Marketing communication is a crucial and complex part of a company’s marketing strategy (MarCom). MarCom is a broad term for all your marketing communications and media.
Marketing communication includes advertising, direct marketing, branding, packaging, your website, printed materials, public relations initiatives, sales presentations, sponsorships, trade show appearances, and more.
What is MarCom?
Marcom, or marketing communication, is how companies directly or indirectly communicate, educate, and enlighten consumers about their products, services, and brands.
Marcom gives a business and its brands a voice and enables them to interact with and communicate with consumers.
It helps companies link their brands to specific individuals, places, events, experiences, and emotions. It may also assist companies in presenting a product’s features, applications, justifications for usage, beneficiaries, and value to the intended market.
Objectives of MarCom
Communication in marketing has two objectives. Creating and maintaining demand for the product comes first. The sales cycle should be shortened as well.
Making a choice
Developing preference is typically a long-term project that aims to employ communication strategies to help establish your brand or business in the minds of your target audience.
The organization must invest significant time and attention into positioning and building a brand since it requires consistency across several dimensions, including product, pricing, distribution, and communication activities.
Remember that building brand preference will affect market share, profitability, and even access to talent, resulting in long-term value for the organization.
Shortened sales cycle
Supporting your sales and channel partners in locating, attracting, and delivering a customer is necessary to reduce the sales cycle. Understanding the consumer’s purchasing process is essential to shortening the sales cycle.
The consumer’s processes while making a purchase are shown in the diagram below. Through market analysis and conversations with salespeople, MarCom professionals must learn how they may help hasten the process.
There is a large amount of client education in the primary phases of the sales cycle for high-tech products. MarCom must concentrate on creating, packaging and giving pertinent consumer information throughout the purchasing process to meet this need for knowledge.
Generally speaking, communication strategies to accelerate the sales cycle have a more tactical bent than those used to build a brand. The legitimacy of your plan would be questioned if one reason were to take precedence over the other. Thus your strategy for attaining the two MarCom objectives must be balanced. To achieve this balance, you must collaborate closely with sales and customer-facing channel partners.
Process of MarCom
Sending, receiving, and processing data are all part of Marcom. In one of our earlier postings, we used a real-world example to describe the major components of the Marcom process. There are two people involved (the sender and the receiver), four operations (encoding, decoding, response, and feedback), and two communication tools (message and media). Anything that disrupts the intended message is referred to as noise.
To ensure that the target audience hears a consistent message, marketers must be knowledgeable about every step of the communication process.
The message can be heard above the clutter and noise with an adequately integrated Marcom process, boosting market share, revenues, and customer loyalty. An effective campaign integrates all marketing activities.
Steps involved in MarCom
The following steps are involved in Marcom:
Identify the target demographic
The target audience might include the general public, influencers, groups, present users, potential consumers, and users of the company’s goods. The target audience’s makeup affects the message, medium, setting, and communication style.
Identify Marcom objectives
What benefits do firms expect from the Marcom process? Possible Marcom objectives include:
- Increasing the target audience’s awareness of the existence of the brand or product.
- You may build brand loyalty by enabling the target audience to recognise or remember the brand for them to make a purchase.
- Helping the target audience understand the nature of the product and how it satisfies consumer needs is a critical component of understanding the product.
- Conviction involves influencing how the target market perceives the product.
Selecting a communication method
Choosing the most excellent Marcom channel might be subjective or personal.
Personal influence can help if the product is expensive or risky (such as stock recommendations). People regularly ask friends for recommendations for a good hotel, attorney, physician, accountant, or financial advisor. They do so because they trust the advice. A personal Marcom channel might also be a celebrity endorsing a product. Positive word of mouth can lead to organic growth. Examples include email marketing, social media, online marketing, and other customized marketing platforms.
The message is distributed via non-personal Marcom channels, including advertising, sales promotions, events, and public relations. Businesses fund events and charitable acts to attract a wide range of potential customers.
Make a marketing spending plan.
The spending for Marcom varies from business to business. A B2C company, like Snickers, can devote 35% of its sales to marketing, whereas a heavy industry company can only save 5% of its sales to marketing. There are four techniques to establish the Marcom budget:
- Setting a budget that a business can afford is a practical strategy.
- The percentage of sales approach is the practice of basing budgeting on a percentage of sales.
- The competitive parity strategy relies on budgets on how much a competitor spends on Marcom.
- The target and task approach includes establishing the objectives, outlining the tasks required, and projecting costs.
Measuring MarCom ROI
The effectiveness of every Marcom plan must be assessed. Confident marketers survey customers to find out whether they remember the message, when they are likely to remember it, how they felt about it, and whether their opinions of the brand have changed due to the Marcom campaign.
But measuring Marcom’s effectiveness goes beyond polls and forms. Assessing the ROI of Marcom is essential to determining what is connecting with the target audience because the Marcom mix uses a variety of content assets to reach that audience, including PDFs, videos, photographs, GIFs, and PPTs.
Wrapping Up
Marketing communication (MarCom) is the messaging and medium used to reach your target audience. Its two main objectives are to increase product demand and preference and shorten the sales cycle. Marcom may influence customer perceptions, increase sales, and impact shareholder value to assist a company in building brand equity.
