What Is Marketing Communications?

If you work in a medium size or large organization then chances are that you would have heard the phrase 'marketing communications'. It is the department that deals in handling all communications for the company. Depending on the kind of company and the industry they are in, this department is sometimes called the corporate communications or the product marketing division at times.

Marketing communications is nothing but the science and art of communicating information that the company wants to divulge to the public. The information could be related to the marketing of a product, talk about a new product launch or community initiatives taken by the company. The whole exercise is called a science and an art because though there are set rules and patterns to the manner in which communication should be drafted, the ability to communicate effectively is an art that only some can master. Even as just communicating may seem an easy task since that is what we do every day in our normal lives, there is a science behind what to communicate to whom and in what tone and manner. The process becomes more complex when the market to which one is communicating is an evolved market.

To give you an example of the underlying concepts of marketing communications let us consider the example of the promotional emails that we receive almost everyday. Any person who has some technology background will tell you that the communication is filled with embedded action scripts, flash, cookies and a lot of technological techniques to decipher your movement through the Internet. These are the best practices that are being used in marketing communications today.

These technological wonders enable the marketing professionals to track the navigation of the user through the sites. It registers whether you open the email or not and the activities that you undertake once you have reached the landing page. It measures the amount of time that you spend one each page, the links that you click on and therefore the products and options that you are interested in.

This information is then delivered to the marketing department where it is analyzed and a specific customized communication is created for the user. This tracking and monitoring has enabled marketing programs to become more result oriented and measurable. And it is now becoming a significant tool to justify marketing spends and link the increase in sales to marketing efforts directly.