Marketing is a highly diverse field that can cater to any business persona or industry. When a brand tries to market itself by using all of its different aspects into one singular campaign and spread it across different mediums, it is known as holistic marketing. It is a rather non-traditional marketing approach and it is considered to be one of the best possible ways to build core brand value.
If one thinks of their business as a singular entity, they can see the various interconnected links between different parts of it. The primary concept of holistic marketing is to connect the different platforms to create a singular campaign that transcends multiple target markets. It provides a common goal for the marketing process and allows the different systems to link with one another to achieve this goal.
Instead of a traditional marketing processes that usually concentrate on a certain aspect or product of the business, holistic marketing tries to establish the entire brand to the customers through a simplified message. This helps the customer psyche associate the brand with something more than merely its products and services. In this article we discuss the importance of the holistic marketing technique, its different components, how one can achieve it, and also some examples of successful holistic marketing campaigns.
Importance of Holistic Marketing
Brand Building
The holistic marketing approach is one of the best means of raising brand awareness through highlighting the core brand values across all platforms. Since the consumer behavior towards products and services are constantly changing, it is important that brand awareness be directed towards multiple channels to ensure maximum branding capability.
Efficiency
If performed successfully the holistic approach can increase communication efficiency between different parts of a business. Furthermore, it can ensure that the business processes run in harmony with one another while the marketing process boosts brand awareness. This also helps identify brand values with ease.
Effectiveness
It is a highly effective marketing approach in today’s multi-dimensional market structure. It focuses on long term goals rather than short term ones and thus allows for a business to truly flourish and make the most use of its resources.
Focus
It allows for the consumer to focus on the core values of the business thereby increasing the ability of brand performance. These core values when communicated through marketing platforms ensure that the market associated the brand with its values and not simply with its products.
Components of Holistic Marketing
Relationship Marketing
Holistic marketing is not usually composed of short term goals. Rather, establishing long term customer relationships is something that this process can provide a brand with. It not only focuses on gaining new customers but also on strengthening brand value with the present customers. This approach towards long term goals allows holistic marketing to serve the longevity of a brand.
Internal Marketing
The holistic approach not only affects the target market but also the employees of a brand. And once they are convinced of the central goals and values of the business they serve; they also perform as platforms that spread brand awareness. Additionally, internal marketing helps keeps the business process in motion without hassles.
Integrated Marketing
Integration of various communication channels into a single marketing approach is a unique aspect of holistic marketing that ensures maximum customer satisfaction and process effectiveness. From public relations to digital marketing, all aspects of the brand communication are connected to produce stronger messages.
Societal Marketing
Holistic marketing is performed keeping a broader social framework in mind. The target markets that are concentrated upon are selected regardless of class and geography. Thus, the message that communicates the brand values is usually something simple and touches customer psyches in different social layers.
Also Read: What is Societal Marketing Concept?
Performance Marketing
The ROI aspect of marketing is maintained absolutely transparently via holistic marketing techniques. And this is highly important since a brand will be able to tell exactly how much they are earning from their marketing campaigns.
Holistic Marketing Framework
Analysis and Identification
The primary stage of creating a holistic marketing campaign involves analyzing the business potentials and identifying new grounds and values. The potential of a business is dependent on the cognitive space of the consumer, the competence level of the organization, and the availability of resources. After a complete analysis of these three aspects, a business will have sufficient data necessary to frame their holistic marketing campaign.
Creation
In order to create a marketing value that spread across different markets, one must first analyze the customer’s psyche and how it relates to the business. The creation of a marketing technique requires highly proficient minds and a seamless integration ability of the top management layer.
Performance
When the marketing campaign is finally pursued the most amount of importance needs to be given towards deliverance of values to the customers. This ensures longevity of the campaign and also customer loyalty which is one of the most necessary components for any business to flourish. This is also the stage where resource management becomes a highly important factor towards maintain the capabilities of the marketing campaign.
