of enterprise content management (ECM) systems:
Keep Track of All Your Information
Reduce Operating Costs
Save time
Improve Customer Service
Minimize Risk
Document Version Control
Picture an executive rushing from one client office to the next, updating the minutes of the feedback he received at the previous office on the official sheet using his iPhone or Android phone. The entries made by the executive are further accessed by employees sitting in the head office who use the details to generate reports for further information processing. This is possible with the advanced enterprise content management solutions provided by consultants who help businesses optimize their internal documents, datasheet, and content sharing capabilities. Are you aware of the latest techniques and tools being used to perfect enterprise content management?
To begin with, the most important advantage of using professionally generated enterprise content management solutions is that you can be assured that the system will work at its optimum for long. What are the common types of solutions that these enterprise content management consultants use to give you highly advanced data access? Here is the list of the commonly used content sharing systems that are being used in enterprise content management these days.
Content Sharing Systems that are used in ECM:
1. Drupal:
The ideal content sharing system that is known for its robust page building capacities can be used to develop both internal and external websites. Professionals using this CMS for enterprise content sharing and management excel with the in-built options provided by Drupal. The best part of using this CMS is that it is an open-source system that allows the ideas of thousands of users and developers to flow into the building of your enterprise content management systems.
2. Ektron:
This leading provider of content management products allows businesses to use the solutions to manage multi-websites. The framework can also be extended to allow customs control during component development by the professionals. Ektron has been used to design websites of many leading companies like Pfizer, Intel, Dove, Kellog's, Adidas, and many more. You could use the customizable features of this CMS provider to enrich the user experience of your enterprise content sharing portals.
3. MS Share Point:
The software that helps streamline business processing amidst dynamic environments; MS Share Point is definitely the answer for low-cost enterprise content development services using the latest tools and features. The main advantage of using MS Share Point is that you get to leverage content to improve web traffic flow to your website and increase collaboration amongst users.
Thus, in order to stay ahead of market competition, one needs to use the most recent tools and techniques through professionally generated enterprise content management solutions that will help you optimize enterprise performance.
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When you start a business, you have something bigger plan in your mind and to execute it you go all possible means. But, depending entirely on the human-empowered workforce can slow down your ambition. But, we have something new and extraordinary kinds of stuff to tell you about. Yes, guessed it right. We are talking about marketing automation platforms. When you leave the crucial tasks on software such as managing marketing campaigning, email marketing, and others, it ensures success to your business while keeping your staffs free from all these complicated tasks so that they focus on other important things to increase sales.
In this article, we will be talking about the top 10 important things that your marketing automation platforms integrated with CRM system software.
Email Marketing:
Email marketing is a crucial part of any business to customer engagement. CRM system helps you send mass emails on a scheduled time and you can make things possible in just setting up the system to complete the task. More than that, the marketing automation system offers professional grade email format that could be sent after a little modification.
Contact Management:
Accumulating a list of subscribers, filtering them out based on category and listing them, is a complicated task and finishing this always like winning the half of the battle. Your sales team get complete data of subscribers and even set up to the automation system to take follow-ups calls and emails.
Social Media Automation:
Sales representatives may have to spend an extra hour to keep a constant eye on social media activities while marketing automation software easily does this and also saves the information in CRM records.
Community Engagement Simplified:
Marketing automation platform easily identifies the engaging post and successfully sends a reply to automatically to the visitors who come seeking information.
Customer Journey:
Managing customers is an essential element for driving success. Automation system integrating with CRM system can easily handle the customer journey, right from sending emails and to show products and services.
Landing Pages:
You need a fine, engaging, eye-catching, simple, comprehensive and conversion optimised landing page where your customer would visit and take further course of action.
Customizable & All-in-one Dashboard:
When you automate your business process with full stack system, you get fully customised dashboard which lets you do all your marketing and management activities do without creating any complexities.
White Label Options:
This feature makes your brand presence felt everywhere by putting the brand logo on various platform. Mastering in marketing will lead to you complex procedure to follow and reach your target audience while the CRM system integrated with marketing automation can do this in no time that too without involving and human resource.
Conclusion:
Features are not limited to the mentioned level, rather there can end a number of features depending on the types of marketing automation you have integrated with your business process. You can explore more options there and get the maximum benefit as you can.
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