Step Away From the Bullhorn...
By Jerry Rackley
It’s time to do some marketing communication about, well, marketing communications! Demand Metric has now published its Marketing Communications Plan methodology, the third in its trifecta of marketing planning methodologies. We’ve previously written about the distinction between a Marketing Strategy, Product Marketing Plan and Marketing Communications Plan – we encourage you to get a quick refresher on this critical distinction by reading the blog post on this topic.
Your Marketing Strategy is like a map that shows you where you are, where you can go and all the features of the landscape. A Product Marketing Plan represents the compass you’ll use to navigate. Along the way, you’ll communicate, perhaps tweeting about your discoveries, posting a travelogue online, calling home periodically and uploading cool photos to a Pinterest board – these are your Marketing Communications. All three of these components are necessary to ensure your journey is successful.
Marketing Communications (Marcom) is often the only form of marketing an organization practices. In reality, it is a subset of the marketing discipline and is primarily concerned with promotion. It is all about what you say, to whom you say it and how. A Marcom plan acknowledges that marketing is more than just picking up a bullhorn and blasting your message at high volume to anyone who will listen. Instead, Marcom takes an intelligent approach, carefully considering whom you need to reach, what they need to hear and the best ways of delivering the message. A Marcom plan is ideally built upon the foundation of a Marketing Strategy, and it supports the company and it’s product lines.
The visible output of a Marcom plan is the ads, emails, web content, brochures and other communications the plan directs you to deploy. The value of the plan, however, is in how it orchestrates all communications in a way that creates maximum impact and maintains continuity with your brand.
The new Demand Metric Marketing Communications Plan methodology is a free resource to help marketers build a Marcom Plan based on the organization’s Marketing Strategy and to support it’s product lines. The methodology leads the user through six stages planning and implementation stages:
- Strategy & Environment – align your Marcom Plan with your strategy.
- Audience – identify the audience for your plan.
- Objectives – determine what you want your plan to accomplish.
- Messages – decide what your audience needs to hear from you.
- Channels – select the best channels for your messages.
- Budget & Measurement – forecast the costs of executing your plan and establish a way to track results.
This methodology is currently free; any Demand Metric member can simply login and download it. The methodology references 30 separate Demand Metric tools and templates that are available only to Pro, Premium or Team members. However, even without access to the individual premium tools, the methodology is an effective blueprint for marketers that need to understand how to structure and execute a Marcom Plan.
Since we launched our methodologies in late 2011, they are all in the Top 10 list of most frequently downloaded content from the Demand Metric website. We hope this new methodology provides that same level of value, but let us know. We’ve activated comments for every resource on our website to make it easy for you to share your thoughts.
Editors note: we had some discussion internally on whether the correct abbreviation for Marketing Communications was "Marcomm" or "Marcom". We are reluctant to take a firm stand on the correctness of either, choosing to follow Wikipedia's lead and go with "Marcom". However, if you fall in the "Marcomm" camp, we hope we have not offended you, and here are the extra "m's" we would have used had this decision gone the other way: mmmmmmmmmm. :)
