Buyers will not attract to your products and service until you make them advocate and aware. For this reason, you need to communicate the feature, attributes and benefits of your offerings with them. Nowadays, offline and online communication strategies enable marketers to wider their product reach and customer base.
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What is Marketing Communication? (MarCom)
Marketing communication (MarCom) is the process of combining different marketing messages and media in order to communicate with the market. If the promotional campaign is good, then it creates a good response in the audience. However, marketing communication often deals with the problems of the target audience like immediate awareness, image, and preferences.
When we talk about marketing communication, then it has some limitations. Like it doesn’t create short-term results from the targeted customers, and the high cost.
Marketing communication is a mix of advertising, public relations, mass media, social media, branding, packaging and other print material that can help you to convey your message with the market.
Most marketers have been using marketing communication in recent years. It’s to establish a relationship with customers in various stages like post utilization, selling, and pre-selling. Since there are different types of customers, therefore, marketers develop various communication programs to target different segments of the market.
Objectives of Marketing Communication
The marketing communication has got three main objectives, and they’re as follows;
To Communicate
The primary objective of marketing communication is to share ideas, thoughts, and views with the target audience. Companies do it through public relations, sales promotion, personal selling, and advertising. However, the goal of effective communication is to get things done.
While developing the marketing messages, make sure that it’s truthful, accurate, and useful to all the parties. It’s because of the persistence of the market communication, it should maintain integrity.
To Compete
The second objective of marketing communication is to compete in the market, and it offers many marketing opportunities. It’s possible that the competitors are offering the same product at a similar price, and in the same store. However, marketing communication allows you to differentiate your product/service in order to appeal to the target customer, and it helps to develop brand loyalty. If a company is not following the MC strategy, then it would appear unattractive to the customers.
To Convince
Convincing the customers is also the main objective of marketing communication. If you convince them well, then it would lead them to take the desired action whatever you want. Therefore, marketers should communicate in a convincing manner. Sometimes, you have to reconvince the same customers, because a customer won’t buy your product/service over and over again.
Element of Marketing Communication Process
It’s important to be familiar with the process of marketing communication in order to be effective in the communication. Some of the main elements of the MC process are as follows;
- Sender. It’s the person that is conveying the information or message to the party or group of people.
- Encoding. It’s the process of converting your ideas/thoughts/emotions into meaningful symbols like gestures, body language, signs, or words.
- Message. It’s a combination of signs and symbols that senders are imparting.
- Media. The media is the channel that the sender is using to transmit the message to the receiver.
- Decoding. Decoding is the process of converting signs and symbols into meaningful thoughts or messages.
- Receiver. Receive is the person that the sender has sent the message to and the person who received the message.
- Response. It’s the reaction that the receiver shows before sending the message.
- Feedback. It’s the feedback that the receiver of the message sends back to the sender.
- Noise. It’s the unwanted distortion that occurs during the communication process, and it causes the receiver to comprehend the wrong meaning of the message.
Communication would be effective if the encoded and the decoded messages are the same. Most importantly, the signs and symbols that the sender is sending should be understandable to the receiver.
Types of Marketing Communication
Some of the main types of marketing communication mix are as follows;
Advertising
Advertising is a very powerful and effective type of marketing communication. It allows you to reach a wide target audience in terms of message delivery and frequently. However, it’s a very costly type of marketing strategy, and you should try to make the most of it. There are various types of media tools to reach different types of audiences.
You should allocate a specific budget for advertising, whether it’s for advertisement or Ad creation. If you’re creating an ad by yourself requires you to have the team or the skill/expertise, then it would be very cost-efficient. It’s important to keep in mind that Ads companies charge a plethora of money to create an ad.
Public Relations
Public relations also fall under the category of marketing communication and it helps you to spread brand awareness in a subtle way. That’s how it’s different from advertisement. However, the advertising method follows the subjective, self-serving, and aggressive approach, whereas the public relations follow the objective and softer approach. In terms of cost, it offers free communication.
Sales Promotion
Sales promotion is a very famous type of communication where you offer discounts, and it compels customers to make an instant purchase decision. It helps businesses to increase the sale. You might be wondering how to make use of the sale promotion in order to increase the sale.
Many marketers use sales promotions techniques like coupons and discounts to attract the attention of customers. It allows you to reach more people because of its popularity. However, they use devices like Cetera, window signs, overhead signs, and shelf talkers.
Personal Selling
Personal selling is the direct and face-to-face type of marketing communication. Connecting via online channels like telephone, internet, or emails are also falls under the category of personal selling. The personal selling technique allows you to receive direct feedback from customers, with customer feedback you don’t whether your marketing strategy is working or not.
Mass Media
Mass media comprises electronic and print media, and it allows you to reach a mass audience at a specific price. If your business or company has media marketing, then you should use this communication channel. However, it’s a traditional one-way marketing communication method, where you only send marketing messages without getting any feedback. Sometimes, you don’t know whether the right audience has received the message or not.
Social Media
Social media is the most recent form of marketing communication through various social media platforms like Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, etc. It allows you to approach the mass target customers directly without any boundary restrictions across the world. However, social media is the modern form of mass media that allows you to have two communications and receive feedback from customers.
Tips of Effective Marketing Communications
Some of the important tips that you should keep in mind in order to have effective marketing communication are as follows;
Persuasive Message
The needs want, expectations, and requirements of various customers are different, and that’s why you should target different customers based on their needs, instead of treating everyone with the same offer
Design
Various media channels like brochures, digital media, TV, social media, newspaper, and magazines have different designs and settings. Therefore, you should develop different designs and messages for different channels.
Feedback
You should reach out to your target audience and ask them for their feedback, and it would help you to rectify your marketing message.
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