Mar 6336-Weekly Application Post – Week 1
To help integrate what you are learning each week, as well as to help you illustrate your growing subject matter expertise, you’ll complete a weekly blog-style post that focuses in some way on one or more of the topics covered that week. Each post must be a minimum of 200 words in length (including the post title) with no maximum limitation. They should be tailored to fit the personal/professional brand or expertise that youre trying to develop.Note that later this term (Term 1), you’ll begin to upload all of your posts (for this course and all other courses) to the WordPress website that you will be developing in this course.
Your weekly application posts should go beyond merely reiterating what was covered in the course materials. They should show your target audience(s) how to apply marketing concepts, techniques, or technologies to real-world problems or opportunities for which they have an interest. Your posts can be serious, light-hearted, tell stories or experiences, give advice, offer critiques of marketing practices you encounter, make comparisons across companies or techniques, describe innovative marketing practices, predict the future of marketing, etc. The key is that they must be (1) informative to your target audience and (2) pertain in some way to the week’s material for this course. Other than that, you have free reign. Remember that the tone, style, voice, and mood of your writing is up to you, but you should always consider what would work best for your target audiences. You may even decide to have a general theme to your posts, perhaps staying focused on a particular industry or region or marketplace.
Must watch videos:
Articles to read:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-20-golden-rules-of-bu_b_4388943
https://drumcreative.com/5-tips-for-effective-hyperlinks/
What needs to be discussed and explained:Please change the title below so it can be something better I cant use that one
An innovative way a company is using communications to inform, remind, persuade, or connect.
Target audience: Jewelry brand
Company uses for example: branding, videos, pictures (70s vibe), giveaways.
Please see attached
MAR6336 Integrated Marketing Communications
Assignment Overview Weekly Application Posts (8 in total 5% of Grade)
OBJECTIVES
As marketers, we are required to create value for our various clients while helping our own
organizations grow. An important skill that we must master is our ability to convey marketing
ideas, concepts, best practices, and strategies to our various audiences that include our clients,
business partners, colleagues, investors, etc.
At the same time, it is critical to our careers that we demonstrate our expertise via the
communication of our own ideas, concepts, and perspectives with respect to marketing and its
application to various industries, situations, and environments. One of the best ways to do this is
by creating our own content that showcases our knowledge, skills, and experience.
In this program, you will be required to write weekly posts (similar to a blog) that specifically
relate to the content presented in each course. This exercise has several benefits:
You will better integrate and retain the information that you are learning each week.
You will enhance your written communication skills.
You will demonstrate your learning and knowledge to your instructors.
You will showcase your subject matter expertise to your audiences.
You will become more confident in your willingness to proclaim your mastery of
marketing to your various audiences.
With respect to marketing communication, regular posting of relevant information can help drive
traffic to websites, increase search rankings, position brands (including your personal brand) as
industry leaders, and even help develop stronger customer relationships. Strategic and tactical
writing and content planning can help with website search engine optimization (SEO), website
visitor retention and engagement metrics, and marketing/communication funnel performance.
Thus, your weekly application posts will serve not only as a course assessment, but also as a
learning experience, a builder of your personal/professional brand, and an application of content
marketing that can be measured via engagement metrics as you gain experience and expertise in
Google Analytics (particularly when you experience your MSM Marketing Analytics course).
SKILLS & KNOWLEDGE
This assignment will enhance your ability to take newly acquired information and transfer it to
your target audiences in a manner that is useful, informative, and engaging. By authoring
regularly-posted content, you will enhance your creative writing talents, build your capacity to
engage and retain audiences, and strengthen your strategic and tactical thinking. As you learn
about design elements during the Element Assessments assignment series, you can apply what
you learn to your website creation and weekly posting as well.
ASSIGNMENT
Your weekly posts must go beyond merely reiterating what was covered in the course materials.
They should show your target audiences how to apply marketing concepts, techniques,
technologies, strategies, etc. to real-world situations for which they have an interest. Although
they may have minor references to other individuals, each post should showcase your particular
knowledge and skills.
Tailor the posts to fit within the personal/professional brand or expertise that you are cultivating
within your website and with your other digital and non-digital communications. Developing a
general theme to your posts can be a good way to accomplish this by staying focused on a
particular industry, region, marketplace, or set of audiences.
The tone, style, voice, and mood of your writing is up to you, but you should always consider
what would work best to engage the readers. Additionally, to build and maintain your
professional expertise, it is imperative that you do not position yourself as a student by using
words such as this week in class, professor, course, etc. You have free reign to
demonstrate your professional creativity, but be consistent in your positioning.