Holistic Marketing Examples
Samsung
Samsung has led technological innovations with their customer friendly approach towards creation of digital devices. And this is always presented as the core marketing message keeping in mind that the customer likes to be told that they are being served. This added to their highly efficient customer services and showrooms staff, Samsung provides a holistic experience for the customer and allows this to serve as their marketing technique.
Coca-Cola
When the no. 1 beverage brand chose ‘happiness’ as their core branding message, they were not simply trying to find new consumers. Rather, they were creating a franchise which consumers would associate with happiness. Instead of simply promoting their brand, they promoted the concept of happiness and this was a successful strategy for the brand in the long run. It allowed for the brand to reassure its existing customers of brand quality and also share a core value that would draw in new customers.
The internet changed forever the way consumers browse and buy products. Needless to say, it also completely altered the way companies advertise and sell. Today, marketers have the capability to gather campaign data 24/7 and measure the results as they happen. While in the past, attribution was nearly impossible, data transparency now enables marketers to optimize their campaigns so they perform better. And that’s why it’s called “performance marketing”.
What Is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is the term given for online marketing campaigns where advertisers pay marketing companies or advertising platforms for results achieved, such as clicks or conversions.
Unlike traditional and organic marketing, performance marketing is specifically used to drive actions, track and measure those actions, all while attributing the ROI of each asset, campaign or activity.
While major corporations can spend millions of dollars on branding, most businesses need to focus on the bottom line to stay profitable. Performance marketing puts power back in the hands of the advertiser. You determine the action, then pay when that action has been completed – whether it’s a sale, lead, or click.
How is Performance Marketing Different?
In most traditional forms of advertising, the advertiser pays a fee up front for ad space independent of performance. That could mean hundreds to thousands of dollars spent without ever seeing a conversion. With performance marketing, advertisers only pay for successful transactions.
Performance marketing vs brand marketing
In an increasingly brand saturated market, standing out is a challenge, and that’s why brand awareness is so important. There are many ways to increase brand awareness, such as social media campaigns, native advertising, content marketing and more. Some of these may actually fall under the umbrella of performance marketing, because they are measurable and advertisers only pay for specific actions.
For example, Outbrain recommendations are a powerful way to boost brand awareness by exposing target audiences to relevant, top-of-funnel content that addresses their pain points and sparks interest. Because the results of these campaigns can be attributed and the advertiser only pays according to a specific budget and conversion goal, this is a form of performance marketing.
Performance marketing vs affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a definite subset of performance marketing, as it is entirely driven by metrics and goals. With affiliate marketing, a commission is earned for the online promotion of the product or service of another company. The affiliate marketer advertises on behalf of the merchant, with the goal of driving traffic, clicks and sales to the merchant’s website. The affiliate receives payment only for actions taken, such as clicks, conversions or leads.
Performance marketing vs programmatic marketing
Programmatic marketing is an automated method of buying ad space, targeting the most relevant audience at the best possible price. Programmatic is becoming an essential ingredient of performance marketing, as it enables advertisers to buy better placements at scale and maximize their ROI. A huge benefit of programmatic is the in-depth reporting and analysis, which means that advertisers can explore performance of programmatic ads and optimize in a highly focused way. Read more about programmatic advertising here.
How to Measure Performance Marketing?
A defining element of performance marketing is ROI [return on investment] – every activity and action is measured, reported and analyzed against pre-defined KPIs. This is how the performance of a campaign can be understood and optimized towards improving performance.
Measurable ROI is the key to successful digital marketing, so it’s important to track it regularly. There are loads of performance optimization tools available on the market, but whichever you choose, give your campaigns time to gather data. The more data you have, the deeper your insights and the more you’ll be able to optimize in an accurate and effective way.
Here are some of the key metrics and KPIs commonly used in performance marketing:
CPM
CPM stands for Cost Per Mille, or Cost Per Thousand, and it is the cost the advertiser pays for 1000 impressions of a digital ad. In other words, it is the price for every 1000 times an ad is shown to viewers. CPM does not measure an action taken by viewers; it only determines the price of getting the ad shown. Some performance marketers are focusing less on CPM and more on metrics that have a concrete, action based meaning.
