CEO and Founder of BlueTuskr, a full-service digital marketing company for e-commerce sellers, and host of The E-Comm Show podcast.
Before founding my agency, I worked at a brand that hired agencies and contractors for each particular media or marketing channel. From agencies handling Google Ads and SEO to independent contractors writing blog posts and managing social media, we had different crews executing various parts of our strategy.
The problem was that I spent so much time getting each group of people to work together so they could understand our brand’s broader strategy. For example, if one agency needed to pivot at any point (such as by adjusting ad spend for Google Ads), even the slightest failure to communicate the “why” behind this change would wreak havoc with the other agencies and keep them flying blind.
This reflects a wider problem I’ve observed in the e-commerce world: Brands often lack a holistic understanding of their broader marketing strategy.
Embracing Holistic Marketing
It’s important to understand that the average online shopper now takes multiple steps during the purchasing journey. For instance, she may first see your ad on Facebook, then research your brand name on Google and maybe after all that visit your online store while also price-checking on Amazon before buying anything.
Because of the fluid nature of the online shopping journey, you need to have a comprehensive view of the ways that all aspects of your marketing activity affect every other part of your sales channel. You cannot effectively measure the true success or failure of your brand’s campaigns if you become hyper-focused on key performance indicators for individual channels (such as obsessing over Google performance).
Let’s say you increase your Facebook ad spend by 10% and see an apparent corresponding jump of 6% to 7% in your website traffic. If you fail to take the performance of other marketing channels into account, you could fail to notice that your Amazon traffic also increased by 3% to 4% at the same time.
In other words, you’d be overfocusing on Facebook ROI and thus failing to consider the effect of your Amazon performance on your total strategy.
Breaking The Chains Of Narrow Marketing Focus
In many cases, e-commerce marketers focus on individual aspects of their marketing strategy, sacrificing their ability to survey how each platform fits into a broader narrative. It’s certainly still important to review the KPIs of individual channels, but limiting yourself to these metrics is a poor practice because it doesn’t paint the larger picture of your overall marketing strategy.
The questions you need to ask yourself are these: Is every individual piece of the marketing puzzle working, and are all of the little pieces working together as part of the bigger picture?
Asking yourself these questions can help you solve perplexing problems, such as if you were to increase ad spend on Google and Facebook but fail to see any change in your ROI. If you adopted a more holistic view and factored in the probable increase in organic traffic you might be receiving, you could gain a more comprehensive understanding of the overall impact of your marketing efforts.
Three Keys To Holistic Marketing Success
There are at least three factors you need to master as part of this high-level understanding: how all of your marketing channels function both individually and together, how your customers use those platforms and how well you’re spreading your message. Let’s dive deeper into these three factors.
1. Platform Overlap
Speaking broadly, ads on platforms such as Google and Facebook overlap with each other (e.g., a boost in Google traffic tends to boost traffic on Facebook, and vice versa), both of these platforms overlap with SEO practices, and both of these channels overlap with email marketing campaigns.
Implementing robust analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or marketing automation platforms, allows you to track the impact of each of these channels individually, which in turn allows you to discover synergies between them. For example, you could set up customized dashboards that showcase KPIs for each channel. This approach provides actionable insights that enable you to optimize your strategies.
2. Customer Interaction With Marketing Platforms
As far as knowing how your customers interact with your marketing channels, it isn’t enough to know your target demographic. You also need to understand the different ways your would-be customers use each channel, such as Facebook versus Instagram.
Simply put, the potential customer (such as a man between 25 and 40 years old) probably uses Facebook differently than he uses Instagram. For instance, since Facebook exists mainly to connect with loved ones, he’s more likely to use that platform for extended conversations and engaging with life updates.
Meanwhile, since Instagram is a more visually driven medium, its users (including our hypothetical prospect) will probably use that platform to stay up to date with the latest trends and check for quick, visually curated content.
Tailoring your content and advertising strategies based on these differences can enhance the effectiveness of your various campaigns. For example, you could emphasize community and storytelling in your Facebook ads, while prioritizing visually striking and concise content in your Instagram ads.
3. Effective Messaging
Finally, if you want to know whether you’re actually getting your brand message out there or you’re just burning up ad cash, your right hand needs to know what your left hand is doing. Compartmentalization hurts you when it comes to this because it keeps you in the dark.
Choosing Synergy Over Fragmentation
Creating synergy and avoiding compartmentalization in an omnichannel strategy requires effective communication and collaboration, regardless of your team setup. You need to clearly define your overall objectives at the outset, set up a centralized communication hub to let all team members (both internal and external) coordinate their efforts, and conduct regular strategy meetings to keep a handle on big-picture campaigns and initiatives.
By implementing these practices, you can gain a holistic understanding of your overall marketing strategy, keep the ball from getting dropped, and let your company reap the rewards of improved synergy across your various marketing platforms.
Source: forbes.com
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