Holistic marketing works – here’s how to apply it to your campaigns (+ expert tips)

When I graduated with a degree in marketing over a decade ago, I thought marketing would always be its own thing. Something like “holistic marketing” seemed unnecessary to me. Marketers had their swim; I would stick with mine.

Now, when I teach marketing students at my alma mater, I couldn’t imagine it not Think marketing holistically. Like Deloitte, the marketing function is constantly expanding CMO survey spring 2024 confirmed. And marketing must help other departments and the entire company achieve its goals and objectives.

This is one of the many benefits that holistic marketing offers. When we free marketing from swimlanes, we invite others to join in and adopt the principles and results of marketing. Marketing then becomes the guide that guides customers, partners and employees to a comprehensive, unified brand experience.

But first, you need to understand the history, application, and impact of holistic marketing. Let’s talk about how you can get more out of your campaigns using this approach.

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For a long time, companies divided their operations into separate business units. Marketing, sales, customer support, product development: each department was responsible to the entire company, but operated within its own boundaries.

But these departmental boundaries are blurring, with marketing taking center stage in the process. No doubt many of you are familiar with the call to align sales and marketing Marketing.

But other departments also rely on marketing to help them:

• Attract more prospects.
• Educate and inform potential customers.
• Entice customers to renew and upgrade.
• Deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience.

Are you central to these needs? Serve the customer. And the key to “holistic marketing” is understanding how you, as a marketing leader, can influence the way your entire company interacts with customers.

The term “holistic marketing” gained popularity primarily through the efforts of respected marketing professors Philip Kotler (often referred to as the “father of modern marketing”). He defines it as “creating an experience for the customer that goes beyond the product.”

Kotler further defines the cornerstones of holistic marketing:

• Internal marketing that gets everyone from interns to CEOs to embrace marketing principles.
• Integrated marketing that uses many channels and creative opportunities to communicate your value proposition.
• Relationship marketing that advocates for your customers and marketing partners.
• Performance marketing, which analyzes the return on marketing investments and contextualizes marketing activities under legal, ethical, social and environmental factors.

With this in mind, you can see how holistic marketing is part of the customer experience (CX) that a company delivers. The scope of CX is the overall experience that a customer has with a brand. A holistic marketing strategy focuses more on how marketing activities impact that experience.

What does holistic marketing look like in practice?

To answer this question, I spoke to Allison Nordenbrock BrownFounder of North Marketing. It provides part-CMO services to B2B technology and professional services companies.

“I would define holistic marketing as an approach that considers all potential marketing channels,” she said. “Rather than focusing heavily on one channel because it’s about ‘what was done,’ holistic marketers instead consider how all of those channels have historically performed within the organization to determine future direction.”

These potential marketing channels cover all areas that could influence a customer’s brand perception, including:

• Classic marketing such as TV, radio, outdoor advertising.
• Digital marketing such as SEO, email and social media.
• PR and earned media.
• Direct sales calls and promotions.
• Customer support such as call centers, chatbots and social media support.
• Experience and event marketing.
• Corporate Social Responsibility Efforts.
• Internal marketing to employees.

Consider a brand like Apple from this holistic perspective. Maybe you recently bought an iPhone. No doubt you’ve seen an advert on TV or checked out a landing page via a sponsored link – that’s certainly the job of marketing.

But what happens after you purchase the device?

Every post-purchase event also falls under Apple’s marketing umbrella. From the design of the Unpacking the device If you would like to offer Genius Bars in-store as support, you can do so feel Apple’s brand. It’s a unified, seamless brand experience. You want to emulate this feeling with a holistic marketing approach.

Advantages of holistic marketing

Look at how many ways marketers have to think about when taking a holistic approach to marketing. Is all the work worth it? Let’s explore the benefits of holistic marketing.

Improves customer experience

Customers crave a seamless experience like what Apple offers. And they notice when you don’t deliver.

The latest from Salesforce Connected customer status One report found that “79% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 55% say it generally feels like they are communicating with separate departments rather than a company.”

A well-executed holistic marketing approach helps companies deliver a consistent brand experience. With a defined core message and an approach shared across all company functions, every customer receives an experience that accurately reflects your company.

Increases company sales

Of course, better customer experiences likely mean customers want to stay with you and spend more money. A consistent brand identity à la Apple can help you generate more sales. Brand management tool Marq found that “uniform brand appearance Sales can be increased by up to 23% across all platforms.”

Increases internal team effectiveness

A holistic approach also offers significant advantages internally. Brown gives an example that every marketer is familiar with: Sales asks marketing to quickly come up with a new deck to wow a big prospect.

In a traditional marketing setup, “marketing sucks,” says Brown. “You’ve already made a deck. Why is this an emergency now? They are overwhelmed and frustrated because they didn’t hear about this need sooner. Why isn’t the existing deck good enough?”

Holistic marketing allows marketers to be more proactive. This approach allows marketing to communicate with sales, take ownership, and get things done.

“In a holistic marketing department, sales and marketing meet regularly and discuss their goals and activities,” says Brown.

“Sales is targeting more large corporate customers. Marketing asks about your needs in advance. The sales indicate that the current offering is not being well received by potential companies. Sales and marketing develop a deck together while sales ramp up their efforts. As soon as sales get to a meeting, the deck is ready to go and everyone is less stressed.”

How to apply a holistic marketing approach

Whether you’re a one-person marketing team or managing marketing for a global company, you can benefit from a more holistic approach. How do you start?

