Marketing Communications: Types, Goals, and Effectiveness

Marketing communications are how a company tells people about itself and its products. In other words, it encompasses all means of brand communication with its audience: advertising, newsletters, social media posts, messaging apps, and so on. Through these channels, businesses communicate their ideas, values, and offerings to customers. In the classic 4Ps model, this process corresponds to Promotion and is a crucial part of the overall marketing strategy.

Why marketing communications are important

Marketing communications are essential for brand recognition and engagement. They translate strategy into real-world connections, help build relationships, and encourage the desired action, such as a purchase, a subscription, or a request. Here are the main goals for which companies develop communications:

Increasing sales. Well-thought-out communications help generate interest in a product and increase revenue. Through promotions, discounts, and engaging messages, marketers motivate customers to choose their brand.
Conveying information. Communications help inform customers about new products, promotions, and service changes. Without this, the audience simply won't know about your offerings. Regular communications maintain interest and brand awareness.
Differentiating from competitors. Vibrant campaigns and clear positioning help a brand stand out and attract attention. A unique communication style, creative content, and the right choice of channels make a company more noticeable and stronger in the market.
Brand strengthening. A consistent style, values, and tone of voice make a brand recognizable and relatable. Without these, even a good product may remain unnoticed.
Customer retention. Personalized emails, social media posts, and abandoned cart reminders maintain interest and encourage repeat visits.
Loyalty enhancement. When a brand speaks to customers in a language they understand and offers personalized promotions, it enhances trust and loyalty. Thanks to omnichannel marketing, a company can reach different customer groups with relevant offers.

Here, we discuss which channels can be used in the Altcraft platform to communicate with customers more conveniently and effectively.

Word of mouth. Vibrant and emotional content encourages people to share it with others. On social media, a single successful video or post can quickly go viral.

Types of marketing communications

Advertising. Paid communications that address a wide audience through media and online platforms: TV, radio, newspapers, the internet, and outdoor advertising. It helps quickly increase brand awareness. This includes both mass communication channels and more targeted ones, such as online advertising, newsletters, and promotional campaigns.
Direct marketing. These are personalized communications aimed at a specific person: emails, messages, calls, chatbots, or personalized offers on a website. Their goal is to establish contact and encourage action. This approach is effective if it considers the customer's interests and avoids overloading them with spam.
PR (public relations). Involves building a brand's reputation and relationships with the public. This includes interactions with the media and bloggers, hosting events, and managing a brand's image on social media. Unlike advertising, PR does not produce immediate results, but builds trust and a positive attitude towards the company.
Personal sales. This is direct communication between a salesperson and a customer: in-store, over the phone, or at a meeting.
Sales promotion. These are short-term campaigns that encourage immediate purchases: discounts, coupons, gifts, bonus programs. The key is to avoid overusing discounts, as this may diminish the value of the product.
Sponsorship and event marketing. A company promotes itself through participation in or organizing events, such as concerts, conferences, webinars, and sports matches. This increases awareness and builds a positive brand image. Such activities engage people and often generate word-of-mouth, with participants sharing their experiences.
Content marketing and SMM. This involves creating useful and interesting content that attracts attention and generates brand trust: articles, videos, podcasts, posts.

Marketing communications tools (technologies and platforms)

CRM and customer databases. This is the foundation for most communications. CRM systems help collect and store data about customers: contacts, purchase history, interests, reactions to emails. This makes it possible to segment the audience and send tailored messages. CRM integrates various channels, from email to call centers, and helps to personalize communications. Without this data, it is impossible to build an effective dialogue with customers.
Marketing automation platforms. These are systems that help manage all marketing campaigns in one place. For example, the Altcraft Platform compiles customer data, automates emails, and analyzes results. Such platforms allow for customized scenarios: a welcome email upon subscription, an abandoned cart reminder, or a discount after periods of inactivity. They integrate a number of promotional channels, such as email, SMS, push notifications, and social media.
Specialized channel tools. Services for working with specific communication channels. For example, email and SMS messaging services, social media management systems for post scheduling and engagement monitoring, contextual and targeted advertising tools, chatbot platforms for messaging apps, call centers, and automated dialers for telesales. Each of these services is tailored to its own needs, and companies often combine several tools. The choice of tools depends on which marketing channels are a priority for your audience: some companies emphasize digital and social media, while others rely more on SMS and phone calls.
Analytics and performance tracking. Analytical systems help understand the effectiveness of marketing communications. End-to-end analytics combines web data, CRM, and advertising, and shows where the customer came from and what actions they took: whether they made a purchase, subscribed, or simply left without doing anything. In addition to numbers, surveys are also important, as they reveal how attitudes toward the brand are changing.

How to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing communications

Typically, two aspects are analyzed: the communication aspect (how the audience responds) and the economic aspect (how much profit the communications generate).

Communication effectiveness shows how marketing has influenced brand perception. Indicators such as audience reach, brand awareness, engagement (likes, comments, views), and the share of mentions compared to competitors are assessed. This data is obtained through surveys, focus groups, and the analysis of mentions on social media. If communications are effective, the brand becomes more visible and trustworthy, even without a sharp increase in sales.
Economic effectiveness shows how marketing communications impact actual business results. The key metrics are sales, profit, and return on investment. Companies compare campaign costs with the revenue generated by acquired customers. For example, they analyze ROMI (return on marketing investment), conversion rate (how many people completed the desired action), CAC (customer acquisition cost), and LTV (lifetime value). This assessment helps understand whether the campaign was profitable and which methods work best. If awareness is growing but sales are stagnating, it is worth reviewing the product or price; if sales have increased but the brand image has suffered, the approach needs to be reconsidered.

Key performance indicators (KPI)

1. Reach and frequency. How many people saw the message and how often (metrics such as impressions and unique users). High reach indicates that the communication was widely distributed, but does not guarantee a response.

2. Engagement and reactions. Shows how interested the audience was in the content. This includes clicks, website visits, time spent on viewing the page, likes, shares, comments, video views, email opens, and newsletter clicks. These metrics help understand whether the message was interesting and relevant. It is also important to consider whether people reacted positively or negatively.

3. Conversions and sales. Show how many people completed the desired action: made a purchase, registered, or submitted an application. Conversions can be direct (a purchase immediately after a click) or delayed (a person saw the ad and made a purchase later). Sales are measured by volume and revenue. If the goal of the campaign is to launch a new product, the main metric will be sales volume during the promotion.

4. Cost metrics. These reflect the effectiveness of spending money on communications. For example, cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per conversion (CPA), and return on investment (ROI or ROMI). This data provides an understanding of which communication channels deliver greater results for less money and where to allocate the budget.

5. Loyalty and retention. These metrics reflect the long-term impact of communications: are customers willing to stay with the brand and recommend it to others. They measure the percentage of returning customers, churn rate, net promoter score (NPS), and lifetime value (LTV). If repeat purchases and brand trust increase, this means that communications are effective.

Conclusion

Marketing communications are part of marketing management aimed at conveying information about the company and its products. The development of an effective marketing strategy determines how and through which channels to communicate with customers, while marketing campaigns ensure the achievement of set goals. This builds brand recognition and strengthens its position in the market.