Integrated Marketing Campaign

All Integrated campaigns need to focus on the Customer. Let’s have a look at some key aspects of this.

Focus on Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is a deeply-held commitment that causes a customer
to purchase a preferred product or service repeatedly, despite other
influences and competing marketing efforts designed to encourage
them to switch.

Customer loyalty is important: research suggests that
it is more profitable to sell to an existing customer than it is to recruit
a new one. Loyalty experts say that acquiring a new customer is five
times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
However, not all ’loyalty’ is good.

Inertia can be a factor, as can the
hassle of changing supplier.

But in general, customers stay loyal and
‘repeat buy’ because they are happy with the ‘value exchange’ involved
in purchasing a particular product or service.

Focus on Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the extent to which the perceived
performance of a product or service meets customers’ expectations.
The author Piercy (2000) categorises customers into four groups when it comes
to satisfaction:

  • Satisfied stayers – Will stay with the company through thick and thin, even when logic dictates otherwise.
  • Wanderers – Are satisfied but fickle.
  • Hostages – Stay, despite being dissatisfied, through habit, inertia or supplier monopoly.
  • Dealers – Are unhappy generally, shop around and may or may not return.

However, satisfied customers are the very least marketers should settle
for, and many aspire to create’delighted’ customers.

Customer Orientation

A customer orientation, in an organisation that seeks to build and
maintain customer loyalty, involves customer care – that is, looking
after each customer and meeting their individual needs so as to nip
any dissatisfaction in the bud and give them no reason to buy from a
competitor.

As with customer focus generally, customer care needs to
be tackled on an organisation-wide basis, and to introduce and sustain
it requires leadership, persistence and, often, a new mind-set.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) underpins customer care,
ensuring as it does that each customer receives the right message, via
the right channel, at the right time (regardless of which party initiated
the contact).

According to author Chris Fill (2013): “CRM incorporates technologies and systems
that enable all employees who have an interface with customers to
have real-time, up-to-date information in order to deliver high levels of
customer service.”

As Chris suggests, CRM is an integrated system, enabled by IT systems
and methodologies, and it covers the entire business process of
marketing and sales.

It brings together a number of marketing and
customer-facing systems within one application, and allows marketers
to manage customer information and customer relationships in an
organised and profitable way.

Integrated Marketing Communications Tools

Planning and implementing CRM is a major task, especially in a big
organisation.

It is likely to be expensive and disruptive and, as with any
change, meet resistance.

So here, as with any change project, a boardlevel
champion is invaluable in order to secure the financial, human and
external resources necessary for it to succeed and to be embraced by
all employees as a key element of how the company does business
rather than being seen as a ‘one-off’ project.

Focus your staff to work together to meet customer needs

Employee branding and engagement

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) says that
employee engagement is: “emerging as the master key that unlocks
performance.

Successive research exercises over the past five or six
years, including a large amount of work sponsored by the CIPD, have
shown that, without engagement, all the clever HR policies in the world,
let alone investment in technology, marketing and innovation, will fail to
deliver sustained competitive advantage.” (CIPD, 2009).

Engaged employees don’t just have ‘satisfying’ jobs, but also have a
true passion for what they do, are prepared to go the extra mile and are
committed to the success of their organisation. To engage employees
organisations need to ‘brand’ themselves to their workforce in much
the same way they do to their customers.

Employees are motivated
(and therefore remain loyal and committed) by a range of different
aspects of the ‘employee brand’, including the following:

  1. Reward.
  2. Job satisfaction.
  3. Technical and managerial support.
  4. Ethical and responsible employment practices.
  5. Flexible working.
  6. Positive organisational culture.