How do you incorporate innovation and creativity in your IMC plan?

1 Understand your customer journey

Before you start brainstorming ideas, you need to understand your customer journey and map out the communication touchpoints that influence their decision-making process. This will help you identify the gaps, opportunities, and challenges that you need to address with your IMC plan. You can use tools like customer personas, journey maps, and empathy maps to gain insights into your customer's needs, motivations, and pain points at each stage of their journey.

2 Define your objectives and metrics

Next, you need to define your objectives and metrics for your IMC plan. What are the goals that you want to achieve with your communication efforts? How will you measure your success and impact? You can use the SMART framework to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives. You can also use the RACE model to align your objectives with the four stages of the customer journey: reach, act, convert, and engage.

3 Generate and evaluate ideas

Now it's time to generate and evaluate ideas for your IMC plan. You can use various techniques to stimulate your creativity and generate diverse and original ideas, such as brainstorming, mind mapping, SCAMPER, and SWOT analysis. You can also look for inspiration from other sources, such as competitors, industry trends, best practices, and customer feedback. Once you have a list of ideas, you need to evaluate them based on their feasibility, relevance, and effectiveness. You can use criteria such as cost, time, resources, alignment, and differentiation to filter and prioritize your ideas.

4 Choose your communication mix

After you have selected your best ideas, you need to choose your communication mix, which is the combination of channels and tools that you will use to deliver your message to your target audience. You need to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each channel and tool, such as reach, frequency, cost, impact, and compatibility. You also need to ensure that your communication mix is integrated and consistent across all channels and tools, so that you create a unified and coherent brand image and voice.

5 Develop your creative strategy

The next step is to develop your creative strategy, which is the overall concept and theme that guides your communication execution. Your creative strategy should reflect your value proposition, objectives, and customer insights. It should also be original, memorable, and compelling, so that it captures your audience's attention and interest. You can use frameworks such as the creative brief, the big idea, and the message strategy to define and communicate your creative strategy.

6 Implement and monitor your IMC plan

The final step is to implement and monitor your IMC plan. You need to plan and execute your communication activities according to your budget, timeline, and resources. You also need to monitor and evaluate your performance and impact based on your metrics and feedback. You can use tools such as dashboards, reports, surveys, and analytics to track and measure your results. You should also be ready to adapt and improve your IMC plan based on your findings and learnings.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?