Each post must follow these guidelines:
Minimum of 100 words in length.
Pertain to the weeks material for the course.
Be informative to your target audience.
Have a compelling original title that will attract audiences.
o This will help with SEO as well as website engagement metrics.
o Tips for creating titles: http://bit.ly/post-titles
Posts should have the following as well:
At least one hyperlink that adds substance to your content.
o The addition of relevant hyperlinks can help with SEO.
o Initially, you may decide to use only external links, but as you upload additional
posts, you should also link to your own relevant prior posts to increase your
website retention.
o Tips for creating effective hyperlinks: http://bit.ly/post-hyperlinks
A relevant image that will attract your audience and add value to the messaging.
o Tips for including images: http://bit.ly/post-images-1
o More tips for including images: http://bit.ly/post-images-2
Submit the assignment as a PDF
NOTE: Please do not upload your post to your website until you have received a grade (doing so
could cause your post to be flagged for plagiarism).
Additional resource material:
http://bit.ly/post-rules
http://bit.ly/post-titles
http://bit.ly/post-hyperlinks
http://bit.ly/post-images-1
http://bit.ly/post-images-2
http://bit.ly/post-rules
CRITERIA FOR GRADING
Each submission will be scored out of 5 points possible. Scores across all 8 posts will be
averaged and will be worth 5% of your total grade.
To receive minimum credit, each submission must:
1) Be completed as instructed.
2) Submitted on time on the due date. No late submissions will be accepted for credit.
3) Submitted via the appropriate Canvas assignment link (no emails allowed).
4) Refrain from positioning yourself as a student. To build and maintain your professional
expertise and to avoid appearing as only a student, it is imperative that you do not use
words like professor, class, course, or phrases (e.g., this week we learned
about) that infer your role in these posts is one of being a student. Posts that infer
student status will receive grades of zero.
Additional grading criteria:
Posts should go beyond merely reiterating what was covered in the course materials.
Posts should show your target audience(s) how to apply marketing concepts, techniques,
or technologies to real-world problems or opportunities for which they have an interest.
Posts should have strong conceptual writing with careful thought and consideration of the
intended messaging.
All posts must be your original work. Plagiarism of any kind can result in a zero grade
for the assignment, the assignment series, potential failure for the course, and/or potential
expulsion from the program.
There should be no grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors.
Posts that meet or somewhat exceed the minimum criteria will be awarded 3 points.
Posts that reasonably exceed the minimum criteria may be awarded up to 4 points.
Posts that go far beyond the minimum criteria (in quality and not just quantity) may be
awarded up to 5 points.
No late posts will be accepted for credit under any circumstances. (Thus, its far better to
be imperfect on time than to be perfect and late.)
Grades of A are reserved for outstanding work. Work that meets or only somewhat
exceeds standard requirements does not constitute outstanding work.
1
The Many Purposes of Marketing Communication
Anthony Miyazaki (2019)
Its clear to anyone in business that marketing communications are critical to the survival
and success of businesses, regardless of whether those communications come in the form of paid
mass media advertising, direct marketing pieces, sales promotion, publicity, social media posts,
salesperson scripting, or other types of marketing messaging. As a result, marketers constantly
are seeking the best marketing messages to achieve their goals.
The catch, however, is that there is no generic best message, because it all depends on the
particular marketing goal, the audience, the message sender and how the sender is perceived, the
environment, the communication channel, the level and type of noise in the channel, and the
specific situation. Thus, marketers most often are relegated to finding merely good enough or
better rather than best when it comes to developing marketing messages.
What is marketing communication supposed to do?
To move toward the creation of better marketing messaging, we first need to understand
what marketing communication is supposed to do. Although most marketers understand that,
ultimately, it should facilitate a perceived mutually beneficial exchange relationship between the
marketer and the target audience(s), there are several more specific goals that marketing
communication can achieve.
One typical approach to a categorization of marketing communication goals suggests that
marketing communications should inform, remind, persuade, and connect. Lets consider each
of these below.
Inform. When we speak of marketing as informing audiences, we need to consider two
questions: What information will they receive? And why should they receive it? Technically,
any communication contains information of some type, regardless as to whether its data-heavy,
image-based, abstract, emotional, etc. Normally, however, when we desire to inform, we have
specific facts or opinions that we want to share, for example, about product attributes or features,
service quality, process improvements, value functions, brand reputation, etc. The key is to
inform in a manner that provides sufficient information, but not so much that information
overload is a concern. We also need to consider how information is presented so that (1) it is
easily understandable by our target audience and (2) it will be more likely to persuade the
recipient to adhere to our request (whether its to purchase a product, stop a destructive behavior,
attend an event, etc.).
