Offering a good product or service is no longer enough. Users must perceive its full value. Marketing and communication serve precisely this purpose and are essential for selling much more.
Metaphor of Fuel
Think of marketing and communication as the fuel for your company. Whether you have a small car or a custom-built one, you need fuel to make it go. However, this metaphor doesn’t fully capture the role of marketing and communication in business growth. With the right marketing, even a small car can transform into a powerful vehicle.
Old school, goodbye!
In the past, the mantra for businesses was “sell, sell, sell.” However, with increasing competition, simply offering a quality product or service isn’t sufficient if customers don’t perceive its advantages over competitors. This shift in perspective has led to a revolution where effective communication and marketing are essential for selling.
Marketing and Communication Strategies
Marketing and communication involve daily strategizing, market study, competitor monitoring, and choosing the right time and method to promote products or services. Today, business communication is about building and strengthening brand identity and reputation, always staying ahead of the competition.
What is the corporate marketing and communications plan?
The focus has shifted from “any publicity is good publicity” to building brand identity and customer relationships. The success of your business hinges on your ability to make users perceive the positive aspects of your products or services through marketing and communication.
A corporate marketing and communication plan outlines objectives, strategies, and methods to achieve them. It involves creativity and feasibility to create a winning plan by studying ideas, conducting market research, and assessing available resources.
The Role of Analytical Marketing
Analytical marketing applies quantitative methods to understand and respond to market changes, helping companies develop more effective strategies. By understanding consumer demand and competitive weaknesses, companies can improve their position and achieve sustainable results.
Strategic marketing: quality vs quantity
Imagine an almost empty room filled with chairs: there are more speakers at the table than journalists sitting in front of them. Is your product launch a flop? Not necessarily. Maybe you will be able to “bewitch” one of them, who will write the best article you can imagine about your company.
It’s not with the classic “camel troops” that marketing and communication challenges are won, but with targeted strategies. Filling a room with notebooks and (above all) cameras is a welcome option, especially for top management. However, it’s not the full room that will determine the success of your communication strategy for that event; rather, it’s what your potentials will read the next day in newspapers or see on this or that TV program.
Therefore, a single article that conveys the message that your strategy intended to promote is much better than ten approximate articles, which may even be counterproductive.
Building a Winning Corporate Marketing and Communications Plan
Marketing and communication are vast topics with numerous effective strategies depending on the situation. While it’s impossible to cover everything in one article, starting with a qualitative analysis, identifying the target audience, brainstorming creatively, and studying competitors can lead to a successful plan.
But I can’t say goodbye to you without giving you some advice that will certainly be useful to you in drawing up an effective marketing and communication plan.
- Start from the beginning: do a qualitative analysis of the starting situation, starting with the financial and economic situation.
- Identify and define the target audience: an effective marketing and communication plan manages to identify the most interested customers and, therefore, potentially most suitable for purchasing your products or services. So you have to decide whether to try to reach many users with a single product, some customers with a product dedicated to them or differentiate your offer depending on the segment of people. Personally I think it is always useful to segment your target to be able to reach them in a more targeted way, but even the first two strategies can be very effective in some cases.
- Go wild with brainstorming. The best ideas aren’t necessarily the ones others like, nor the first ones that come to mind. Consult with colleagues or other trusted people and ask them for creative input. Listen to them and propose your ideas without fear, even the most absurd ones. Yes, because the most absurd ones, appropriately adapted, can perhaps be the basis on which to build a plan. If you knew how many brilliant ideas were born like this…
- Get inspired. Study your competitors. Analyze the main case studies in your industry to understand who (but above all why) has been most successful. But remember, those who follow someone will never arrive first, so it is useless to copy the competition, to be successful the key is always to differentiate you by making yourself recognisable.
One last piece of advice: don’t leave anything to chance. A marketing and communication plan is a truly important and complex document, which can also be adapted during construction, but which must be complete.
Lastly, leave nothing to chance when crafting your marketing and communication plan. It’s a complex document that can be adapted during construction but must be comprehensive to ensure success.