Do you think 21st-century businesses would fare well in this time if they adhered to obsolete marketing strategies and principles?
The business landscape is changing, and marketing must change, too.
Holistic marketing is one of the most revolutionary marketing strategies for businesses in the 21st century. The whole concept aims to extend the marketing endeavor beyond designated marketing departments. Under a holistic marketing strategy, marketing becomes an enterprise-wide responsibility.
That means not only your solutions or sales calls but even other departments will absorb the marketing function. After all, it’s called ‘holistic’ because it reinforces the limitations that traditional marketing offers.
By adopting holistic strategies in your marketing plans, you can stay competitive in this ever-evolving landscape. Whatever residential home service business you may have, a holistic approach to marketing will significantly improve your business. That is what Wizard of Sales® is here to help you with.
Read on to discover everything there is to know about holistic marketing.
What Is Holistic Marketing?
Traditionally, every department within a business operated like silos. For instance, marketing focused entirely on reaching new customers, and sales took care of deals. While the same system still stands today, there are interconnections between marketing and sales that can benefit both.
With isolated attention to departments’ respective goals, there was minimal consideration of how their efforts impacted the entire business. Moreover, this system failed to explore mutually beneficial relationships among business touchpoints.
This is where holistic marketing comes in.
Holistic marketing takes an entirely different approach by looking at the business as a single entity. Departments are interdependent rather than separated.
Just like the human body, every component has its own unique functions. But the body will only work normally when all those components operate in harmony. Holistic marketing considers all business components a single entity, enabling every activity and constituent to work with a shared purpose.
Through a holistic perspective, businesses limit the number of bottlenecks, blindspots, and breakpoints along the way.
More importantly, holistic marketing solutions explore profit drivers often neglected under outdated marketing approaches. Furthermore, it improves your customer’s buying journey leading to increased sales and better word-of-mouth.
We can help you attain that.
Wizard of Sales® is an expert business strategist that has helped countless residential home service businesses revamp their marketing strategies. Our holistic approach covers all bases, from company culture to sales tactics and even advertising. Want holistic marketing campaigns? Book a call.
Importance of Holistic Marketing Philosophy to Residential Contractors
While the holistic marketing concept matters for all businesses, it is far more important for residential home services. Holistic marketing allows you to reach and engage your target audience effectively. Remember that selling residential home services is more complicated than other business models. Aside from the costs, people want real experts with genuine concern for their customers.
When you leave the marketing to one department, you neglect other touchpoints that could give customers what they want. For example, having a stellar marketing campaign but not up-to-par customer service or a bad social media presence. Instead, holistic marketing means engaging with your customers on all fronts.
Here are two reasons why holistic marketing is more important than ever:
Brand Message
Brand MessageDid you know in 2015, intangible assets like goodwill made up 84 percent of the S&P 500’s market value? This is a staggering 64 percent boost from 1975.
What does this tell us?
Modern-day customers no longer solely care about products and services. People also buy the brand. That is why having a solid brand message matters in today’s competitive marketplace.
Fortunately, holistic marketing allows companies to build a cohesive narrative across all touchpoints. It covers all bases, from advertising and social media to customer service and value development.
By carefully engaging with customers on all fronts, you better understand their needs and create messaging that resonates with audiences. Whatever your end goal is, holistic marketing can help you achieve them through a clear and compelling brand message.
Brand Reputation and Image
Following the point above, your image as a business is everything. A tarnished reputation only hurts your business, generates negative word-of-mouth and drives customers away. Conversely, a strong brand image builds awareness, invites consumer engagement and boosts sales.
Holistic marketing helps you achieve all of those.
When you communicate with your customers, do you speak to them clearly and consistently? Or do you leave the buttering up to the salespeople? Do you have a holistic marketing strategy in place to help you manage and build your brand reputation across all channels?
With holistic marketing, you can focus on building more authentic relationships with your customers. This means communicating with them in ways that resonate, increasing engagement and ensuring they feel heard and valued. Additionally, holistic marketing can also help you address any negative feedback from customers or the general public quickly and effectively.
All of these things ultimately add up to building your brand image and reputation.
Holistic Marketing vs. Market Segmentation
Aside from perfecting your business touchpoints, holistic marketing also covers how you serve your target market. Allow me to explain.
Customers have varying buying motivations, pain and pleasure points and underlying needs. In residential home services, for example, some customers primarily need reliable and professional service providers. Others prioritize affordability and easy payment terms. At the heart of holistic marketing is the principle of serving all of them despite their differences.
Residential home service owners do not qualify their market based on demographics and preferences. Frankly enough, doing so will only hurt your business in the long run. Instead, we allow customers to qualify us as service providers based on their own specific standards.
Through a holistic approach, you mold your business to fit every prospect’s criteria.
Market segmentation, on the other hand, qualifies customers and divides them into defined subgroups. It involves targeting only specific desired niche opportunities with high potential for profit or growth. In other words, segmentation relies on individual preferences and demographic data to determine which customers to target with marketing efforts.
While segmentation may be effective in some cases, holistic marketing takes a fuller approach to business development. “Everything matters,” so to speak.
What Are the Main Features of a Holistic Marketing Philosophy?
If you’re looking to develop a holistic marketing concept for your business, it’s important to know what it entails. The holistic marketing philosophy has three main features: singular goal, aligned activities and integrated activities. We’ll discuss each of them below.
A Singular Goal
One of the central tenets of holistic marketing is having a singular goal that guides all business activities. This goal is none other than to provide an unrivaled customer experience.
