Image by Prodeep Ahmeed from Pixabay

By Steve Conway

The term holistic marketing has been somewhat of a trending term in marketing and advertising circles, and for many businesses out there, it is still somewhat of a new concept. This article will discuss the idea of holistic marketing and suggest how it can reinvigorate your brand.

Holistic marketing in brief

It’s based on Aristotle’s concept of Holism, where the sum of the entire marketing campaign is valued more than its parts. There is no segment or part of the business marketing that is more important, and as a whole, a well-developed holistic marketing plan is worth the time it will take to develop.

Holistic marketing must include as many channels as are used by your clientele and customers, stakeholders, and business partners. Internal marketing, relationship marketing, performance marketing, and product marketing are all integrated into one cohesive marketing plan. It is a long-term view that is taken and used to develop a strategy that serves to increase revenue by ongoing integrated brand building.

What are the marketing channels to integrate?

– Internal marketing

This is the process of ensuring that the employees and all staff, management, and contractors understand and buy into the values and principles of the company. It’s about encouraging them to participate in company culture and to fully support the mission, vision, products, and services.

– Relationship marketing

This is about creating long-lasting, sustainable relationships with customers, clients, and all other business stakeholders. It is a cheaper, more reliable process to keep existing customers than to create a new one, and as such, the customer service that is the mainstay of relationship marketing is the one aspect that many businesses understand and are able to get right. In order to make it a holistic process, this relationship aspect must be integrated with the other forms of marketing and use all the channels that the stakeholders, clients, and customers use. It should include new media, posters, billboards, and as noted by gsa-marketing.co.uk, telemarketing could form a critical component of this process as the available customer and company data on social media and from transactional data allows for a much-improved opportunity to build a solid relationship through conversation and customer support.

– Socially responsible marketing

This is a new trend, and it has become ever more important to ensure that your marketing campaign is in line with current environmental and societal trends. Linking the company to a higher goal and to those as expressed in the protection of the planet and our society as a whole is a good way to show involvement and commitment to more than the bottom line.

– Performance marketing

If you are going to spend on marketing, then you must be able to track every penny. In an age of big data and where analytics are now commonplace, your business has to be able to track your spending and measure the return on investment for marketing. How many responses does a specific campaign bring, how many calls does it take to elicit a sale or a response? This is the data that you must gather to improve the integration and ensure the marketing campaign is working.

An integrated and holistic marketing campaign is accepted as the best way to ensure that your small business succeeds and that you meet your marketing and advertising needs. It is a process that will need planning and as much information and data as is available on customers, competition, the market, and more. Holistic marketing is not as complicated as many have made it sound. It is about brand building in a way that is as inclusive as possible and uses the techniques and methods that your clients and customers are using.
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Content marketing and inbound marketing expert, Steve Conway is passionate about discovering new tech which will enhance his already well-honed digital marketing skills.