CPC
Cost Per Click denotes the price paid for every time a viewer clicks on an ad. CPC is a better indicator of engagement than CPM, because the viewer has taken an action and actually clicked on the ad. A higher CPC usually means that the value of the conversion is higher. For example, a luxury car brand might set a higher CPC, thereby targeting a much smaller audience of high potential customers who are likely to buy an expensive car. The cost of the click is more expensive, but the potential return is also much higher.
CPA
CPA stands for Cost Per Action, and it measures campaign performance according to a specific desired action you want the target audience to take, such as downloading an ebook, signing up or subscribing, purchasing an item, or some other action. In performance marketing, the action taken by potential customers is considered the most important tangible and measurable result, so CPA is one of the most important and popular metrics too.
LTV
This metric concentrates on the predicted “Lifetime Value” of an individual customer during their entire relationship with the brand or company. LTV estimates the expected spend of acquired customers based on their ongoing activity, using advanced methods like predictive analytics. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated measurement capabilities, LTV is fast becoming a popular metric, as it helps marketers plan their overall strategies towards the ultimate goal of boosting ROI.
Performance Marketing Types
Performance marketing has evolved over time thanks to new technology and changing consumer behaviors. In today’s performance-driven world, digital marketing is all about “hitting the right people on the right device at the right time.” The available tools and targeting options have advanced significantly, giving performance marketers more ways than ever to create high-performing campaigns for various audiences and different goals.
SEM, or search engine marketing, is an important part of performance marketing and definitely worth the time and investment. SEM is the placement of paid ads on search engine results pages [SERPs]. It is very effective as it exposes the user to highly targeted ads related to the product or service they are searching for, in the moment when intent is high and there is a strong chance of capturing their attention and interest. Check out this great SEM guide.
Another performance marketing tactic gaining ground is native advertising. Native ads are more effective than display ads because they don’t look like ads, so they don’t disrupt the user’s browsing experience. Rather they fit “natively” on the web page in which they appear. With tools like the Outbrain Amplify dashboard, native advertising is highly measurable. And by choosing a high-quality network, you can get excellent exposure on premium publisher sites, reaching high-quality traffic and audiences.
How to Build a Performance Marketing Strategy
There are so many different types of performance marketing channels and campaigns, so there is no single way to do it. However, these are the main steps to build a performance marketing strategy of any kind and for any audience. Use them as a guide to get your performance campaign running towards success.
Step 1: Establish your campaign goal
Before you can measure the success of any campaign, it’s important to establish your campaign goals. Whether generating brand awareness or selling products, setting goals prior to launch is the very basis of performance marketing.
Many ad platforms require you to establish goals before creating ads or setting up campaigns. Your campaign goals determine where your ads are shown, who they’re shown to and other factors vital to success.
The most popular digital marketing goals are:
Once you have established your campaign goals, you can use ad platforms to create campaigns that target those specific goals.
Step 2: Choose your digital channel[s]
In performance marketing, it is wise to diversify the channels you use, rather than focusing exclusively on one channel. This helps spread campaign exposure and reach, broadening the chances for success. Whether it’s affiliate marketing, native advertising, or social media platforms, look for channels that specialize in your conversion type and where you are most likely to find your target audience.
By diversifying on different social media networks, for example, or broadening from simple display ads to native advertising, you can massively increase your potential reach and expose your performance campaigns to a much wider audience.
Step 3: Create and launch the campaign
A lot of the work of performance marketing goes into creating campaigns – identifying the target audience, understanding their pain points and desires, and crafting ads and messaging to address their needs and grab their attention. The more you understand the target audience and how the product or service can appeal to them, the easier it will be to create the best ad copy, design and scheduling. And of course, the technical aspect of the campaigns, such as ad sizes, copy character limits, and acceptable images, also depend on the particular platform or channel you are using.