When you put customers at the forefront of your attention, everything you do will be for their satisfaction. By having this focus and clear vision, businesses can align their activities to achieve maximum results.
This brings me to the second feature.
Aligned Activities
Goals are useless if there are no specific steps to achieve them, which is why aligned activities are so important.
Ensure your next focus is to align your activities to your goal, which is excellent customer experience. Everyone needs to work toward the same goals, from top management down to the frontline staff. This ensures that all actions are complementary and purposeful rather than disoriented and scattered.
Finally…
Integrated Activities
While all departments work on achieving superior customer experience in their respective activities, open communication should transpire. That means every department will work together to keep their activities integrated, unified and consistent throughout.
Doing these things help perfect your holistic marketing approach. However, missing out on one pillar compromises the core purpose of holistic marketing.
Philip Kotler’s Components of Holistic Marketing
“Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing.”
—Regis McKenna
The holistic marketing concept is still fairly new, but its core principle isn’t. Without a formally coined title, Regis McKenna devised the principle that would shape holistic marketing. According to him, distinct and separate functions are unsupportable and obsolete. If you peer closely, holistic marketing also follows the same principle.
The marketing department shouldn’t be the only one dipping their toes in marketing, but also other touchpoints. You want aligned and integrated activities that cohesively work toward a single goal. That’s where McKenna’s famous line above came from.
Kotler argued that there are four dimensions of holistic marketing, and we’ll cover each of them below:
Relationship Marketing
Relationship MarketingRelationship marketing is one of the key aspects of holistic marketing. As the name suggests, it refers to the idea that a business needs to build strong relationships and networks. Kotler sees relationships as a vital growth driver for businesses. Relationship marketing is two-pronged, as it should include both stakeholders and customers.
First and more importantly, businesses must prioritize building loyalty among their customers.
Instead of short-term objectives like individual sales, relationship marketing focuses on long-term engagement. Creating an emotional bond with customers increases the odds of repeat business and positive word-of-mouth. This fact is especially relevant in residential home services compared to other industries.
Club memberships are the lifeline of HVAC, plumbing and lawn maintenance businesses. It is difficult to convince customers to join your club membership without nurturing a special connection with them. Offering this exclusive monthly subscription requires a certain degree of familiarity, and relationship marketing can give that.
Stakeholders are the other group you must focus on with holistic marketing. Residential home services depend on many stakeholders like suppliers and investors. Maintaining a positive relationship with these stakeholders is essential for your business to succeed.
Integrated Marketing
Integrated marketing aims to create a synchronized experience for your customers. In this marketing approach, all forms of communication and publication must revolve around a central brand image. In that way, they all cooperate as a unified and uniform force that keeps your customer experience consistent.
Applying integrated marketing builds trust and reliability among customers. They are more likely to trust a business that is consistent across its various touchpoints. To achieve this, craft your external communication around your company culture and brand image. These communications include:
- Advertising
- Sales promotions
- Sales negotiations
- Public relations
- Interactions
Internal Marketing
Driving an aligned marketing strategy is not primarily an external endeavor but an internal effort. Your company’s story (what you tell the public) must align with your culture (what happens within the company ranks). Otherwise, this drastic misalignment will reveal itself when customers realize how your employees relate to them differently.
Internal marketing is all about aligning your employees with the brand vision. This enables them to adopt the brand image and practice it at all times. Remember that employees carry themselves and the entire company whenever they wear their uniforms. Any attitude or actions that don’t reflect your values will only hurt the business’s reputation.
In other words, marketing needs to be in everyone’s job description. From receptionists to board members, the brand image must be reflected everywhere.
Societal Marketing
It’s important to view your business not as an independent entity but as a component of an even bigger society. You are only a single component in a wide stretch of networks, and your goal is to make your presence count.
In today’s business landscape, customers also consider what societal contributions companies bring to the world. You tarnish your credibility and community standing without a positive and memorable societal change. That’s what societal marketing aims to halt.
Societal marketing, also known as socially responsible marketing, is a form of marketing that seeks to impact society positively. This can take many different forms. A few examples include the following:
- Promoting sustainability and environmental awareness
- Encouraging better workplace practices
- Supporting local communities
The key to successful societal marketing is to align your business’s values with those of your target audience. That said, you aim to determine what causes matter most to your target audience. After which, you participate in those activities and incorporate them into your brand messaging. You may also partner with other organizations that share these values to reach a broader audience.
Performance Marketing
Many people often pool performance marketing along with societal marketing, but they’re quite different. While societal marketing refers to external metrics that positively impact society, performance marketing is the opposite. It focuses on external metrics that explain how you perform business-wise.
In other words, the attention is on special metrics related to key performance indicators or financials. Here are a few examples:
- Financial returns
- Sales revenue
- Profitability
- Customer satisfaction level
- Market share
- Product Quality
A strong performance displays your company’s ferocity in the industry and builds trust among consumers. When you perform well, it shows that people trust your business’s expertise in handling their services. This encourages undecided buyers to pursue your business.
However, it’s important to note that you must consider other holistic marketing facets. Even with unrivaled performance marketing, you may fail because of less-than-stellar relationship marketing. At the end of the day, it’s all about securing every business touchpoint, hence, holistic.
Establishing a holistic marketing approach is a radically changing strategy. While it sounds easy, it takes an expert business tactician to mold the perfect holistic marketing campaign.
If you’re looking for the best residential home services strategist, look no further. Wizard of Sales® can help concoct the holistic strategy you need to succeed in your market. Book a call.