1. Establish your goals and an overarching strategy.

Before you jump into developing an incredible, highly detailed holistic marketing plan, think about the basics:

• What do you want to achieve?
• What do you think it will take to achieve this?
• Who should be around you to do this?
• How do you think you will integrate everything?

Write yourself a memo with detailed answers to these questions. You want to build buy-in before investing significant time and resources into holistic marketing.

Create an overarching roadmap to achieve your goal that will help others see the direction you want to go and where they can support you.

2. Align internal teams.

With a briefing in hand, start building consensus among other departments. Sales is your first and most important champion. They will benefit most from your holistic approach and you want to have them on your team.

Just as a salesperson develops a logical and emotional argument for their prospects, you should approach them in a similar way. Show why they should care about a holistic approach. Find case studies and examples from other companies.

Rely on the benefits this brings to customers (and the prospects sales want to close). It’s not about making marketing better; It’s about how marketing can make a difference all better.

After strong sales, consider other customer-facing departments, such as customer support or product development and design. Invite teams that influence how customers experience your company’s product or service.

3. Determine details such as messages, channels and SOPs.

With agreement on the plan’s goals and overarching strategy, you can then develop the details to expand your holistic marketing approach.

Include the following in your plan:

• Goals, objectives and key figures.
• Central, customer-focused messaging.
• Brand voice, tone and style guides.
• Channels for managing customer relationships.
• Standard operating procedures (SOPs) to execute holistic marketing campaigns.
• Clear lines of responsibility and authority (consider building one RASCI matrix).

Pro tip: Make sure your message reflects your authentic voice. Customers can spot a counterfeit. Social content marketing company Stackla reports that “88% of consumers say Authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support.”

Provide enough detail so that your non-marketing colleagues can adopt the marketing principles and act accordingly. For example, user- or employee-generated content can be particularly valuable in providing the authenticity customers desire.

A clear guide can help employees create great content—and help you avoid mishaps like Chick-fil-A’s treatment of its employees Food videos went viral on TikTok.

4. Monitor and adjust metrics.

Remember that a holistic marketing strategy involves more than a traditional strategy. Accordingly, you need to track more than the typical sets of metrics. Other KPIs worth tracking include:

• Customer satisfaction.
• Brand awareness.
• Employee engagement.

These data points are more qualitative; Get creative with how you collect and use this data. For example, use post-purchase engagement surveys to determine Net Promoter Score (NPS). This will help you evaluate customer engagement and track quality progress.

If you need additional help completing the details of your plan, check out HubSpot’s guide to creating a quality marketing strategy and plan.

3 tips for a strong holistic marketing strategy

They have recognized the benefits of holistic marketing and are working to integrate marketing processes and involve other departments.

As you execute your strategy and build your coalition, Brown shares some tips to successfully implement this significant operational overhaul.

1. Question everything.

A holistic marketing strategy requires a broader mindset to be successfully implemented. You need to look beyond the regular channels, recognize and respond to unorthodox opportunities. Therefore, marketers cannot sit back and stay with the status quo.

“Traditional marketing departments often get stuck in a loop: ‘This is how it’s always been, this is how we’ve always done it,'” Brown said.

“But holistic marketers look at marketing strategy from the perspective of ‘Should we do this?’ and “Is this producing the right results for our business?” When your approach becomes holistic, you will shift your marketing efforts from reactive to proactive.”

2. Always communicate.

To create something new, everyone has to be convinced of the concept and excited about the possible results. It’s a question of relationships within your company. And as with building any relationship, communication is key.

As marketing takes a more holistic approach, Brown reminds you to keep everyone updated on progress.

“By communicating that marketing is testing multiple channels to see how they can all work together at the same time, departments will be more understanding when marketing stops being as responsive to their needs,” she said. “Your needs are already being met through proactive planning and communication.”

3. Pursue a common goal.

Holistic marketing generates a lot of data and it’s difficult to keep everyone’s key insights top of mind.

UX designers may recognize this challenge as Miller’s law: Long-term research shows that most people can hold about seven pieces of information in their heads at the same time. UX designers have tried many ways to get around this limitation, such as: “Chunking” content to make it digestible and memorable.

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Like designers, marketers need to transform data into comprehensive, manageable insights. Cross-departmental communication quickly becomes complicated.

Marketers should take the lead and focus teams’ attention on what matters most with a unified goal.

Brown agrees with this strategy. “All channels should still be measured individually, but a successful holistic strategy will lead the way to the unified goal,” she said. “This goal should be understood across departments. Whether it’s increasing recurring revenue in a single business unit or acquiring new subscribers, a holistic strategy will work toward the unifying goal from all angles.”

Pro tip: Use HubSpots Marketing plan template to lay the foundation for your holistic marketing approach. You will receive templates to define your strategies, channels and technology.

Take proactive steps to integrate holistic marketing

Consumers are picky about their brand relationships. If they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll go somewhere else. And the best brands that consumers stay with provide a fulfilling, seamless brand experience.

I teach marketing students about individual marketing activities such as email, social media and direct marketing. However, the successful future marketer must not only think holistically, but also build relationships across departments to expand marketing influence.

A holistic approach to marketing can help you take advantage of the various resources scattered throughout your business.

With a proactive mindset, high regard for your customers, and strong cross-departmental relationships, you can build a clear vision into any marketing campaign and achieve consistent business goals.