Integrated marketing communications (IMC) approach

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· Provide a detailed description of the communication channels/media (for example, advertising, personal selling, public relations, direct marketing, and sales promotion) you would use to communicate with your target segment. (Be sure to provide research to support the pros & cons of each channel)

· Explain your rationale for choosing (or not choosing) these specific channels/media.

In order to communicate with our target segment, ie, high school and college level students scattered all over the United States, we will use a combination of online as well as offline communications methods. Let us discuss these offline as well as online methods one by one.

We will start the integrated communications approach by popularizing our portal within university, college and high school students via series of seminars, conferences and presentations at major universities, colleges and high schools throughout the United States. This approach will give a tremendous boost in creating awareness among the students about the presence of our website and the services provided by us. Since online tutoring is a fairly new concept and not many players have entered this industry, the best benefit of such seminars and conferences in schools and colleges will help in eliminating many apprehensions, sceptisms and queries associated with online tutoring. If we can continuously keep on clarifying issues to a group of people, additional referral business is bound to come as these students will pass on the information to their freinds and peers.

However, one major drawback of these methods is the time, effort and money spent on such marketing techniques. Further, since the number of schools and colleges are firly large across the United States, we have to prioritize and segment the schools and colleges to be visited for this purpose. The best approach will be to first prioritize the important states in US we need to cover during the first phase and then selecting the most important educational institutions, which not only possess good student ...