For those who didn’t know, I teach at the University of SC in the Journalism School; Mass Communications and Information Studies to be “proper.” But being a graduate of the “Journalism School,” back in the day when that word was still used in the name, it will always be the “J-School” to me.

I teach Advertising Campaign Strategy to graduating seniors. (at least they think they are graduating. They have to pass this class first.) And it’s the time in the course calendar where we discuss “communication tactics” as part of the strategy. In the lecture portion of my class last week here were a few general points I made about communication tactics that sometimes get overlooked:

1) “Consistency” does not mean that all campaign materials or elements should look alike. It does mean that your target audience should receive messages and promotions that are consistent and carefully developed to reflect their past and present experiences with your products or services.

2) As a general rule, the more targeted your media and the closer to actual “sale” you want your customers’ responses to be, the more costly your per-customer marketing communications plan will be.

3) Likewise, the less targeted and further from “sale” (awareness messages are a good example) the less expensive your plan will be.

The grid above is a great diagram of the interactivity of communication tactics. At the point of the grid are the most “personal” tactics and therefore the most expensive in terms of time and money and at the “megaphone” end of the diagram or the most non-interactive and mass produced methods.

My class seemed to think this diagram was very helpful when considering different goals and objectives of their marketing communication mix strategy. To further help, I’ve included a second diagram I call “Response, Cost, Target Mix.” It adds in the consumer and where they are in the purchase cycle and the desired response you want to the message.

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then I’ve just given you 2,000+ words. How much is an idea worth?

No matter what obstacles your business faces, you can be sure of one thing—others have faced them before. And overcome them. Let’s talk about your business, your goals and your ambitions. And then let’s talk about building that marketing roadmap to get you where you want to be.

Tags: advertising, advertising failures, brand equity, brand loyalty, Branding, business barriers, business gains, creative marketing strategy, Creativity, marketing, marketing performance, social media marketing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 11:40 am and is filed under Branding, Creativity, email marketing, Great Ideas, Highly Recommended, internet marketing, New Ideas, Research, Social Media, Traditional Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.