Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is a tool used by marketers to build a brand over time. In IMC, different tactics are deployed across different platforms/mediums. However, used effectively, IMC can also be a great tool to move customers through a customer journey.
A customer journey typically has four steps, as illustrated below.
For marketers in higher education, IMC can help acquire new students and maintain or increase application rates by exposing constituents to the brand. Before moving forward, it’s extremely important to understand the audience you’re trying to reach. For our example, we’ll focus on high school seniors’ parents. Research has shown that parents are highly influential when students choose their college/university. One study by Noel-Levitz, Inc. found that “The increasing level of parental involvement has been fueled in part by a surge in parental use of e-communications…”
Ideally, your content will be so engaging and informative that it will serve as a catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing. IMC is your opportunity to entice the audience to follow your brand. What better way to facilitate parents to follow our school than by persuading them to advise their children to apply and become a member of our community.
Using IMC, we could also gain awareness and create need recognition of our institution by placing ads on Facebook and Instagram. Content that could work here would convey all of the opportunities that could arise from the parent’s child attending our school. Creating engaging content can easily entice the audience to interact with our boosted posts, which would lead them to the admissions landing page.
A carefully constructed landing page will include all of the important information a parent may want to know about a college/university. This is where you should highlight all of the reasons your school is better than the rest. This same landing page should include a link to begin an admission. The goal here is to make it as easy as possible, while leveraging multiple tactics across multiple platforms/mediums to get the results we want.
Once the application is submitted, your purchase is made. Congratulations! Your call-to-action has been completed. Your IMC strategy isn’t done yet, though. There’s still one more step in the customer journey.
We can help reassure the customer that their decision to purchase (or apply for admission) was a good one by immediately following up with an automated email that includes essential information/links to the next steps in the application process.
In this example, we’ve employed different tactics across different platforms/mediums to help us get the result we wanted. The omission of an IMC approach in achieving a goal could be detrimental to your efforts. There are different channels, use the right ones at the right time.
Have you used IMC to facilitate a customer’s journey? Are there any tips I may have missed that you’ve learned in your career? Let us know in the comments!
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