Developing an Integrated Marketing Communications Program– Part II

In our previous blog, Developing an Integrated Marketing Communications Program– Part I, we discussed the 10 steps to implement strategic integrated marketing. Today we will discuss two of those ten steps in detail.

Step 1: Become aware of barriers to integrated marketing

Despite many advantages, there are real as well as perceptual barriers to implementing an integrated marketing communications approach. Some of these are listed below:

• Lack of strategy and managerial expertise
• Traditional, conservative marketing efforts
• Conflicts between short-term sales needs and long term marketing goals
• Lack of a measurement and evaluation process
• A marketing budget that seems small to put an integrated approach into action

aMarketForce has been there, done that, and can help in crossing all these barriers for designing and implementing an integrated marketing plan.

What next?

Step 2: Prepare a master marketing plan including marketing strategies, campaigns and yearly/quarterly goals

The next step is the creation of a master marketing plan, including the components below:

• Understanding the market
  • SWOT Analysis
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Product Positioning
• Definition of your target market segment
  • Geography
  • Demographics
  • Behavioural segmentation
  • Psychographic segmentation
  • Product-related segmentation
• Marketing objectives(short term and long term)
  • Brand awareness
  • Increase sales
  • Increase market share
  • Increase website traffic
  • Increase leads
  • Repeat – reinforce purchase decision and more
• Marketing budget
  
• Marketing strategies and campaign execution plans with defined campaign goals
  • It is important to sync marketing tactics with strategies in order to achieve desired goals.
• Messaging and content
  
• Tracking and performance evaluation

aMarketForce helps in developing integrated marketing plans using established processes and strategies based on client requirements. aMarketForce clearly understands business challenges and is focused on helping companies capitalize on their marketing efforts with limited time and resources.

In our next Integrated Marketing blog posts we will discuss the next steps for implementing integrated marketing. To know more about our services request a whitepaper.