What is a Marketing Communication Mix?
A successful company needs well-researched and well-developed marketing strategy. This helps the company to reach their customers. As an essential part of company’s marketing strategy, marketing communications mix sometimes also called the promotional mix. These are the tools that will help your company to reach out customer base, raising awareness of your product/brand and driving sustained purchases of your product or service offerings. It is very important to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of each tool of marketing communication mix while deciding how to properly utilize each tool to achieve your marketing objectives and goals. All companies try to balance the various parts of the mix this not only create an integrated approach to companies marketing communications but also devote enough resources for each component to be successful.
Here I would discuss each promotional mix tool in detail.
Advertising
Advertising is most effective and reliable way of grabbing and reaching company’s customers’ attention. Advertising uses mainly mass media platforms to deliver its message to their customers or general public. When planning your advertising strategy, companies should make it sure that their message is targeted as effectively as possible to your customers. For example, if a particular company sells cosmetics, they don’t need to put out advertisements during football games.
Personal Selling
Personal selling is most effective tool adopted by companies and it include setting sales appointments and meetings, making presentations and any type of one-to-one communication to reach targeted customers and strengthen company’s relationship with customers. Personal selling also allows companies to get for feedback and make adjustments. This is Relationship-oriented approach. Targeted buyers become more attentive and Sales force represents a long-term commitment. This is also most expensive of the promotional mix tools.
Sales Promotion
This is a reliable tool adopted by companies. Sales promotion includes a variety of formats like premiums, contests, samples, displays or incentives and demonstrations. This tool attracts the attention of customers and offers strong purchase incentives. This also stimulates quick response and used to accelerate Short-term sales. So this is not effective for building long-term brand preferences.
Public Relations
Public relations or PR is the process of building long-term public awareness through communicating regularly with company’s various target markets. The main purpose of this tool is to building goodwill towards your company and products or services of the company so that customers will think more favorably of your company and be more likely to purchase product. This includes press releases, product launches or celebrity endorsements, event sponsorships, to build trust and goodwill of company by presenting the company’s products and services in a positive light.
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing is considered the mixture of both sales promotions and personal selling. It is interactive communication with company’s targeted customers where the company’s message seeks a response from targeted customers. The most common formats used for direct marketing include E-mail and direct mail. These messages are sent to target customers with special offers or calls to action. This is also used to now the response of selected customers for new product launches. Other examples of direct marketing communication are online or print surveys, Mail-order clubs, and infomercials.
