Hey, creative. Do you want your marketing to work better? Of course you do. Every business owner wants their marketing to work better. Well, if you want your marketing to work better, you have to market like people whose marketing is working better than yours. You have to mark it like a pro. I want to introduce a term to you and a concept in this episode that I learned in graduate school. For those of you who don’t know, I have a graduate degree in corporate and public communications. Not that that matters that much, but, uh, but I did learn some concepts that I’ve been able to apply in, uh, we all films and other businesses that I’ve done, and that I see other people who are way more successful than I am employing this same technique. So it works. Funny thing is I see many, most of the creatives I know in business are not using this technique at all.
The term is called integrated marketing communication. I m c, integrated marketing communication. Now, you don’t have to remember that necessarily. Um, it’s a graduate school term and they have whole master’s degrees in it and stuff like that. But here’s, here’s what it is, and let me give you what integrated marketing communication is by way of an example. When McDonald’s did all day breakfast, you remember that all day breakfast when McDonald’s announced that they were doing all day breakfast, how long do you think it took for the entire universe to know McDonald’s was doing all day breakfast? The answer is about three seconds. You saw it everywhere, right? Everybody knew. Why is that? How did that happen? When Apple puts out a new iPhone, how long does it take before the world knows? Two seconds. All of these companies use integrated marketing communication, imc, and you can too.
You don’t have to be a billion dollar company to use this concept. Integrated marketing communications goes like this. You have a position in the market who you are, what you offer, who you want to offer it to. I’ve done episodes on positioning, and there’s a great book called Positioning that you should read, but you start with your position, okay, here’s who we are, based on who you are. You have messages, marketing messages, what you want to tell people about what you do. Now if you’re a creative in business and you aren’t even that far, you don’t know your position in the market and you aren’t telling people about your position and what you do, well then stop this video right now and go start doing that and come back to this when, uh, when you started that. But the first step is to know your position in the market.
Second is look at all of your available channels, all the communication channels you have at your disposal and that you can afford to use. Now, apple and McDonald’s have obviously, uh, more money than we do, and so they can, they can fill up the channels more than you can, but do not let that be the limit to how many communication channels you have available. Chances are you are not using all the chan, all the communication channels you have available, because if you have a market and a position in the market and you fill up all of your channels, that’s the goal of imc. Fill up all of your communication channels as much as possible with your communication messages, all of the channels you have at your disposal, and then you do that consistently over time. So a position in the market. Fill up your channels with your messages and do that consistently over time, you have more channels than you think. For instance, I see lots of young creatives who are on Instagram. They have an Insta, maybe have a TikTok, and they’re doing tos. Nothing wrong with those, by the way, we do those too. Do you have a Facebook page? You on Facebook anymore? LinkedIn, YouTube.
What about your website? Have you been working on those? Chances are no, especially young creatives. Um, it’s very easy to pick the channel that you like, the best you like as a user and fill that up with your messages. You’re probably not even filling that up with your messages as much as you should, but you should fill up every available channel. It’s crazy nowadays that we have all these free marketing channels out there called social media. All you have to do is make an account, start putting stuff out there, and you aren’t using them. I’m not even using ’em as much as I probably should, but I’m, I’m, I’m trying to get better. So the first principle of IMC is, you know, your position and what you offer to the market, who exactly you’re after, who, your who, your target audience, your avatar, whatever you want to call it.
Second is you find all the available channels you have and you start filling up your channels. All the channels with content could be a podcast like this, could be a picture, could be a, a reel, could be a, a poem. Nothing wrong with that. Could be a story, could be if you’re a good writer, use writing, but chances are you aren’t using all of your channels. And that’s the biggest failure in integrated marketing communication. The reason the mc, everybody knew bag, uh, McDonald’s all day breakfast in three seconds is they filled up every channel. They had billboards, Twitter, um, place, mats, uh, tv. It was everywhere. And because it was everywhere you saw it, even if you never went there, you saw the messages. I have worked. My business partner and I, we have built, we all films on Facebook, posts, on LinkedIn posts, on we, we fill up all of our channels just because you don’t like that channel.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m not comfortable on TikTok. Like, I don’t know. I I, you know, I watched my daughter and she’s amazing at it. I’m, I’m learning, but I know it’s an important channel. So I fill it up. Go to our TikTok. You’ll see <laugh>, this one video that I’m making right now. I will, I’m making this video on my phone. You’re looking into, into my phone. I will take the video and I will put this video on YouTube. I will then pull the audio off using a free app that I found somewhere online. I’ll do it on my phone. I take the audio off and I put that on Spotify and Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts. And if you don’t know how to do that, um, there’s a great platform called Anchor fm. I think Spotify just bought them as a matter of fact.
But you can one time post your audio file and it will go to all the major podcasting platforms. I will put this on Facebook. I’ll put this on Instagram. I’ll put it on TikTok. I will throw it into cap cut. If you haven’t heard of Cap Cut, it’s a free video editing software. You can take it, throw it in there and cut this, whatever. This thing is gonna be 10 minutes. I can cut it down to a one minute reel or a few one minute reels. You’ve probably seen some people on YouTube doing this YouTube shorts, so I can make content one time. I can make this video one time and it’s gonna show up in like seven places, and I can do all that. I can post all of that and have it in seven different places in like 15 minutes. You can fill up your channels.
Chances are you’re just nervous about putting your marketing messages out there, which takes you back to point number one. You don’t know your position well enough. You don’t know who you’re after and you don’t know what to say about it. That’s a whole different topic altogether. But once you figure that out, the key to IMC and the key to marketing like a big successful brand is to fill up every channel you have. You don’t have to necessarily pay for paid advertising. You can do it all for just the cost of your time. And then the third thing, first thing at imc, know your position, know your marketing messages. Second thing is to fill up all the channels, all of ’em, even your Facebook page. Get a Facebook if you don’t have one young person, if you do have one, get on there and use it.
It is just as important as all the other platforms. Third, you have to do this consistently over time. You don’t get business from one post. You don’t get business from 10 posts. You get business by posting regularly over time, sometimes years, and it will build, it will grow. This is something that we have done. I have worked to build a business just on consistent Facebook posts. Now, the content of those, of those posts and the content of those social posts, that’s up to you back to step number one. But follow those three steps of imc. Think like a big marketer. Know your position. Know your messages. Know who you’re after. Fill up every channel you have at your disposal, and you’ve never had more channels. Never, never, never in the history of the world has marketing been more accessible to more people. Get out there and use those, and then don’t stop it if you don’t see big results immediately, or even in a few months.
If you see two likes on your post, if you, that’s two more than you got if you didn’t post it. And down the road, those things accumulate. All of these channels build up. I don’t know where you saw or heard this podcast, but it found you somewhere. And if it finds you there, then it can move you onto another piece of my content, or it can move you onto our website, or it can move you onto something else we’ve done. And slowly, slowly, slowly, that’s how you build a brand and people find you and then they come down the funnel, the sales funnel, and then they contact you. They find your email address and they contact you, and you’re doing business as a creative. This is how big companies do it. They use imc. You should too. You can. It’s never ever been a bigger opportunity to market like the big brands. Imc. You can do it. I love you.