What is this IMC you speak about?

There are a few definitions for Integrated Marketing Communications, but my favorite is from the Northwestern School of Journalism: “IMC is a strategic marketing process specifically designed to ensure that all messaging and communications strategies are unified across all channels and are centered around the customer.” Simply put, it is the principle that marketing is most effective if every marketing channel has communication that is aligned to the same core brand positioning.

Like many good marketing strategies, this initially seems like a “duh” principle. Clearly you don’t want to have marketing that makes your brand look like it has some sort of split-personality disorder like Gollum from The Hobbit. (“No, not social media! / It will cheat you, hurt you, LIE! / But, social media is our friend!”) But getting all your marketing communications aligned is trickier than you may think.

Why now?

IMC is not a new concept, but it’s more important than ever, as there are now more marketing channels than ever before. Back in the 50’s, marketing campaigns relied heavily on print, radio, and television. It didn’t take much to keep these aligned.

But, now with digital media, we have everything from newsletters to social media campaigns. Our marketing tool sheds are filled with new and effective tactics that range from broad messaging (your website’s homepage) to targeting more niche groups (via Instagram).

In bigger companies, each marketing channel will have a different manager, which is all the more reason to make sure that high level IMC strategies are in place.

Examples, please!

An IMC expert once told me that when he first engages a client, he would audit their entire property. This obviously includes their entire digital efforts, but also included things that they might not expect.

In the case of a restaurant, he’d visit the restaurant and bring a notepad and paper taking note of everything from the condition of the parking lot to the personalities of the waiters. If the brand messaging of the restaurant is elegance and fresh foods, it really doesn’t help if the dumpster is viewable from the parking lot. Every little piece that contradicts your brand messaging is a step back.

Likewise, let’s take a look at a brand that seems to come up on everyone’s list as the gold standard for marketing – Apple. Apple stands for innovation, simplicity and style. Not only do their commercials, print ads, and website all share the same design aesthetic, but they bring the same qualities to their retail stores and even their products. For example, their customer service center – the Genius Bar – is set up to be simple, easy, and effective, just like an iPad.

What’s bad IMC?

One of the most common pitfalls for brands in terms of IMC is the use of too many tools for social media. Some brands have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Foursquare, Yelp, etc., when their audience only really pays attention to one or two of those channels. What ends up happening here is that although one channel looks nice and engages in meaningful conversation, the others look like a barren wasteland that ignores their audience. Not good.

But even when you have someone concentrating specifically on your social media, they need to not only be aware of the messaging they are trying to convey, but the manner in which they are conveying that message. Sometimes, it doesn’t always go well (See Exhibit A and Exhibit  B below).

Exhibit A

Here’s a post from ZzzQuil early in 2014:

And here’s one of the many responses they got:

Exhibit B

And again, what seemed like a genuine post from Gap:

And as you’d expect, it didn’t get the best response.

Another thing that sometimes brands forget about is that even though you may not be able to directly alter the messaging for external sources, you still need to be aware of it and try and shape it best you can. This can be done by how you choose to respond to audience communication. If this is done improperly, it’s the same as having poor communication in the first place.

TL;DR

The point of IMC is to make sure that every piece of marketing is paid attention to. If every piece is in harmony, the overall result is much more powerful and the audience will be able to hear what your brand is trying to say. Each piece, no matter how small, shares the same responsibility in providing a strong brand identity. Each and every drop causes the flood.

The post It’s Raining Marketing: The Importance of Integrated Marketing Communications appeared first on Portent.

We live in a culture of YES. Positive reinforcement abounds. Grade school kids get awards simply for participating. Everyone is special. Encouragement is great, don’t get me wrong. Accolades are a big part of what motivates us in life.

In the business world, however, this can translate into dangerous decision making. Fear of killing creativity, squelching ambition, and being perceived as an office meanie has caused countless managers to green light projects that never should have seen the light of day.

NO can be incredibly powerful and effective as a means to pause—to force everyone involved to stop, evaluate, and ensure all the pieces are in place. Here are just 6 situations in which NO will help you run a successful marketing campaign.

1. No goal, no go

This might seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many projects fail because the parties involved have different understandings of what success looks like. Consider a conversation like this one:

Client: We want more traffic.
Account Strategist: Great! How much? And in what time frame?
Client: Well… I dunno… my VP just says she wants to see more.

Yup, it happens more often than I’d like. But herein lies a great opportunity. As the project lead, it’s your responsibility to ask the direct questions and get direct answers.

