Marketing Home Products

The marketing and communications world has changed more in the past five years than it has in the last 20. Due to technology and the explosive popularity of social media, today’s home product marketers and public relations practitioners must walk a fine line between new and traditional mediums when communicating with their target audiences. As such, social media marketing tends to fall under the umbrella of public relations, vastly changing the role of modern-day PR professionals.

Despite the challenges of creating a balance between shifting job responsibilities and time spent on social media versus traditional communications, PR professionals actually have the upper hand in the new wave of communications. As more and more customers flock to social media for news, interaction, sharing, dialogue and engagement, PR professionals have enhanced opportunities to connect with the audiences they have spent their entire careers trying to reach. How exciting!

And as skilled, professional communicators, public relations practitioners are the most qualified group of individuals to handle social media marketing for your businesses. They are strategic, well versed in your company’s key messages, and trained to deal with a variety of internal and external audiences including the media and your important customer audiences. They operate within a strict code of ethics and understand the importance of the distribution of immediate and relevant information to a variety of target audiences – all within a tight time frame.

If you’re in public relations, embrace the change. Remember that social media puts the focus back where it should be – on the public. And if you are a home products business owner or executive, remember to leave social media up to the experts, not the interns!

How Marketing Home Products Benefits from Integrated Efforts

Is it PR, or is it advertising? Or marketing? Or communications?

At Kleber & Associates, we combine these efforts into what’s called Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). When marketing home products, one must be cohesive and thorough.

Because the landscape of communication has changed (think texting, Twitter and iPhones), so has the way we do business.

Integrated Marketing Communications doesn’t have a universal definition, but its overall gist is a holistic approach to marketing in which all aspects of communication come together to form cohesive and unified messages. IMC is designed to align stakeholders in such a way that they feel everything is connected…from PR to advertising to promotion and direct marketing.

Consider our “Four P’s of Integrated Marketing Communication”:

• Plan: Like any strategy, you and your team should designate specific goals and tactics as you prepare to integrate your marketing efforts.
• Participate: Try to strip away titles like “PR-like object” or “creative execution.” All members of your team should be focused on one thing: what’s best for the audience. Therefore, you should all be thinking of ways to effectively overlay all promotions, advertising, PR and marketing.
• Pass On: Keep everyone informed. All the time. Share information in a way that keeps all of the team in the loop.
• Promote: Sell back the results of integration by promoting the metrics of its success.

When planned and executed well, IMC fosters cooperation, lower costs, better internal communication, personal growth and innovation. As your team collaborates to blend traditional PR efforts with traditional advertising and social media, your team has the chance to learn more, sharpen their skills and think more strategically. Not to mention the time and money saved when it comes to printing duplicates and e-mail threads!

Stakeholders appreciate it, too. Imagine receiving a clear set of messages with one voice that encompasses your entire campaign.

MMC Learning puts it nicely:

“IMC wraps communications around customers and helps them move through the various stages of the buying process. The organization simultaneously consolidates its image, develops a dialogue and nurtures its relationship with customers.”

In the end, it’s really all about togetherness. And doesn’t that sound nice?

Balancing Social and Traditional Communications

Yes, social media is changing the way the world communicates, but that doesn’t mean that every customer is using it. Despite the hype surrounding social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, we must not forget that traditional communication mediums play a vital role when marketing home products to our target audiences.

For today’s companies and home product marketers, it’s critical to strike a balance between social and traditional communications that is tailored to your specific brand. If your home products business is consumer focused, then social media channels may be a more popular way to reach out to your customers; if you’re operating in the b-2-b channel, communicating in trade publications and more “traditional” communications channels may be worth more of your time and effort. Your business model, industry and target audiences including their gender, age and race, will help you identify the best methods to reach them and influence their perception of your brand and/or their buying patterns.

It’s important for brands to implement a multi-faceted marketing approach that talks to customers when and where they look for information. Some brands claim that social media doesn’t work, but they’ve yet to invest any time and effort into making it a success. It can’t be a “build it and they will come” approach. Creating a Facebook page and Twitter account won’t do anything for your brand if you’re not participating in the conversation. Social media is about interaction and engagement and is only successful when effort is put into a transparent, two-way communications model.

The bottom line is that in today’s chaotic world, you need to balance your efforts between new (social media) and traditional communications. You can’t be talking to everyone, in every medium, and expect to do it well. Talk to those individuals who mean the most to your brand; and do so in the channels where they will hear you and join your conversation.