By Brittany Gora and Katherine Rupp
As more businesses work to refine their presence on the Internet, staying relevant in a vast online landscape continues to be competitive. To win over potential customers, you must integrate all your efforts, and this method of incorporating all strategies is part of holistic marketing.
By definition, “holistic marketing” refers to considering an entire business and all its sectors. Essentially, you’re thinking beyond just one specific department. You’re considering all departments, working in harmony. It sounds like a beautiful thing that’s too good to be true—but good news is, you can achieve this. We’re breaking down how you can be a holistic marketer both inside and outside of the office.
Understanding Holistic Marketing Concepts
Today, customers make their purchases after careful consideration. Thus, it’s crucial to capture their attention from the start. To do this, all efforts should align with a larger company-wide mission. Often, these goals look like encouraging customer retention and promoting brand awareness. By creating a plan ahead of time, you can intentionally and quickly develop meaningful relationships with your clients or customers.
Honing the skills of being a holistic marketer is just one step through which the tapestry of marketing is created. There are facets to being a holistic marketer that tend to sway towards the professional aspect of business, however, what shouldn’t be taken for granted are the personal characteristics.
Tapping into the Breadth of Holistic Marketing Strategies
One of the concepts of holistic marketing includes bringing together the vision of each department or organization’s marketing channels and funnels that upward. While the company as a whole should have a mission, each department needs one as well. If your company is working in silos — and each channel doesn’t understand their purpose — you’ll face disadvantages such as communication breakdowns, duplicated deliverables, and wasted time and money.
Once a common goal is settled upon that is congruous with and ladders up to the mission and vision of the organization, it is disseminated throughout the company. As each employee understands the ultimate purpose of what they do and why they do it, it solidifies the holistic marketing concept of attaining an objective for the greater good, including the client. This aspect of internal marketing is vital to move forward with more external facing marketing efforts.
Once internal marketing has been addressed, the next weave of the holistic marketing tapestry is integrated marketing. The integration of different holistic marketing strategies and tactics is, ideally, what takes place when an organization is seamlessly running on all cylinders. By fusing the elements of integrated marketing into a full holistic marketing approach, the more well rounded the final product.
Additionally, both relationship marketing and performance marketing play their own separate parts as holistic marketing concepts. Through forming the more deep-seeded bonds through relationships with customers — truly building brand loyal consumers and cultivating a connection with those who use the product or service — and understanding the consumers that take action on paid marketing services and engage with a brand with performance marketing goals, holistic marketing can be seen as such, comprehensive.
Not only are commonalities in goals an important characteristic of holistic marketing, so should the fusion of its features, strategies, and tactics such as initiatives to increase brand awareness and pursuing the concept of cohesion to achieve a level of compatibility in strategies.
Therefore, through the amalgamation of various elements of business strategies running throughout a company, being a holistic marketer means taking a bird’s eye view of the target market and understanding that the cross-pollination of marketing channels and strategies can have great, and fruitful, impact on a business and clients.
Being a Holistic Marketer
No doubt, planning future initiatives requires a great deal of time and effort. After devoting time to the organization you’re part of and its future success, what is crucial and comes into play in holistic marketing is to carve out time for yourself.
Being a holistic marketer requires a large amount of autonomy and a skillset that is unmatched. It can be quite the task to keep on top of trending holistic marketing strategies, understand the nuances of each of the four types of marketing that comprise holistic marketing, and maybe even carve out your own niche within digital marketing (for instance, you might be someone who excels in SEO or Paid Media).
Remember to take intermittent breaks throughout the day, and lean into healthy ways to decompress during this time. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Calling family members or friends for a chat
- Cleaning up your home
- Cooking a meal or preparing a snack
- Listening to music and podcasts
- Reading a magazine or book
- Participating in creative hobbies like drawing, making music, painting, or sewing
- Squeezing in a workout or meditation
To improve on your proficiencies in holistic marketing, an important point to remember is to be a full person. Bringing your humanity into being a holistic marketer should make it easier to transfer real-life experiences, opinions, and research into your holistic marketing strategies and initiatives.
