Holistic Marketing: The Dangers of Fragmented Strategies

Speaker 1

Hey everybody, welcome to a new episode. We've been talking about automation and holistic strategies, how to get that going. And today we're going to dive in specifically to holistic marketing, fixing fragmented strategies. It's something I've seen a lot in the groups we work with is things are kind of disjointed and their marketing efforts are spread all over the place. This can lose to obviously inefficiencies, lost revenue. So we want to talk about how businesses can take a, like a full funnel strategy where everything has a purpose in place and is related to one another. So going off of that, Zach wanted to ask what are some common questions? Sorry, what are some common signs that a company has a fragmented strategy? 
Speaker 2
01:00
So to me it matters on the type of company. But if they are for instance a startup or they're B2B or B2C, everything that they do, it kind of lives in the silo. Like for instance, for a startup there's a consistent problem between the product and its roadmap and then the marketing trying to be on the same page, but there's just too much of interconnection and you have these different tracks of work being done that aren't really aligning with the overall strategy, the overall goals. You have objectives all over the place. You have, you know, these hows and targets kind of going off rails pretty often. And I think the best way to determine at least a main sign would be if you can't track roi.

Speaker 2
01:51
So if you're running Google Ads or you're doing, you know, a new GTM strategy, whatever it is, if you're inconsistent with your marketing and the strategy involved and you're not communicating, you're not analyzing data, your strategy kind of dissipates, kind of breaks apart. So you have this much more reactive marketing strategy than a proactive. And you're not able to pivot, you're not able to be agile and it just seems like every day you're basically doing everything yet nothing. Nothing yet everything. It's just a very fragmented operation.

Speaker 1
02:28
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. One other note I'd have there is just like I, I've seen over reliance on like one thing. So they like we're gonna go to this trade show and that's what's gonna get us all our business this year. And even that isn't really systemized. They don't have a system for being at the trade show. They just go there and hope. No follow up plan, no pre promotion plan, it's everything is Last minute and a sprint, right. And nothing. It's very rarely is there a big step back and to take everything in as a wide view and look like how are we going to interconnect everything? But yeah, I love that. So going off of that. How does marketing fragmentation impact businesses? How does it impact our revenue, our efficiency, our brand perception? How, how we're seeing.

Speaker 1
03:25
Yeah, how does, how does fragmentation impact that?

Speaker 2
03:29
So to me, it causes a lot of the work that's being done to get lost. It's not consistently measured. It impacts revenue because if goals aren't met or they aren't contained, then the data is not being shared. Brand perception could get, you know, pretty affected by this. But I think overall the internal struggle is the worst because you're not really working towards something together. Is very inconsistent, is very inefficient. Typically that leads to lower conversion rates. It leads to a very, you know, offset budget allocation and it really wastes resources. You have to constantly go back. You know, I've been a part of, you know, clients where they have done things over and over again. They didn't realize they had done that before the duplicated efforts.

Speaker 2
04:23
And it just, over time, it just really slows down their growth and they have to keep going back in and trying to fix things, but they don't really know what to fix. So it's a very inconsistent work in the business and that really expands into the market with typically very inconsistent messaging, very not really focused on the customer anymore. They're just trying to, you know, put fires up.

Speaker 3
04:48
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Speaker 1
05:22
Yeah, you're building something without a blueprint, which causes you to continually have to rebuild it. And it falls apart. And it rebuilds it. You have to rebuild. It falls apart and people get stuck in that cycle. And then they'll like, well, what's the purpose? You know, that's very frustrating and like you said, waste an insane amount of time and attention and resources and then it's just energy. It's just a setback. It's frustrating and you lose momentum. I think a little bit that way, which can be hurtful. So how can businesses align their marketing and sales and their client experience efforts? How, how can you get all of these things on the right track, like we said, into this broader system?

Speaker 2
06:03
So I think for this, something that I have done is we establish goals right away and then those goals have objectives, they have hows, and then they have targets. So you're able to make this very focused, almost like a marketing one pager. And it allows you to get clarity on different parts of your marketing operations. Whether that's marketing, that's sales, that's everything that goes after you onboard or you sell a product, it's, it shouldn't be siloed. All three of those to me need to be in a consistent cycle of, you know, optimization. So to be able to do that, you need to make sure your marketing goals, your sales goals and your customer experience are all kind of following the same track. And when you truly define objectives, there should be a long conversation about it.

Speaker 2
06:57
Because to me, once you set those things, obviously you want to be able to pivot, to be agile, but the overall goal should be the same. So a lot of people don't take that as seriously as they should. So I think that is the biggest thing is learn how to actually break down your goals and you need to be able to share metrics across the board so that everyone can align on the entire kind of like again, the entire cx, the customer experience. Because in the end that's what actually matters. So whether it's operational, it's marketing, it's business, et cetera, all those need to have those specific goals and then have a place to put all that through and then just have those KPIs go across the board.

Speaker 1
07:43
Yeah, we talked about it a little bit in the last episode. Is that handoff process from sales and marketing and getting everybody aligned makes that so much more of a smooth process. Right? If, if people are operating separately, each working right, no one's aligned in the vision or the efforts. Everyone's working in different directions. That's, that's both frustrating and isn't a very long term successful way to go forward. Your waste like we've been talking about, it's an incredible waste of time and resource and energy and momentum. So yeah, that's great going off of that. Are there tools that can help organizations create a more unified marketing system and what does that look like?

