Why Holistic Marketing Made Sense to Us but Might Not for You

Introduction

Holistic marketing has been gaining popularity within marketing departments over the last few years. This organic, connection-driven approach fosters building strong relationships with all of an organization’s surroundings and evaluating the impact of different marketing strategies on several different components.

In this blog post, we discuss what holistic marketing involves and why we’ve adopted a holistic marketing approach at AIM Collaborators. We’ll also cover why holistic marketing may not work for you, because as much as we love the approach, we know that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing and different approaches are going to work best for every business.

What is Holistic Marketing?

Holistic marketing involves considering several distinct areas when developing a marketing plan. The extent of consideration varies based on what an individual business needs, so this is not a set-in-stone approach to take to every single marketing campaign but should be viewed as an overview of the basics to better understand holistic marketing.

Holistic marketing is made up of five components: relationship marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, and performance marketing.

Relationship marketing considers the relationships the company has with customers, employees, and partners. Thinking about what you promise to each group and how you fulfill that promise will give you key insights into how you already market your relationships with different groups.

Integrated marketing looks at the communication strategy used to get the word out about an organization’s products, services, and prices. The channels used to communicate this information are an important aspect of integrated marketing and should also be considered in this framework.

Channels are more important than ever to consider because consumers are active across multiple channels. Confining your marketing efforts to only one or two channels means you’ll miss out on a large portion of your target market.

Internal marketing involves all of the departments within the organization that are a part of the marketing efforts. This of course includes the marketing department. Senior management also needs to be involved in the internal marketing plan. The other departments involved in the organization’s marketing will vary from business to business, so you must sit down and think of who you’ll need on your team to make your organization’s marketing a success.

Performance marketing evaluates sales revenue along with brand and customer equity. Looking at what’s influencing your revenue trends will help you determine what needs improvement and how to go about making an action plan for those desired changes. 

What values are important to your customers? Do your brand’s values align with those of your customers? The answers to these questions will indicate whether your brand story is resonating with your prospective customers. If your values and theirs are in alignment, your customers will be more likely to remain loyal to you.

A fifth component has made its way into the holistic marketing framework in recent years. Societal marketing is gaining in popularity among holistic marketing practitioners. This component involves considering the well-being of the society your target market belongs to and your organization’s social responsibility.

Why We Chose Holistic Marketing

Holistic marketing has a few benefits, which is why we ultimately chose this approach. As the word “holistic” indicates, this marketing approach emphasizes interconnectivity between different parts of the business ecosystem. 

Holistic marketing is a flexible approach that is ever-changing. It allows for enhanced responsiveness and better adaptation to each business’s unique needs. This, in turn, makes for a truly unique experience between a marketing agency and a small business. 

The dynamic nature of the holistic approach also fosters relationships between an agency and a business because of its flexible, responsive nature. It truly puts the customer’s needs first more so than the typical rigid internal processes that dictate what can be done, by whom, and at what point in the process it can be done. 

Lastly, the organic experience holistic marketing provides allows for greater learning, both for the customer and for yourself. Because the holistic approach is grounded in human connection, there are greater opportunities for ongoing learning about each other, which in the end leads to creating an exceptional plan for the business to move forward with, and for the agency to have a better understanding of that business’s needs for future projects and that specific niche.

All of these aspects are why this approach resonated with us. Holistic marketing is flexible and can be adapted to any situation, which would enable us to be flexible when working on marketing projects with growing businesses. In the end, this builds better outcomes for everyone.

Why Holistic Marketing Might Not Make Sense for You

Although holistic marketing has several advantages, it’s not always the approach that makes the most sense for everyone. It’s more time-consuming upfront to engage in holistic marketing; you have to devote a lot of resources to get the full picture with details on each component. Even with a small but mighty team, it’s a lot of work to put this together, and you and your team members may not be able to adequately balance your existing responsibilities and compile a holistic marketing plan.

For small businesses that may not have in-house marketing teams, it would be challenging to actively market across several social channels while balancing other responsibilities. This is where an agency comes in handy because it can focus solely on the social media management of your business.

FAQs

1. What are the five components of holistic marketing?

The five components of holistic marketing are relationship marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, performance marketing, and societal marketing.

Holistic marketing is popular because of the way it organically cultivates a marketing experience that’s wholly unique to you and your business. As humans, we fundamentally crave feeling connected to others, so a rigid one-size-fits-all approach to marketing isn’t all that appealing to most, nor is it always beneficial.

The benefits of holistic marketing include fostering a meaningful connection between businesses, increased flexibility and responsiveness to customer needs, and enhanced learning opportunities for all parties involved. All of these benefits contribute to better outcomes for everyone.

The channels you ultimately choose to use in your holistic marketing strategy depend on the channels that are used the most by your target markets, and different niche markets prefer different social media channels. The channels most used by your industry competitors are a good indicator of what channels are the most popular in your target market.

5. What approach might work for me instead of holistic marketing?

If engaging in a full-fledged holistic marketing approach right away isn’t feasible for you, you could instead start by evaluating one of these five components. For example, let’s say you decide to first take a closer look at your performance marketing. You could start by listing out your values and why each of those values is a chosen part of your business. 

Then, you could move on to evaluating the values of your customers. You could ask about the values that are the most important to your customers by doing a series of polls on your social media or sending out a short survey to your email list (or both). The feedback from this will point you in the right direction to comparing the values of your customers and your business.

From there, you could begin identifying trends in sales and correlate those to the type of marketing you were doing at the time. Were your campaigns centred on values that resonated with your customers, or were you trying to appeal to a group with different values? This information will give you a solid understanding of your performance marketing, and you can start to work on how to improve this and address the other areas when time permits.

Conclusion

As you can see, holistic marketing has many advantages. It fosters meaningful connections between businesses and customers while also increasing your flexibility and responsiveness to customer needs. Additionally, it enhances learning opportunities for businesses and customers. These advantages are the reason we chose to adopt the approach at AIM Collaborators.

However, not every marketing approach works for every single business. Holistic marketing isn’t for every business. It can be a time-consuming approach since there are so many moving factors and a lot of data associated with each factor. However, if you can make time to develop a holistic marketing plan, it’ll immensely help your business.

Holistic marketing resembles the natural ecosystem in how the approach looks at how factors influence each other throughout the marketing process. It provides a well-rounded, comprehensive overview of your marketing and allows you to construct an intentional plan that will effectively address all five components. Holistic marketing is an incredibly worthwhile investment and will forever change how you approach marketing, so it’s definitely something your business should try.