You are dumping thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars into marketing but have no clear idea what is working and what is not. Does this sound familiar? If it does, this post was written to help you understand holistic marketing!
How Your Customers Experience Your Brand
As marketers we often hyper focus on in platform performance. How many leads did this campaign drive? What was the cost per acquisition? What was our reach? Unfortunately this micro focused view does not represent how customers actually experience your brand and your marketing efforts. This is where having a holistic marketing view can help you bridge the gap.
For a customer they see your brand across all channels as one brand. They see a YouTube ad that introduces your brand to them for the first time. Then they see a display ad while they are browsing their favorite blog that reminds them of your brand. Then they see a Facebook ad and decide that they are ready to buy. If we look in platform Facebook will take full credit for that sale. Depending on the length of the sales journey and the way the customer interacted with the previous ads they may take credit for that sale as well. But, does the Facebook ad really deserve all of the credit for that sale? Does the YouTube ad? This is where taking a holistic marketing view can help you better understand how all of your advertising efforts are working together to drive results.
The Need for a Holistic Marketing View
In a time where third party cookies are soon to be a thing of the past it is more important than ever for brands to focus on a holistic marketing perspective. Just because one channel is a conversion channel does not mean that other channels and efforts are not just as important to the overall customer journey.
Multi-Channel Case Study
Consider this scenario, you notice that display ads are not delivering down funnel. You decided that they are a waste of money and pull your display budget to spend in other areas that are delivering more sales. Unfortunately a few months down the line you find that email, one of your best channels for sales, is tanking. But why?
After a careful analysis you find that display ads were a huge driver of traffic to your site, and without it you are not getting the traffic you need to fill your funnel with new subscribers.
Now that you see how huge the impact of pulling budget from a “low performing” channel can be on a “high” performing channel, perhaps it is important to consider our whole marketing effort, not just in platform performance.
Getting Started
Each channel will have its own purpose and impacts, not all channel goals are the same. That is why it is important to understand the purpose that a channel plays in your overall marketing efforts and ensure that channel is optimized to the right goals.
The first step to gaining a holistic marketing view is to have proper tracking in place. It is hard to make data driven decisions without the proper data.
If you are thinking to yourself, I threw a Google Analytics code on my website when I set it up, isn’t that enough, be sure to catch our next post!
Looking for help setting up your framework for a holistic marketing strategy? Check out our services we’d love to help you get a leg up on the competition.