What kind of traffic? What kind of visitors? What do you want them to do once they arrive?

Bottom line: Until all the key stakeholders of a marketing project agree on its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), do NOT give it a green light. As a bonus, your team will recognize your leadership and respect you for demanding clarity.

2. Your goals are not supported by user behavior

Say you sell kitchen knives and you’re embarking on an SEO effort to increase organic traffic to your website. Getting more search traffic seems simple enough—rank well for “kitchen knives” and related terms. But you completely ignore the most highly searched phrase in the category: “cutlery.”

Instead of saying NO or asking for supporting data, like the above from Google’s Keyword Tool, your web manager changes all instances of “cutlery” on the site to “kitchen knives.”

Instead of the millions of searches you thought you’d garner, you are suddenly cut down to thousands. Ouch.

Bottom line: Do the research before you start an SEO effort and build your plan of action based on the data. If people on your team are making decisions based on their “gut” or “common sense,” put on the brakes and demand a review of available data sources.

3. Your team is chasing shiny objects

Your plan is set. You’ve got a budget and individual tactics lined up and in motion. And then your CFO forwards you an article about how a competitor acquired 10,000 Facebook followers by giving away free stuff. “We gotta do that too,” he says. “Get with the product team and figure out what we have in excess inventory that no one will miss.”

Sigh…

Say YES, and your marketing resources will be diverted into chasing the new project. Here’s what could happen:

• Your previously stellar, high ROI PPC campaigns sputter out. Revenue gone.
• Your creative team is tied up making a shiny app for your Facebook page, so, alas, your lead-nurturing emails are nurturing no more.
• In the weeks that follow, you watch your sales drop off precipitously, despite leading into a seasonally strong time of year.

Say NO, and you can keep doing what’s working, while establishing a timeline for testing Facebook campaigns for increased social engagement, search visibility improvement, and potential lead generation. Because those are all excellent goals. But not at the expense of your core marketing tactics.

Bottom line: Red herrings are everywhere. Beware. And don’t be afraid to manage up. Your boss wants to hear you say NO when it means you’ll make more money for his business.

4. You can’t measure your efforts

Over the last several years, you’ve seen solid—not amazing, but steady—growth with a diversified Internet marketing campaign. Your PPC campaigns are driving a positive ROI. Your organic traffic has doubled in the last year.

But your CMO thinks the online space is tapped out. He is convinced that a billboard campaign in your five biggest markets is going to be your company’s saving grace this year. So you pause PPC, allow SEO and content to stagnate, and buy up all that highway signage.

You’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this. Billboards are great for branding and getting a message out to the legions of distracted, texting, cell-phone-yammering, yelling-at-the-kids-in-the-back-seat road warriors. They’re not great for measuring ROI.

Bottom line: Never put your eggs in one basket. Or into a black box even. So many cliché expressions apply here. High spend and no way to measure results? Just say no.

5. There are too many cooks in the kitchen

You’ve been there—a giant conference room with an appropriately giant conference table and 17 people seated around it. Marketing is there. Creative services is there. IT is there. The guy from accounting is there (what’s his name again?). Don’t forget about the intern (aka your boss’ nephew) your boss forced you to hire. The meeting’s topic: the name for your upcoming Pinterest promotion.

Oh, how I wish this was an exaggeration.

Committee-based decision making has its time and place. It’s often essential when creating a long-term roadmap or discussing a major strategic shift. It’s how you ensure the right goals are set (see #1 above) and get buy-in from your team. But in marketing, it very rarely makes sense to have representatives from multiple departments providing input on tactical decisions.

Bottom line: Everyone’s opinion does not count equally. Identify task owners and give them the authority to make (informed) autonomous decisions.

6. There’s no long view

Your CFO wanders into your office and demands to know why you’re spending $100,000 on SEO over the next year. The work started two months ago and the result? Minimal growth. “Why aren’t we spending more on PPC?” she wonders. “It’s much more scalable.”

Oh boy.

You could easily agree to the change. SEO isn’t reaping benefits now. In the short term, you’ll almost certainly make more money on PPC.

But she’s dead wrong. PPC doesn’t scale the way SEO does. Even with optimally-structured campaigns and ad groups and quality scores in the 8s and 9s, you’ll still pay for each and every click. And you’re playing in a much smaller universe. One August 2012 study claims that an astounding 94% of UK searchers click on organic results. At Portent, we subscribe to a 75/25 split on organic vs. paid. So, conservatively, if you’re focused on the short term and investing more time and money into PPC, you’re only competing for 25% of potential search volume. Yikes!

