Why a Holistic Marketing Strategy Is More Important Than Ever
In today’s rapidly changing marketing landscape, a piecemeal approach just doesn’t cut it anymore. Audiences interact with brands across search, email, social, and more, meaning that an integrated, holistic strategy is what turns those touchpoints into a cohesive journey. We have long-preached that this approach is essential in making sure you get the most impact from your efforts (hence our name), but the need for this practice is even more important now with high consumer expectations and the fast-paced nature of the AI-driven marketing world.
Here is what you need to know about creating and structuring a holistic marketing strategy.
What is a Holistic Marketing Strategy?
The key aspect of a holistic marketing strategy is aligning every aspect of your business to improve your customer experience and maximize efficiency. By implementing this well, you can ensure that your customer experience is consistent from discovery to repeat buyer, building brand loyalty and optimizing marketing budgets.
Traditionally, each operation within an organization would be separated into departments like marketing, sales, fulfillment, sourcing, etc. And each of those departments could be further segmented into specialties including email, search, design, support, etc. While all these departments are seemingly working towards a common goal, the lines of communication are complicated and often one department wouldn’t know what another department was working on until that initiative was launched.
Tools like Slack and Teams (among others have made communication easier among departments, but a true holistic marketing approach needs to be designed from the top-down for maximum impact, all starting with your customer in mind.
“Shaping an experience for the customer that goes beyond the product.”
Philip Kotler, also known as the Father of Modern Marketing. initially defined the key aspects of holistic marketing as:
Internal Marketing - How your brand and products are discussed inside the organization
Integrated Marketing - How you utilize the tools and channels available to deliver a consistent customer experience
Relationship Marketing - How you work to build brand loyalty with customers and partners
Performance Marketing - How you measure the returns of your marketing efforts and how you address the impacts of those efforts (legal, ethical, social, and environmental)
How to Create a Holistic Marketing Strategy in the AI Era
Now that you have a better understanding of what a holistic marketing strategy is, you are well on your way to taking the first steps in creating a holistic marketing strategy. Here are some tips on structuring your strategy.
Audit Existing Marketing Efforts
Before you make any changes, assess how each department and channel (traditional, digital, PR, sales and promos, customer support, events, philanthropic, and internal messaging) has historically performed. Look at what resonated, what fell flat, and what was consistent among them. Use this data to help inform your new strategy.
Set Brand Goals + a High-Level Strategy
This will look different depending on the size of your organization, but you need to have solid answers around what you want to accomplish and how you plan on integrating your efforts. Having the bones of a roadmap will help you communicate the idea to your other team members so you can get buy-in and support. Key questions to ask in this stage are:
How can the customer experience be improved?
What parts of our current experience are working well?
How do we create a consistent experience for the customer throughout their journey?
How can we align all internal teams on goals and messaging?
What existing processes are redundant or prohibitive to collaboration?
What systems are in place or need to be in place that can support this?
Get the Team on the Same Page
The most important piece of the puzzle is getting the entire team on the same page. You need to create internal communication processes and make it easy for teams or team members to communicate and collaborate. Part of this is going to be making sure everyone knows the common goal that they are working towards and how they should be tracking efforts and progress consistently and clearly.
Create Guidelines + Messaging
Now that the team is on the same page and has a mission to work towards, you need to create clear goals, objectives, and metrics (KPIs). Important KPIs to consider as a part of this approach are customer feedback, employee buy-in, and brand awareness. From here, refine your strategy by establishing your “brand bible” with style guidelines, messaging, and tone outlined.
When developing your messaging, it is important to consider the stages of the customer journey - Aware, Appeal, Ask, Act, Advocate (as seen in the figure below) – to ensure you are crafting language that will resonate with your audience in each stage of their journey.
When it comes to implementation, your strategy should also include the channels that are most important to your audience. In other words, make sure to be where they are.
Lastly, your team needs to know who is responsible for what and what the procedure is. This helps with consistency and buy-in. Create standard operating procedures or SOPs for each role with clear accountability considerations and revisit these often to ensure they are still relevant.
Monitoring + Adjusting
Once your strategy has been implemented, you need to continuously monitor the KPIs that you have previously outlined and determine what is working well and what needs further refinement. Each department will have a unique perspective, so it is best to consider all data points to create a more complete picture. As with all things in marketing, your strategy should not be stagnant. To stay ahead of the curve, be flexible and keep up with digital trends and consumer behavior. Some emerging technologies that are sure to influence buyer behavior in the near future are voice search, facial recognition, and the growing reliance on AI. Determine what your approach to these technologies will be and how to incorporate these without losing sight of the customer or your brand.
TL;DR
Customers expect a seamless experience from brands even when they haven’t interacted with a brand previously. Customers most likely will not compliment you when you do this well, but they will surely call it out when you miss the mark. By matching expectations, you are setting yourself up for repeat customers and potential brand advocates. Let us know if you need another set of eyes on your holistic marketing strategy.