Step 4: Measure and optimize your campaign
The real work kicks in post-launch. Performance campaigns begin to generate data the moment they are up and running. It’s up to the marketer to optimize individual campaigns for performance, across all channels in use. Keep track of analytics and metrics to determine which sources of traffic are performing best, then allocate ad funds accordingly. Use performance marketing campaigns not just to grow sales but also to identify your best channels, audiences, and campaign objectives to increase your return on investment.
Step 5: Handle potential pitfalls
Like with any marketing campaign, there are some potential challenges and pitfalls that can come with performance marketing. These may include:
- Brand safety
- Compliance-related issues
- Privacy regulations
- Click frauds & bot traffic
- Publisher fraud and placement transparency.
One way to reduce potential problems at the outset is to focus your resources on high-quality advertising networks and platforms, where issues like brand safety and data privacy are handled responsibly and reliably.
Benefits of Performance Marketing
Native advertising is the perfect example of performance marketing – advertisers create ad campaigns for a specific conversion goal, and only pay for clicks or other conversion actions. Compare this to a TV ad, for example, which runs for a certain period and frequency, however there is no guarantee as to how many consumers will see it or react to it.
This gets to the heart of the benefits of performance marketing. Performance marketing focuses on tracking and attribution, which gives marketers much more control over their budget and ROI.
Here are the top 3 reasons why performance marketing is the new marketing:
- Easy-to-track performance: Performance marketing campaigns are set up with the express purpose of tracking and measuring. With the help of various data analytics tools designed especially for performance marketers, keeping a finger on the pulse of performance campaigns and adjusting them to get better results is easy.
- Low risk: Marketers know exactly what is going on with their performance campaigns at every stage, which puts them in a much better position to optimize and reduce risk whenever necessary. Plus, with less risk, quicker launch times are possible. No more pushing for approvals.
- ROI-focused: Performance marketing is guided by ROI, so the focus is always on the end goal of improving performance. This ensures that performance campaigns are continually moving towards better results, which helps uplift the brand across all metrics and boost leads and sales.
Performance Marketing Examples
1. Avon – Native programmatic video
Iconic beauty brand Avon offers a great use case of how native programmatic can be leveraged for performance campaigns. Together with its media agency in Brazil, the brand produced a video focusing on women’s empowerment, strengthening awareness of its support for women’s issues, such as fighting gender inequality and breast cancer. Using Outbrain’s native video inventory available programmatically on Display & Video 360, Avon was able to measure and track the ad’s excellent performance on premium publisher sites on the Outbrain network: 63% video completion rates and 70% of users viewed over 75% of the video.
2. Outbrain – Search campaign
The Growth Marketing team at Outbrain uses a wide range of performance tactics to boost awareness and generate leads for the Outbrain recommendation platform. Recently, the team launched a brand search campaign in Italy, featuring paid search ads shown to users searching for “Outbrain” online, leading to a sales landing page.
The campaign performance was extraordinary: CTR 18.47%, CVR 13.39%, and an amazing 2028% ROI. This means that for every $1 spent on the search campaign, the return was $20.
3. VAVAVOOM – YouTube video campaign
TrueView for Action is a video campaign type available on Google Ads that aims to boost conversions and leads via action-driving features. Global fashion retailer VAVAVOOM got some very impressive results from a YouTube video campaign using TrueView for Action. The company set an ROAS of 10:1, combining the TrueView campaign with custom intent audiences and in-market targeting to try to reach this goal. And indeed, they massively exceeded it, achieving 304,517 interactions during the 11-week campaign, and an ROAS of 1409%. Read about it here.
In Performance Marketing, ROI Takes Center Stage
Performance marketing campaigns give you the ability to measure everything from brand awareness to conversion rate down to a single ad. As advertising becomes more transparent, advertisers are looking beyond branding to build marketing strategies with proven ROI. Performance marketing was born from this need, and is only becoming more sophisticated and advanced over time. So jump into performance marketing today, and begin reaping the benefits of tracking, measurement, and optimization for your ROI.