Speaker 2
08:37
So to me, again, going back to the last question, it's based on those goals. Objectives, etc. After that, I think vast majority of these tools are kind of pushing towards the same thing. I think what a lot of people try to do is they throw tools and you know, trying to fix problems beforehand. So I would say to really unify your marketing system, project management is obviously a must. Having workflow automation over time, not just right away. You shouldn't just say, okay, I want to start this business and we want to change everything. We want to do this, we want to do that, if let data push that. So to me, each part of your business should be congruent into one system.

Speaker 2
09:25
So obviously a CRM and you should be able, it should be a CRM that you can customize, a CRM that you can have dashboards that are showing the KPIs that you want to measure. And it should be something that can be used daily. Like I said, there's plenty of them and you can basically connect anything through Zapier. You can set up processes to make CRMs that we typically use our HubSpot. But there's so many tools out there. I would just use one that you're going to use every day. People are going to get something out of it's going to speed up processes, it's going to be easily trackable and it's somewhere where you can customize dashboards.

Speaker 1
10:07
Yeah, I think you mentioned it that getting your marketing and sales teams to go in there daily and I've heard it before, is like your crM should be your single source of truth for where your customers are at in this system. Are they all the way atop in the awareness interest stage? Right. Are they, where are they in the consider, where are they in the funnel? And I've worked with a lot of groups that yeah, they're like, well, we have a CRM, but you know, we don't. It hasn't been updated in a while. We mostly use it to send emails or this or that. You have no visibility on where things are or if there might be bottlenecks. Right. Or broken parts of this process. You might not have it mapped out. Keep being really diligent in updating that.

Speaker 1
10:53
CRM is a huge part of it and I get why people don't. It's, it's seen, it's boring. Right. It's, it's not exciting work. A lot of people in marketing are, tend to be in the creative side and, and like these big projects, not always fun to go in and add your notes and move people you know, update things here or there. But it's so important, so important in the system. So thank you for that. Lastly, last question here. What are the long term benefits of a holistic marketing system? A unified system for marketing?

Speaker 2
11:29
So I think it starts with the psyche of the company. I think that people stop doing stuff and they start doing action that's based off the data that's collected not just by them, but by the entire organization. And this idea that we're all pushing towards a common goal. There's no more siloed efforts. People are able to, I would say, learn how to build assets around themselves a little bit better. They're also able to speak up a little bit better. I think when you think of a holistic marketing strategy, everyone's combined again, kind of towards those common goals. But I think there's a lot more conversations that happen and there's also the ability to identify key issues before they happen. And you basically stop becoming a reactive organization and much more proactive. And you understand that pivots are going to happen.

Speaker 2
12:32
You understand that there's going to be ups and downs, you're going to have ways to constantly adapt to things. But I would say definitely less waste, better lead quality, higher customer satisfaction, which is in the end we're all looking for, especially, you know, for customer experience. So to me, the lifetime value is internally you're going to feel better, you're going to feel like you're actually doing things that are pushing the company as a whole and then your customers are obviously going to benefit from that.

Speaker 4
13:07
Yeah, I would say, you know, the, and the opposite of the benefit is the cost. And by not having this cost, you have benefits. So one of the biggest costs or, you know, the most pernicious, detrimental cost that I see is that C level folks stop believing in marketing or you know, like, marketing doesn't work, let's fire the marketer, let's fire the marketing team. And for my company, marketing doesn't work. So we're just gonna throw 200 sales reps at it, right? This kind of very destructive thinking that becomes a pernicious cycle or a vicious cycle, right? By having this holistic marketing, you're avoiding that and you're improving the health and like Zach said, the psyche of your organization. So it's just so important to have this holistic marketing in place.

Speaker 1
14:06
Yeah, I love that. And, and to go off that too. I, I think it's important to realize this is an Iterative process. Whatever you do, when you're building out this marketing strategy and building out a system, however it looks when you build it's not going to look like that in three months and six months and 12 months. If, if you're doing it right, like you can set it and forget it, but it's an iterative process and I like to think of it like it's like a machine. What you're doing is you're building a machine and the machine's purpose is to provide qualified leads. And like any other machine, you have your first iteration of it, but you work on there. There are ways to improve. There are, there are things you can cut out, there are bottlenecks, there are opportunities.

Speaker 1
14:52
There's new software coming out every day. Right. AI, Things that are like the speed of which that is, that is optimizing is insane. So it's a changing process. It will never look the exact same, but you need to set specific time aside and review it. Go. Okay, what is working? And like you talked about, Zach, look at data. The data should tell you where in the funnel you're hitting an issue. It might be awareness, it might be retention or anywhere in between. That data lets you know that. And then you can go and optimize from there. So. Yeah, thanks. Any, any last thoughts here before we wrap up?

Speaker 4
15:38
Great. No, I think that's great. Right? Just, it's important to understand that it's an exercise in getting buy in and sharing information and hopefully educating multiple stakeholders, even the CEO, about what marketing does and how this connects in a kind of a rev ops picture and why this incremental approach and data driven approach works.

Speaker 1
16:08
Yeah, that could be a whole other episode is just how to sell the system to the C suite.

Speaker 4
16:13
Absolutely. I think that's so critical. But yeah, save that for another episode.

Speaker 1
16:17
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you everybody for listening. Next week we're going to, next episode we're going to talk about the future of automation and human creativity and marketing and how those two interact. So thanks again for following along and we'll see you soon.