Marketing Communications - Introduction
Suppose you manufacture a product to sell, then how would you reach out to your potential customers?
Until people come to know about your product, you cannot sell it. So, to popularize your product, you need to communicate with people. Today, there are various techniques of communication that helps market a product, improving the product reach and optimizing business performance.
What is Marketing Communication?
Marketing communications are those techniques that the company or a business individual uses to convey promotional messages about their products and services. Experts of marketing communication design different types of persuasive communication and send it to the target audience.
What are the Marketing Communication Tools?
There are different tools used to attract the target audience. However, which tool to use depends on various factors such as geographical location of your target audience, popularity of your products, etc. Following are the important tools popularly used for marketing communications −
- Sales Promotions and Campaign
- Personal Selling
- Press Release
Why is Marketing Communications Important?
The sole purpose of marketing communications is to increase the volume of sales by persuasive, informative, and positive messages. Marketing communication provides new facts through encouraging messages about products/services.
Marketing communications is meant to inform and persuade target audience and reinforce market credibility.
Marketing Communication Process
Communication simply means passing the information from the sender to the receiver. But in practice, this is a complex process that involves many other factors. However, Kotler has given one of the most effective models to define the marketing communication process (see the following diagram) −
The diagram explains various components − first two components are ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’. Second two components are ‘message’ and ‘media.’ The other features of this model are ‘encoding,’ ‘decoding,’ ‘response,’ and ‘feedback.’ And, the last feature is ‘noise.’ Noise is random and other competing messages that more often interfere with the communication.
This model emphasizes on the major key factors that play an important role in effective communication. It is imperative to know the market response and your target audience before you send any message.
Tips of Effective Marketing Communications
Following are the important points that you need to take care of for effective marketing communications −
Persuasive Message − Different customers have different requirements and expectations; therefore, it is very important to customize your persuasive messages accordingly.
Design − Every medium of communication (such as magazine, newspaper, TV, digital media, or brochure) has its own design and requirements. Therefore, you need to plan and design your messages accordingly.
Feedback − Must collect feedback from your audience; it will help you improve your marketing communication.
Marketing Communication Mix
Generally, marketing communication mix is an integrated term that includes personal selling, direct response marketing, sales promotion, media advertisement, and public relations. These are the tools associated with strategic activities to communicate with the target audience.
The following table illustrates the common platforms of Marketing Communication mix −
|Sales Promotion||Personal Selling||Advertisement||Public Relations|
|Programs||Sales meetings||Print media||Speech|
|Game, Contest, Lotteries, Coupons etc||Sales Presentations||Electronic media, Motion pictures||Press Release, Seminars|
|Gifts, Sampling||Incentive programs||Brochures, Booklets, Magazines, etc.||Charitable donations, Lobbying|
|Exhibition, Trade shows, Offers||Exhibition, Trade shows, Offers||Billboards, Displays, etc.||Sponsorships|
|Low interest financing||Brochure, mailing, etc.||Logos, Symbols,etc.||Publications, Company magazine, etc.|
|Rebates||Digital shopping||Audio & Video materials||Community Relations|
|Entertainment||TV shopping||Point-of purchase display||Events|
Check Your Progress
- What is marketing communications?
- Why is marketing communications important?
- Define marketing communications process.
- What do you understand by an effective marketing communications?
- Describe marketing communications mix.