Marketing is an evolving discipline. With the rapid technological advancements in the past three decades, holistic marketing has been a leading proven concept. With this strategy, the marketing moves beyond the marketing team and takes on an enterprise-wide strategy role for business functions. Traditional marketers used to work in silos to complete isolated projects. However, a holistic marketer brings new opportunities, designs relevant services or products, and creates the necessary supporting infrastructure, such as implementing asset management digital marketing techniques. Unlike traditional marketers, holistic markers incorporate cross-organization strategic perspectives at the enterprise level.
Creating an Enterprise-Wide Mindset with Holistic Marketing:
Holistic marketing and all its activities and processes have been created as interconnected platforms, with the capacity to incorporate each business activity and align all the employees, from the CEO to the support crew, with shared business objectives and consistent messaging.
All advocates for holistic marketing claim that since marketers operate outside individual business units, they view a corporation as a holistic entity that should align with common objectives for the organizational good. Unlike other teams and divisions, marketing is ideally placed to leverage business operational interdependence and drive alignment.
Additionally, having a holistic mindset drives efficiency, profit, and strategy like no other function can.
Dimensions of Holistic Marketing:
According to economist and marketer Philip Kotler, holistic marketing has four components that show how complex and comprehensive this approach is. It covers all aspects from business relationships with stakeholders to internal brand purpose alignment to every ethical, environmental, and social impact the business might have on society.
Internal Marketing:
Holistic marketing represents a perspective that each individual within an organization represents the brand. Therefore, consistently aligning every employee with the brand principles and vision is critical for external brand perceptions. Marketing is a diverse domain that is a part of everyone’s job descriptions. From every board member to the receptionist, holistic marketing ensures a uniform and systematic interaction process that can create strong, sustainable relationships between the business and customers.
Integrated Marketing:
Integrated marketing includes synchronizing every marketing activity and detail on all channels so that business partners and customers have the same brand messaging and perception. Maintaining consistency and driving an omnichannel experience helps build trust, communicate reliability and foster a feeling of meeting expectations. As a result, they increase return on investment (ROI) in public relations, advertising, online communications, direct marketing, and social media marketing.
Relationship marketing:
Treating an organization’s multifaceted relationships with each stakeholder as a valuable company asset, a holistic marketer creates a strong enterprise asset – a long-term, stable network with mutual prosperity.
For any business, the most critical relationship must be with the customer, focusing on CRM (customer relationship management), customer retention and CLV (customer lifetime value).
Holistic marketers see every person and business as a factor that can impact their failure or success, including their partners (suppliers, contractors, channel members and agencies), employees, financial partners (shareholders, investors and analysts), competing firms and regulatory agencies.
Performance marketing or Societal marketing:
A holistic approach to performance marketing is not limited to analyzing immediate financial returns like sales revenue. It encompasses long-term value drivers like customer satisfaction, product quality, market share, and customer loss rate. Holistic marketers also look at non-financial returns to the enterprise and society that are harder to quantify, such as businesses’ ethical, legal, environmental and social impacts.
Holistic marketing positions an organization as a socially responsible company that engages in ethical practices like meaningful community engagement or environment-friendly production. This approach extends the organization’s influence sphere beyond other stakeholders and customers to society. Also known as social marketing, this dimension of holistic marketing has started focusing largely on issues related to the environment.
A holistic marketing platform allows enterprises to evaluate which channel is most effective along every step of the customer journey. In exchange, marketers can leverage the right opportunities to continue reaching new and existing customers using effective and proven pathways.
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