What is marketing communications?
Marketing communication is the blanket term for every interaction your brand has with the public. These can be direct sales messages, such as commercials and ad buys, or they can be less formal, as with trade shows and outdoor promotional events. If your brand sponsors a local little league team, the branding and public presence of your employees is part of your marketing communication with the public.
Your social media communications, press releases and third-party articles about you in the media are all technically MarCom. In a sense, the term refers to every event that makes nonemployees think about your brand, regardless of the channel or the origin of the message.
Common MarCom channels
Because your brand’s MarCom is so broad and the available channels for delivering brand messages are so wide, you probably have to be at least a little bit selective about how and where you put out your messaging.Most of the world’s successful modern brands adopt mixed-media approaches and use one channel to reinforce messaging in another.
There are plenty of examples of this, especially among established brands trying to keep up with changes in communication technology that have taken place since the rise of the internet.
Traditional marketing channels
Nearly everyone knows a thing or two about traditional marketing channels and how advertising works. The fact that these are older approaches doesn’t make them obsolete, as the world’s still-huge advertising budgets show. Any serious MarCom strategy has to take these older venues into account, even starting and ending with them if your brand has a demographic that leans heavily on 20th-century channels of communication.
Print is one of the oldest ways brands have to communicate with the public. While classified ads are less of a go-to sales channel than they were a century ago, many publications still survive on paid advertising. Putting an ad in the local newspaper, mailing out circulars or even paying field reps to place door hangers are all print approaches to MarCom favored primarily by smaller local businesses.
Some large national brands still use all these approaches, such as the constant flow of credit card offers by mail or the huge full-page advertisements large companies still invest in with national newspapers. Radio and TV have been around since the 1920s and 1950s, respectively, and both largely depend on sponsorship to stay alive.
Hundreds of millions of adults still watch TV every day, and the radio is on inside many of the cars stuck in traffic during morning and evening rush hours. These media occupy very different niches in the marketing world, so messages tailored to one rarely work on the other. Radio tends to be less expensive than television for advertising, but TV ads tend to show better ROI overall.
There’s another category of traditional marketing communication that often gets overlooked, which can broadly be called signage. From the publicly visible sign over your office building to the T-shirts fans of your brand wear as a fashion statement, there’s practically no end to the number of ways you can get your brand message in front of potential customers without any mass media at all.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that while putting your logo on items of clothing or paying for billboard space can maximize exposure, your ability to communicate complex messages this way is probably severely limited.
Internet and digital ads
Digital advertising was once thought of as a potential support for the growing digital infrastructure of the early 21st century. In practice, the rate of return on banner or link-based ads is dismal, and even incidental advertising shows limited returns.
Basically, the approaches used for decades by print and TV advertisers to reach the public fall short when applied to intrusive banners on websites where people are less receptive to sales efforts.
Social media channels
Social media has been the rescuer of online and digital advertising. It’s also a venue for marketing communications that go light-years beyond straightforward sales pitches. Your brand’s presence on social media draws attention, builds a following, drives conversion for sales, helps you manage communications during crises or other rough patches and helps define your brand voice down to the granular level of individual tweets.
Knowing this market and tailoring your approach to it is a major part of successful brand communications. The major social media platforms are all different, and while they may be after similar demographics, they generally take different approaches and offer niche benefits for the people who use them.
Competition exists among the majors, but since a social media platform draws most of its value from the size of its user base, the market tends toward monopoly. If you’re expanding onto social media for efficient marketing communication, get to know these brands and how they can enhance your connection to the public:
- TikTok
- YouTube
Depending on the needs of your brand, you may want to cover all these platforms, or you might narrow your focus to just a few. If your MarCom strategy depends heavily on video, for example, YouTube and TikTok may be where you put resources.
Brief branding and sales messages are ideal for the limited space offered on Twitter, while Facebook and Reddit are generally good places to build a community around your brand. You can use social media to recruit for vacancies, encourage sales, announce special promotions or create buzz around your brand when you feel the need.
Why does your marketing communication matter?
Marketing communication is the way you look to the world. If your brand faces the public, then the way the public looks at you is a big part of whether they’re buying your product or boycotting you. Even if you’re less of an end user-oriented brand, for example, if you manufacture pressure valves for the aerospace industry, you still need an effective MarCom strategy.
When a defect is discovered in a single lot of your product or when NASA admits it overpaid for your valves, you need the ability to put your own message out to the voting and taxpaying public, craft the conversation around your issues and drive potentially negative press into a positive piece of brand recognition. A great example of this can be found in Tylenol’s reaction to the poisoning scare of the 1980s.
In September and October of 1982, a number of people fell sick and some died after consuming Tylenol pills that were later found to have been sabotaged with poison. This was potentially a brand-ending event for Tylenol, which saved the day for itself with a vigorous and very public reaction.
Even before an official recall had to be ordered, Tylenol had ordered one on its own, destroyed the suspect lots, redesigned its packaging to be tamper-evident and launched a public campaign to raise awareness about product safety. This bit of crisis communication turned a potential disaster into a marketing windfall and drove Tylenol sales to the top of the market, a position it still holds.
Good MarCom saved the Tylenol brand in 1982, possibly along with several innocent people’s lives. Your own marketing communications might be less dramatic than that example, but the MarCom strategy you’re following is no less important to the survival and success of your brand.
Putting together a smart marketing communication strategy
Given the importance of a good MarCom strategy, it stands to reason that developing a smart approach to communications should be a priority for you. Follow these steps to craft a smart communications strategy and carry it out effectively:
- Develop a strong brand message: If you don’t know who and what your brand is, neither will the public. Coke and Pepsi are direct competitors, but each has a unique brand voice, and they attract different market segments because of it. The voice they’ve developed also colors the kind of videos they produce for YouTube, the community guidelines they enforce on Facebook and the barbs they trade with each other on Twitter.
- Pick your approach vectors: Determine which vectors work best for your brand voice. If you’re positioning your brand as the voice of authority and trust, you might be better off with a traditional ad campaign and professionally written press releases. If you’re positioned as an upstart brand that’s angled toward a niche public, low-intensity social media might be a good choice for you. The platform you pick is nearly as important as the persona your brand adopts.
Speak clearly and in your brand voice: Never deviate from the brand voice unless you’re doing it on purpose. Modern MarCom effectively makes your brand a character people interact with, and sudden changes can be jarring for them. Think of your marketing communications as one side of a conversation between your brand and the public, where your side is a trusted friend and consistently welcome.
