Integrated marketing communications is more than just communications — it’s actually a point of view, a way of looking at how you interact with customers and prospects at each stage of their purchase process. The first step in really executing a program like that is to begin to listen to them and understand what they look for when they make a purchase decision. You also need to understand the purchase process. Not your selling process, because that’s usually very different than the customer’s purchase process.
What we do is look at that in terms of who’s involved in the process, what role do they play in the process, and then what kinds of messages are they looking for. This is really important in B to B, because of the importance of buying committees and if any marketer is involved in trying to communicate to a buying committee. So those people all have a role. That role revolves around a specific aspect of information that they need in order to fulfill their role in the process. And they’re looking for that information at a specific time, and in a specific place, and they want it in a specific way.
And so an integrated program really needs to then define: what media are we going to use to reach those different audience segments at the time and the place when they want the information. So it’s more than just sending out messages, it’s actually about being available to them and being able to respond to them when they need information. And that’s — really powerful integrated programs provide that kind of dialogue. The really powerful media are often the non-traditional media. And you need to understand — and they’re powerful because they usually reach someone on a personal level when the information that they provide is important to that person to fulfill a role.
The name of the game is really to define at what point in the purchase path each medium needs to be focused on and then develop specific functions for each medium that tell you how that medium is going to push people down that purchase path and how it’s going to connect with other media to give people more and more information and to make that relationship with the brand more robust as they go down that purchase path.
What we haven’t really I don’t think understood to the degree that we should is that each one of those contact points needs to be memorable, because people get so many messages from so many different sources raining down upon them all the time that they need to be able to notice that and immediately link that message to our brand. And when they do that the integration becomes powerful because they remember it as part of an experience as opposed to just an individual exposure to a message.