Bottom line: Don’t let the fear of losing in the short term get in the way of long-term success. Just ask any Red Sox fan and they’ll tell you waiting 86 years for a World Series title was painful, but sooooo worth it. Of course, your SEO campaign won’t take quite that long to bear fruit.

When it comes down to it, we all want to see our projects succeed. And that can be so much more rewarding than temporarily placating those around us through misguided agreement. When have you said NO and lived to tell your tale of achievement? Tell me all about it in the comments below!

The post 6 Reasons “No” Will Save Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on Portent.

So how can a business build a successful non-commercial "commercial" presence
in social media? By being active, genuine, creative and, most of all, keeping the
business angles on the back-burner. As an example of this, here is my Facebook strategy
for businesses just starting out in social media. I like using Facebook for this
because Facebook is better suited for people who are already popular. If no one
knows you when you arrive on Facebook you will have to do much work before you can
create influence.

A Facebook Social Media Strategy

Facebook is a closed membership community built for people, not businesses. If
your account does not have a person’s name as the user name or if they discover
that you are not a real person, Facebook will delete your account.

Messages are the simplest and most common form of communication on Facebook.
They occur in different formats and different places They can be one-to-many communications
or one-to-one. Most messages come in the form of:

• Personal updates
  When you place a message on your profile it appears on all of your Facebook
  friends’ Facebook | Friends pages (status updates, notices). If you write on
  somebody’s wall it will appear on all of their friend’s home pages.
• Group messages
  If you are the administrator of a group with 5,000 or fewer members you can
  send a message to all of the members. These are great because they go into people’s
  personal inboxes.
• Event invitations
  Members can send RSVP style event invitations to their friends and to members
  of groups that they administer.

Hopefully by now you realize that The first key to successful push promotion on Facebook is to have lots of friends like Luis Perez does.

The second key to Facebook success is to create anticipation.

Facebook members, especially the popular and influential ones, receive a crushing
stream of messages. If people do not look forward to your messages they will skip
over them or quickly forget them.  It’s difficult to get around this by using
frequency and multiple impressions because it will earn you a reputation as a spammer.

The best way for a business to build a following from scratch  on Facebook

Identify groups that contain your prospect or customer base or targets

• Match your industry
• Match your niche
• Focus on systems or technologies that are prominent in your own business
  or industry

Identify the leaders and key people in these groups and solicit them for friendship
with custom crafted personal messages

Spend a week following your new Facebook friends’ messages

• Keep track of the people they engage with.
• Note what they converse about.
• Note their status messages.
• Note which topics and styles of messages seem to drive the most interest
  and response.
• Note the things they do NOT write about.

Join the conversation

• Update your status before 9am, at noon and at 4pm each day.
• Write noncommercial messages that fit within the tenor of the larger conversation.
  Begin with three or four each day and spaced apart. If a message thread picks-up
  popularity then respond with the same frequency as you would in a natural conversation.
  Otherwise hold back. You are building goodwill, not prominence.

Add friends

• Draft a message to ask for friendships, one that sounds personable, and
  keep it handy.
• Request friendship from other people who converse frequently with your Facebook
  friends. Don’t try to add everyone all at once. Pace it out.
• Approve all requests for friendship from others.

Become a leader

• Leadership is within your grasp, just wait until after you become accepted
  as a regular.
• Write articles on your own website’s blog, articles that extend and expand
  on topics from Facebook. Then, message your Facebook friends with a link.
• Celebrate other members’ news. Congratulate them and retell their story
  to your own friends.
• Stay out of arguments. Avoid taking sides.

Get creative

• Take your Facebook conversation to other Web 2.0 platforms. For example,
  you could tell people that you’ll be on twitter for an hour and welcome live
  messages.
• Hold an event offline. If lots of people in your Facebook community are
  going to a conference or will be in the same place at the same time, host a
  dinner or a party or a game or an activity where everyone can get together.
• Hold a contest. You could give an iPhone to a random person who adds you
  as a Facebook friend or subscribes to your blog during the next week.

Now You Can Market your message

• Hype your business indirectly. Never tell people your product or service
  is great and that they should try it.
• Tell people what you are working on and why you think it’s so cool.
• Let people know you are excited.
• Drop updates and insights. Make it sound like you are telling people insider
  information.
• Remember, Never sell directly!!! You’re more savvy than that.
• If you absolutely must sell then make it sound absolutely genuine and not
  resemble a sales pitch.

The post Killer Facebook Marketing Strategy appeared first on Portent.