Remind. Some marketing communication is designed to merely keep a brand or concept
or solution easily accessible in the minds of the target audience members. In these cases (and if
the target audience primarily consists of people who already know about the brand), there is no
need to discuss attributes, features, benefits, etc. These types of communication may consist
primarily of brand display, or perhaps simply allude to (rather than specifically state) benefits
and advantages of the product offering that the target audience is already expected to know.
Persuade. Most marketers attempt to design their marketing communications to be
persuasive in nature. Whether the agenda is to convince a potential buyer to make a purchase,
influence a voting decision, motivate someone to avoid unhealthy activities, enhance their
education, or countless other reasons for prompting a change of attitude or action, the hope is
that the marketing communication will have the desired effect on the intended audiences.
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Connect. Marketers have learned, long before the digital age, that connecting with
audiences is extremely helpful to the success of their marketing efforts. Thus, much marketing
communication is designed for the purpose of engaging target audiences with the brand and
product, as well as with each other. Connections often develop into familiarity and comfort.
Building communities around brands or products or events can help create new low-cost
communication channels, aid in answering customer inquiries, and build loyalty that moves
beyond loyalty to the brand and toward loyalty to the brand community.
Other purposes of marketing communication.
There are a number of additional goals for marketing communications. Often, these
goals overlap so that more than one goal is achieved by a particular communication piece or
campaign.
Attract. Attracting the attention of the people who will ultimately be interested in
acquiring your product offering is critical to not only the effectiveness of your later marketing
communications, but to the efficiency of your communication process as well. Its easy to attract
attention, but often hard to maintain it, particularly if youve attracted the wrong audience.
Entertain. Often, as a way to maintain attention and interest in a communication,
marketers work to entertain their audiences during their messaging. Whether its tricks of the
trade at the elemental level or elaborate productions, marketers hope to keep audience members
engaged in the communication piece long enough to receive (and hopefully embrace) the
intended message. Unfortunately, some marketers are so good at entertaining that the messaging
is overlooked due to it being overly subtle or the entertainment factor being overly dominant.
Evoke Emotion. Facts, opinions, comparisons, etc. about attributes, features, and benefits
are all important for marketing communication. Emotion, however, is often the most effective
way to build strong brand connections that go beyond product quality and brand reliability.
When marketers can evoke emotion in an audience member, they can dictate to a large degree
the experiential factors surrounding the reception of the marketing message. As such, they can
then influence the degree of acceptance, retention, and likelihood of recall of their intended
message.
Suppress Emotion. There are times when marketers attempt to suppress, rather than
evoke, emotion. This occurs particularly for highly emotional topics or situations when target
audience members are unlikely to listen to and entertain new information. By moving the
communication from emotional to merely informational, the marketer may be able to provide
facts that will assist the audience member in understanding the message in a more
comprehensive manner.
Motivate. Much marketing messaging is designed to motivate its recipients to do
something, whether its to stay tuned, change ones beliefs, act on a purchase decision, or
various other thoughts, tasks, and actions. The messaging may try to invoke immediate action or
perhaps a long-term series of actions. Either way, the messaging needs to be clearly targeted to
the audience, the environment, and the specific situation in which its received.
Other purposes. There are numerous other marketing communication purposes to
consider. Marketers can attempt to excite, frighten, appease, calm, please, provoke, amuse,
thrill, etc. The list is as long as there are human states of mind and states of being, whether
emotional, intellectual, or physical.
3
Conclusion.
There are few marketers who view their craft as only a tool of information provision.
Most understand that, if they have a brand or product that is worth providing, their task is to
provide messaging that persuades, convinces, sways, induces, converts, influences, etc. Others
will attempt to use coercive, controlling, or deceptive messaging, even when their product
offerings are harmful to their target audiences.
In all cases, marketing communication is powerful tool that can change attitudes, desires,
and behaviors. It changes individual purchase decisions as well as the trajectory of entire
industries, regions, and countries. Its ubiquitous and never-ending, and is found in every
industry imaginable. It can help create value and help destroy it as well, regardless of the
intentions of its conceptualizers, designers, or creators. As such, marketers need to understand
the connections between communication purposes and the conceptualization, design, and
creation of their marketing messages. Doing so will help them be successful in achieving their
overall marketing goals.
