What is IMC? The role of IMC in brand building.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is responsible for helping businesses define and communicate their message, building a consistent brand image. This is one of the factors that contributes to brand development, expanding reach to the target audience, enhancing the value of products and services while saving costs and achieving high efficiency.

What is IMC? 

IMC stands for Integrated Marketing Communication, a form of communication that synchronizes and closely links marketing activities, bringing brands closer to their target customers. Messages are defined and widely promoted, aligning with the company's direction, thanks to IMC campaigns.

Accordingly, each campaign will include the following main tasks:

• Advertising: Deliver your message to customers through advertising campaigns on social media, television, newspapers, or radio, etc.
• Public Relations (PR): Maintain interaction with the public through the media.
• Direct Marketing: Through email and phone calls, send messages from the brand to customers.
• Sales Promotion: Implement promotional programs, discounts, and gifts for customers to encourage purchases.
• Digital Marketing: Brand promotion on digital platforms is becoming increasingly popular today, often combined with other forms of online advertising.
• Sales (Personal Selling): Provide consultation and finalize orders directly with customers.

A comprehensive Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) campaign helps businesses convey a consistent and unified message throughout the brand promotion process. Besides enhancing the value of services and products, it also provides a communication opportunity to create a lasting impression on customers. So, who are the target audiences for IMC?

Target audience for integrated marketing campaigns

Current customers, future customers, users in general, etc., are the specific customer groups that an integrated marketing campaign aims to target. Specifically:

• Existing customers: These are customers who have trusted and used the company's products and services. They are a target group that needs to maintain relationships and strengthen trust so that they continue to support the brand. IMC campaigns often involve sending emails, making phone calls to nurture relationships with existing customers, and offering special promotions tailored specifically for them.
• Potential customers: The target audience needs to be targeted in the communication campaign. Various forms of advertising and PR are implemented to help the brand reach these "new customers," drive sales conversions, and generate profits for the business.
• Consumers in general: In addition to the two key customer groups mentioned above, IMC also targets all consumers, helping to increase brand awareness and competitiveness in the market. Currently, through various media channels, promotional campaigns are easily implemented, with wide coverage, reaching audiences both domestically and internationally.
• Partners and stakeholders: This is also the goal that IMC aims for. The overall campaign helps businesses expand their customer base while attracting more new shareholders, suppliers, and partners. Building and strengthening the trust of this group will give your business the opportunity to integrate and grow even more significantly.
• Community and society: IMC campaigns help businesses build their image within the community, enhance their credibility, and foster trust among consumers.

Thanks to consistency and uniformity in messaging, integrated marketing communications (IMC) campaigns offer numerous benefits to businesses. Not only does it create a competitive advantage, but IMC also helps brands reach a wider range of target audiences, boosting sales conversions.

What role does IMC play for businesses?

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) plays a crucial role for businesses. As mentioned above, integrated marketing campaigns offer high consistency, helping to increase competitive advantage and improve customer reach. More specifically, here are the roles of IMC:

• Create a consistent message: Synchronize the message across all media channels that the business chooses as its marketing channels. Seamless, interconnected content increases customer trust in the brand.
• Enhancing communication effectiveness: Synchronizing and integrating the entire communication channel system accelerates the effectiveness of brand promotion. Furthermore, the close connection of messaging systems will create a synergistic effect, increasing the potential for wider reach within the community.
• Optimizing implementation costs: This is one of the benefits that IMC brings to businesses. Synchronizing marketing campaigns helps reduce costs, such as saving on advertising costs and video production costs. Instead of implementing separate campaigns that lead to budget waste, businesses can focus on developing a comprehensive strategy, increasing efficiency and optimizing costs.
• Increase customer accessibility: IMC is implemented across multiple channels, from online to offline, helping to increase the effectiveness of reaching the target audience.
• Enhance brand reputation: An integrated marketing campaign that is unified and synchronized across all aspects helps customers easily recognize the brand and build credibility. This is one of the advantages of IMC, because when a brand has a clear communication "color," it stands out more among competitors in the market.
• Meeting market demand: Integrated marketing communications (IMC) can adapt flexibly to market trends and customer behavior. When necessary, businesses can adjust their communication strategy without affecting other campaigns that would occur if implemented individually. Businesses will be able to adapt and respond to changes in the market.
• Increase customer engagement: Integrated marketing communications (IMC), combined with various other communication campaigns, helps to improve the effectiveness of interaction between brands and customers. This allows businesses to better understand consumer needs, desires, and habits, extracting essential details to refine communication campaigns and increase conversion rates.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) helps businesses build a strong, comprehensive communication strategy, while simultaneously enhancing brand presence and value, improving customer relationships, and optimizing costs.

Limitations of Integrated Marketing Campaigns

Above are the benefits and advantages of IMC for businesses. However, this marketing method still has certain limitations. Specifically:

• High initial cost: Although the campaign can save businesses significant costs after implementation, in the initial stages, businesses must allocate a budget for market research, strategy development, integration of technology platforms, and more.
• Challenges in multi-channel coordination: Implementing multi-channel communication and integrating various marketing activities can be challenging to manage, especially when each channel has its own characteristics, operating methods, and target audience. Therefore, businesses operating IMC must have tight management and clearly defined strategies and guidelines.
• High level of expertise and skills are required: Businesses need a skilled team with expertise in fields such as communications, marketing, and technology to run campaigns smoothly and effectively.
• It takes a lot of time to complete: Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) takes a long time because businesses need to build and implement a comprehensive strategy. Therefore, it is difficult for businesses that need quick results to implement IMC.
• Performance is difficult to measure: For IMCs, monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of each channel can be challenging.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) offers numerous benefits in terms of communication effectiveness and customer experience, but it also comes with challenges related to cost, management, and staffing requirements. Businesses need to carefully consider and plan for the long term when implementing IMC to achieve the best results.

Popular IMC tools today

There are many tools used in IMC campaigns, such as:

• Influencer Marketing: Using social media influencers to convey brand messages helps reach a wider audience and increase credibility. Popular platforms include Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
• Content Marketing: Content is created with the goal of attracting customers and increasing sales conversion rates for businesses. Popular forms of content marketing include blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.
• Marketing Automation: Sending emails and providing customer service using automation software helps optimize time and reach more customers. Commonly used tools include HubSpot, Marketo, and Mailchimp.
• Programmatic Advertising: Automating online advertising sales aims to accurately identify the target audience and individuals that businesses want to reach.
• Omni-channel Marketing: To provide customers with a seamless and continuous experience, multi-channel marketing is implemented from online to offline.
• Chatbots and AI-driven Marketing: Through chatbots, businesses can chat and interact with customers. This tool can help optimize consultation time, especially by providing 24/7 customer service, replacing human labor.
• Interactive Marketing: Create interactive experiences that allow customers to participate, increasing their interest in the brand.
• User-Generated Content: Encourage users to create and share content about the brand. For example, create videos reviewing products or services.
• Social Media Listening: Analyze and monitor social media reviews and consumer feedback. Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social can help. Based on the results, brands can customize their strategies accordingly.
• Native Advertising: Place integrated advertisements without impacting the user experience. For example, a news feed from a sponsor running at the bottom of a program screen.

In summary, IMC is a communication strategy that offers many benefits to businesses. By integrating modern communication tools, IMC helps optimize costs, reach a large customer base, and increase credibility and revenue for businesses.