Course: SLF 130 Marketing Practices for the Small Business

Unit 3 Reading

SubTabs

- Unit 3
- Table of Contents (Selected)
- Unit 3 Glossary (Selected)

IMC Page 1

Reading adapted from Marketing: Boundless Marketing Open Textbook, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
www.boundless.com/marketing, CC BY-SA 2.0

 |  | IMC - Integrated Marketing Communications
As one of the 4 Ps, promotion comprises marketing efforts used to educate consumers, increase demand, differentiate brands, and sell products.

IMC unifies promotional tools across all marketing communication channels. Customers – and potential customers – expect consistent messages from a business or brand.  Businesses that do not put forth a consistent image can suffer. For example, if a promotional piece hypes good customer service, a rude receptionist or telephone operator NEGATES the positive message. If a catering service serves a high-end clientele, every brochure, menu, business card, or other “piece of paper” associated with the business must convey a sense of elegance and quality.
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is an approach to creating a unified and seamless brand experience for consumers across media channels.

IMC includes all promotional messages.
Integrated marketing communications is an approach used by organizations to brand and coordinate their marketing efforts across multiple communication channels.

As marketing efforts have shifted from mass advertising to
niche marketing, companies have increasingly used IMC to develop cost-effective campaigns that deliver consumer value while reducing marketing costs.

Mass audience advertising used to be the norm, but for small businesses, the “one size fits all” approach of mass media – TV advertising and ads in broad-reach large newspapers – sends a lot of costly messages to non-target market groups. Marketing messages run the risk of being overlooked and ignored if they are not relevant to consumer needs and wants.

The Internet has allowed small businesses to carefully tailor messages to those who are like-minded and most likely to be interested in a business’s products or services.