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How students pursuing an MBA in marketing can master integrated marketing communications
May 09, 2017
Integrated marketing communications can amplify a business' message to an impressive degree. Here's how students at MBA school can master this process.
Marketing offers great ways for businesses to attract new clients, share successes, and carve out their space in the business landscape. Today, different channels—from the internet to print to radio and beyond—offer opportunities for marketing. This makes it easier than ever for businesses to use a variety of marketing channels to get their message out and reach potential clients no matter where they are.
To get the most for their marketing budgets, many of today’s companies use a system of integrated marketing communications. This involves leveraging a few important channels at once and maintaining a consistent message across all of them. This can amplify the strength of a message and allow a business to appear consistent and well organized.
If you want to master integrated marketing communications, earning your MBA in Marketing can help. In the meantime, here are a few tips to get you started:
Learn to select the right marketing channels at MBA School
One of the first steps of crafting an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) campaign is determining which marketing channels it will leverage. To decide, conduct research to uncover the advertising channels that will allow you to reach the audience you want to engage with. Depending on your business, this could mean prioritizing Instagram and YouTube ads to reach enthusiastic, young followers, or perhaps magazine and TV ads to engage wealthier middle-aged clients. Whatever you discover, focus your marketing resources only on the few channels that are likeliest to reach the audience you want.
An MBA in Marketing will provide you with a deep understanding of how to conduct effective marketing research into your ideal customers and how to select appropriate marketing channels. A good training program will expose you to insights from leading academics and industry experts working in these areas, and will ensure that you have the latest knowledge to draw from when planning out marketing channel targeting. Once you have this skill-set, you will be well positioned to select the best channels to target IMC campaigns to the right audience.
Implement effective brand management for Integrated Marketing Communications
With IMC, it's important that advertisements created for various channels all align with the common message your company wants to build for its brand. They should also employ the same slogans, images, and other components when possible. This helps to create a sense of familiarity and makes it easier for audiences to recognize and engage with the campaign, no matter which channels they see it on.
A great example of consistency in an IMC campaign is Coca Cola's "Taste the Feeling" campaign, which is featured in TV commercials, billboards, online multimedia games, as well as several other channels. This campaign seeks to associate Coke products with strong feelings of love and happiness, and every ad created is aligned with that goal. For instance, the people featured in images are holding a Coke and smiling; those in videos are dancing with Coke in their hands, etc. The company's distinctive logo and carefully selected fonts and images are reused across online, multimedia, and physical marketing ads to further promote consistency.
Employing a similar level of coordination and care in crafting integrated marketing communications can help your company demonstrate professionalism and deliberateness—both qualities that clients appreciate. To master these skills without putting your career on hold, consider enrolling in a part time MBA program, such as that offered at WU Executive Academy. Doing so will allow you to explore important topics relating to brand management and IMC strategy while you continue to work in your current position. You will quickly be able to implement new techniques to achieve well-integrated campaigns in your workplace and reach new heights of success in your ongoing career.
