How to Develop an Effective IMC Strategy for Your Brand

Successful brand strategy development will win prospective students over.

Statistics show consumers are more than twice as likely to buy products and advocate for a brand they trust. To build a recognizable and trustworthy brand, you must maintain consistency across every aspect of your marketing efforts.

This integration across different marketing tools is called integrated marketing communication (IMC). When you develop an effective IMC strategy with your marketing team, you can find great success with institutional branding and student recruitment.

In today’s post, we’ll help you develop effective IMC techniques with useful IMC planning tips. It’s possible to achieve amazing things through tactful branding and consistent messaging, so keep reading and create a plan that works for you and your institution.

Integrated Marketing Communication, Explained

IMC is a marketing and branding tactic that involves unifying your institution’s look and message to maintain consistency across various marketing platforms. Having an effective IMC strategy in place will help guide communications both internally and toward your prospective student audience.

It’s important for multiple reasons. Firstly, most of today’s educational institutions utilize numerous channels to attract students and communicate with them.

You may use social media platforms, web design, blogging, email campaigns, and more traditional advertising methods at any given time, depending on your programs and target student demographics. What an IMC strategy does is help you create cohesion across all platforms. Doing it well comes with a host of benefits, including:

Brand Recognition

You need consistency to build brand recognition. You need brand recognition to attract prospective students and turn them into enrolled learners.

IMC tactics ensure your marketing efforts are consistent and complementary. They maximize the strengths of each advertising platform without compromising your institutional messaging.

Targeting New Student Demographics

Having a consistent message across multiple platforms helps you appeal to different student demographics. It’s important to understand the landscape of advertising platforms and who uses them.

For example, younger prospective students are more active on something like TikTok, while working adults considering career changes are more often using Instagram and LinkedIn. To attract older demographics or continuing education students, you’ll need to use Facebook, educational blogs, and more traditional advertising methods.

Let the strengths of the platform guide how your message is presented. Beyond that, you can maintain consistency to send a strong institutional message to all prospective students across all demographics.

Cost-Effective

An amazing benefit of an IMC strategy is that it can save your institution money in the short and long run. By planning targeted but consistent advertising, you save yourself time and resources coming up with unique marketing materials for each platform.

Efficient

Integrated marketing communication techniques let you re-use your marketing tactics on different platforms. You’ll need to optimize them for each platform, but you won’t have to create entirely new marketing ideas. Once you establish a method that works for your marketing team, your student recruitment efforts will be much more streamlined and efficient.

IMC Planning Tips

IMC planning might sound simple, but you still need to put the work in if you’re going to maximize your strategy. Here are a few key tips for brand strategy development.

Define Your Goals

Always start by defining the goals of your campaign. If you don’t have a clear direction, it won’t matter how integrated your marketing communications are.

Outline what you’re aiming to achieve with your IMC plans. It could be something overarching, like boosting institutional awareness. It could also be something specific, like launching a new program or increasing enrollment for a particular course.

Within your overall goal, there will be smaller goals along the way. For example, if you’re trying to boost awareness, you’ll want to look at website traffic, program inquiry forms, and online mentions. Improving these numbers can give you checkpoints on the way to achieving your larger goals, as well as clarity throughout your IMC campaign.

Understand Your Audience

To ensure your message hits home across all channels, you need to understand your target student audience. Perform research into demographics, which platforms different student groups use, and what type of content they’re interested in.

IMC doesn’t mean all of your content has to be identical. It means that you should have cohesion in look and voice across different platforms. You can tailor each piece of content to a specific platform and student demographic while adhering to your overall institutional message.

Understanding your prospective students is the best way to create content that works.

Develop an Overarching Theme

Select the channels that make the most sense and begin developing the overarching theme of your strategy. It should capture your institution’s mission, values, and any unique program offerings you want to highlight.

Armed with a clear theme, you can start creating your marketing materials. Be as thorough as possible when developing these plans. You should know what types of content you want to publish – i.e. blog posts, social media posts, student success stories, and videos.

It also helps to develop a content calendar. Doing so will help keep you organized, which is essential when dealing with multiple types of content across various channels.

Distribute Your Content

Once you’ve developed an arsenal of content and a calendar for releasing it, you’re ready to launch your campaign. When you post a piece of content, whether it’s a blog post or a short social media video, it should adhere to the theme that you developed. The color scheme, writing style, imagery, and messaging should all feel like they’re coming from the same place.

Review and Adjust

Release your content according to your calendar, then measure the results. This is arguably the most important step of the entire process. You need to continually review your results, adjust your strategy, and improve the content for next time.

A few of the most important metrics to keep an eye on include:

• Engagement
• Inquiry and application conversion rates
• Website traffic numbers
• Bounce rate
• Qualified student leads

Get Help with Brand Strategy Development

Follow these tips and you’ll be able to develop an effective IMC strategy. We don’t need to tell you how difficult it can be to stay on top of these in-depth marketing strategies. If you need help with your IMC strategy, hiring digital marketing experts who specialize in education is your best move.

Betta Advertising specializes in providing tailored digital marketing services for education and career training providers. We can help you develop your institutional brand recognition with consistent and high-performing content across all major platforms. To learn more about how we’ll help you achieve your enrollment goals, contact us today.