What is holistic marketing and why should you invest in it?

Holistic medicine practitioners believe that a person is made up of interdependent parts; if one part is not working properly, all other parts of the body will be affected. Holistic marketing approaches are similar. If one part of your marketing strategy isn’t working, all parts of the strategy must be taken into consideration to fix the problem. In this article, we aim to explain why looking at the whole picture of your digital marketing strategy is important, and the common traps that people fall into that preventing them from approaching digital marketing in a holistic way.

Don’t chase the shiny object

As digital marketing continues to advance, it can be tempting, as a business owner, to put a considerable amount of money into the latest digital marketing craze. Big companies, like Google and Facebook, are constantly coming out with new tools and methods to get your brand in front of the right audience. Of course, you don’t want to be the one to miss out.

In the digital world, investing in a shiny new thing isn’t necessarily the best thing for your business. This is why you need to hit pause when you’re tempted by these new digital trends. Take a look at all parts of your digital presence and figure out where the best place to invest your marketing dollars is. It could be the new product, but it also might be a good idea to keep things the way that they are. This is a holistic approach to digital marketing.

Taking it apart

In the digital age, users do not follow a linear and easy-to-map-out journey to becoming a customer. With some of our clients, we have seen the user visit the business’ website over 30 times before finally making a purchase. These users come through a variety of digital channels. Sometimes they come through the same channel multiple times, each time with a different intent. If you decide not to prioritize a part of the journey that they might be on, they will take their business somewhere else.

The mix of stages in the buyer journey, from this article by Acorn Influence.

Visibly important

We don’t need to tell you that growing your business means growing your customer base. There are endless ways to do this online and, for the most part, this is where the majority of marketing spend goes. Some of the best-known methods of obtaining new customers are paid search advertising, Google display advertising, YouTube advertising and Paid Social advertising.

One of the forgotten tools in obtaining new customers is SEO, also known as organic optimization. The goal of SEO is to have your website rank higher in the search results below ads. As you don’t pay for the clicks on these results, organic optimization offers the highest return-on-investment (ROI), but it involves a longer time frame, which is why it is best used in conjunction with the other paid strategies listed above.

Be there when they return

Many of the users who visit your website via Google or paid social ads won’t become customers or leads the very first time they interact with your brand. It is important to focus on not just getting them to your website, but also bringing them back.

Organic optimization can help with this. While it can take time to rise within the search engine results pages, increasing your organic visibility is one of the best ways to ensure that you are consistently visible when they search for your brand or one of the services that you offer.

Remarketing capabilities within Google and Microsoft advertising allow you to remind users of your brand when they are visiting other websites. Remarketing is a tool to target users that have previously visited your website or particular product pages, showing them the items that they viewed and reminding them of your brand. Remarketing is a great tool for your brand to remain memorable and make the user come back to your website when they finally decide to make that purchase.

Finish it off

When the user is ready to become a customer, their journey through your website must be as seamless as possible. This does not mean you need to have the fanciest, most beautiful website. What users actually want looks a lot simpler… but is not easy to execute.

Your website is the foundation of your entire digital marketing strategy. It must be functional, easy to navigate, fast loading, and indexable by search engines. All of these factors will increase the user experience and lead to a higher conversion rate – the rate at which visitors to your website become a customer – for all tactics that you are using to build up your customer base.

A great way to optimize your website for conversion is to have it built by a developer or agency that understands holistic digital marketing. Many websites are technically built to best practices, but if your developer doesn’t understand holistic digital marketing, they may not be what is best for your target customer. Optimizing your website through data-driven testing methods ensures that traffic to your website is given the best shot at becoming paying customers.

Measuring it all

Throughout the entire process of building and implementing a holistic approach to digital marketing, it is essential that you are measuring and using data to inform your decisions. Having a properly set up web analytics tool, like Google Analytics, is essential to measuring the effectiveness of your advertising dollars and the impact of your marketing strategy.

Analytics tools provide breakdowns of the volume of traffic to your website from each channel, along with the paths that each took to become a customer. Using this data, decisions can be made on where to dedicate the budget to improve statistics. The data can also provide insights into the effectiveness of channels that play a larger role as an awareness piece rather than directly generating leads.

Analytics tools can also provide data on the top paths taken to become a customer.

Putting it all together

This article has only scratched the surface of the factors involved in holistic digital marketing. However, I hope that you can see the importance of not impulsively spending money on digital marketing platforms that don’t enhance your user journey. You need to look at the big picture to ensure that all marketing efforts are contributing to your business’ growth.

As business owners, marketing managers, and salespeople, it can be hard to stay on top of and manage all these factors. Enlisting the help of an agency with a team of talented specialists, such as Snaptech, can help you to build and execute an effective holistic digital marketing strategy.

If you’d like to start a conversation with us, don’t hesitate to reach out or call us today at 604-677-0742.