Integrated Marketing Communication

How to Construct an effective integrated marketing communications system?

IMC: "A planning process designed to assure that all brand contacts received by a customer or prospect for a product, service, or organization are relevant to that person and consistent over time.”
(American Marketing Association)

Example: The IMC planning process has been compared to composing a musical score. In a piece of music, while every instrument has a specific task, the goal is to have them come together in a way that produces beautiful music. It’s the same in IMC, where advertising might be your violin, social media your piano, public relations your trumpet and so on.

Different Channels/ Communication Tools 

• Marketing
• Advertising
• Sales
• Promotional tools (Search engine optimization (SEO) tactics
• Banner advertisements
• Webinars
• Blogs
• Traditional marketing communication channels (newspapers, billboards, magazines)

NB: It is important to choose the appropriate combination of digital and traditional communication tools for the target audience to build a strong brand consumer relationship. (boundless.com)

How to Choose the channels

"Hitting a Hole in One"

• Have a clear understanding about your target audience. That includes attitudes, interests, behaviors and expectations along with demographic factors. Think about their motivations and how they like to be communicated to. Which marketing channels they use. If they use social media, what are they talking about.
• Configure the pros and cons of marketing channels and select the most effective one to deliver the message than to focus on all of them

.

How to ensure successful integration internally and externally

Integration begins with the way a company and its agencies organize the process for creating and building brand images.
Internally, companies need to create a better working environment where everyone works together ensuring that all departments are integrated. Companies tend to have very well planned for communicating internally. Everyone should be aware of the IMC objectives of the company and should focus on working together towards them.
External integration is usually represented by a company's check over the outsourced activities or helping agents. This can be done through a representative or all employees could have access to outsourced activities.

When and Why Outsource

Outsourcing is needed when companies lack a specific expertise or bandwidth or a specific technology. A better approach is to outsource several marketing functions to specialists who use leading edge technologies. 
Companies want to manage more costs as variable expenses. Specific cost of outsourcing might appear to be higher than doing it yourself, there are internal costs hidden in maintaining internal fixed marketing assets. These include delays due to changing priorities, lack of support when it is needed etc.
Companies want to focus on insight than operations and need to grow more rapidly. During a high-growth phase, it is usually faster and often cheaper to outsource.
Companies want to mitigate their legal risk or launch an additional customer channel through outsourcing.

What kind of agencies are there ?

There are many agencies available in the market with different strengths and expertise but the company need to focus on which expertise are required to achieve their objective of IMC. Agencies use multiple communication channels to deliver the message and are expert in their field.

References

Forbes, Steve Olenski, Last assessed: Sep 16, 2013
URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2013/09/16/why-integrated-marketing-communications-is-more-important-than-ever/#7915ac0d2325
URL: http://www.cmo.com/slide-shows/10-reasons-to-outsource-more-of-your-marketing.html

American Association of Marketing, 
URL: http://imc.wvu.edu/about/what_is_imc

Marketing Communication, An integrated Approach by Paul Russell Smith 
URL: https://books.google.fi/books

URL: http://www.outsourcemarketing.com/whitepaper/why_outsource.pdf