IMC Week 6 - 8

This article talks about tips in combining social media and direct mail for small businesses. As we all know, social media has become entrenched in our lives. It also provides affordable cheap ways to advertise businesses. On the other hand, direct mail is popular but it can be costly. So by combining the two together we can see the many benefits of reaching a wide range of consumers as well as the ideal low cost of advertising it. This article provides tips in how effective we can use these tools together to create and even more effective tool for small businesses.  I enjoyed reading this article as it provided many examples of different businesses that have not adapted or can improve their business through social media when using direct mail. 

This article also list a few points about effective communication mix. This article can be  combined with “developing effective marketing communication mix” article in gaining a basic idea in how to create a better communication mix.

This article has outlined a clear step by step process. I agree that the marketing plan has to be tailored for each organisation as an individualized plan will ensure potential maximum success. I believe that all of the 5 points provided are important to an organization. The 5 steps as follows, identifying your target audience is important because it decides what communication channel techniques so that we are able to reach customers. Creating key messages is a very important key point because you need to get the brands message to be able to communicate to the audiences. Identifying your apertures presents opportunities/openings you can use and target your audience segments. Then you move onto writing the plan, this is the process where it helps execute the previous steps decisions, this also helps to provide a guideline in how effective the communication mix is. In this step you have to make sure your objective is realistic. The last point is to identify your tactics. This means aligning strategies and apertures that best meet your objectives.

This article provides easy to understand guidelines as it provides examples.

In creating an effective communication mix, the development strategies the article focuses on 4 aspects. They are target customers, communication channels, cost estimates and measuring. But first of all it indicates that the marketing mix created needs to contain combinations of advertising, sales promotions, public relations, direct marketing and interactive marketing. Not all has to be used, but the use of more than one of these will give you benefits of different strategies targeting different customers. Thus the business endorses a larger and enhanced foundation.

The 4 aspects provided by the article are clear and informative. To incorporate these steps into your business I believe will be effective for small and new businesses.  Looking at the 4 points, I believe that the main focus should be on targeting customers and channel. With communication channels, there are many innovated tools nowadays such as using facebook and twitter etc., that help indicate the size of the customer base which then links to what customers to target.

As technology has become ingrained in our lives, I believe an extra point to consider is social media. This provides great feedback from customers and helps develop relationships between business and consumers.

This article is vague and I would consider not only just focusing on the 4 areas the article has provided but to also look at other aspects on this area of topic to further develop effective strategies. 

With a well thought out campaign that attracts customer’s attention will make direct mail a tool that is effective to be used for businesses, especially being affordable for small businesses. This is if it is done correctly. This is where the article has 5 aspects in ensuring high potential responses from customers through using direct mail.  The 5 aspects talks about how by personalising the mail, testing what strategies work or don’t work, measuring response rates, analysing the results then testing it again is the best practices a marketer should follow to increase brand visibility, consumer response rate and overall ROI.

The article provides lots of useful tips in the area of direct mail. One of the tips I personally felt applied to me was the “personalization content and be personal” point. This is where the mail has your name, information such as interests that are related to you. This makes me feel I am being valued as a customer therefore I feel this method/tip is an effective tool to consider in direct mailing that helps draw my attention to the brand even more.

I think direct mailing is a great tool however it can be a very costly approach in attracting consumers. Therefore it is vital to thoughtfully develop, implement and analyse if direct mail campaigns are worth investing in. 

I enjoyed reading this article as it demonstrates that the media can communicate the same message in different ways but do not have to give them the same look and feel. This can be seen with Nike and Snickers. For snickers, the strong insight “you are not you when you are hungry” saying has been around for a while yet it still manages to incorporate real human emotions and produce something we all can relate to in various unique ways.

I agree with the article where the article points out people think that integration is about saying the same thing through different channels. In fact, it is not. It is about grasping a unique idea of the brand and linking it to the consumer’s insights where it is powerful and engaging. By doing so, the campaign will draw lots of positive feedback and develop relationships.