In its most basic sense, marketing is a pretty simple concept—convince people to buy your product or service. The problem is that marketing has become incredibly complicated in the digital world. You might have an organic growth team, a PPC team, an email marketing team, and probably several other teams all trying to sell your product. When things get this complicated, it’s easy for different teams to get in each other's way.
This problem is why businesses are now trying to reimagine their marketing efforts as a marketing ecosystem. Instead of having separate pillars like SMS and social media that stand alone, you have your marketing strategies working together. This way, each marketing discipline can play to its strengths, and the marketing department as a whole can achieve its ultimate goal of boosting revenue.
Adopting a marketing ecosystem approach makes your marketing efforts more efficient. This guide will walk you through what a marketing ecosystem is, the benefits of one, plus tips on how to get more out of your new marketing mindset.
What is a marketing ecosystem?
A marketing ecosystem is an interconnected set of marketing tactics and channels that work together to create a unified and effective strategy for generating leads, converting customers, and increasing sales. It encompasses all marketing activities and channels, including SMS, organic search, paid search, social media ads, content creation, email campaigns, website optimization, SEO, customer service, and more. By combining these tactics, businesses can create an efficient marketing strategy that will drive results.
Marketing ecosystems are all about multiple channels working together for the good of the business. For example, if your company was trying to increase its number of qualified leads, it could:
Task your organic team to create SEO-optimized pieces directed at important keywords.
Have your SMS, email, and social media teams blast that content across your customer base.
Use paid media to target people who came to your site to drive them further down the sales funnel.
The result is a powerful marketing system working in unison to promote customer loyalty and build more customer lifetime value.
The benefits of marketing ecosystems
A marketing ecosystem offers several benefits to businesses. First, it allows you to focus on a unified goal and create an integrated plan that maximizes the effectiveness of each marketing tactic at your disposal.
Second, it helps create a more cohesive customer journey by allowing you to track and optimize the entire process from awareness to conversion. For instance, you could plan an omnichannel messaging strategy that reaches out to potential leads, gauges their interest, and educates them about your product. This strategy could include emails that keep leads up-to-date on new product features, SMS messages to notify people of current promotions, and social media marketing that showcases user-generated content.
Third, marketing ecosystems give you better insights into your customers’ behavior and preferences. For example, you can use data on customer behavior gathered through customer communications and marketing analytics to tailor your messaging strategy for maximum impact. You can also use this data to adjust your organic search engine optimization efforts to drive more qualified leads and potential customers down the sales funnel.
Tips for improving your marketing ecosystem
A marketing ecosystem is an essential part of any modern business, but it's not enough to just have one. To maximize the success of your marketing efforts, you need to ensure that your ecosystem is well-optimized and functioning properly. This section will provide tips on how to do just that so you can get the most out of your marketing strategy.
1. Set team-wide marketing strategies and KPIs
Before you start building your marketing ecosystem, you need to completely understand what your marketing goals are.
Are you trying to generate leads? Increase sales? Improve customer retention?
Once you know these answers, it'll be easier to create an effective marketing strategy that all team members can work towards. Additionally, it’s important to set clear KPIs for each marketing tactic so you can track and measure your progress.
2. Make sure your team understands the strategy
Although it might be easy to assume that everyone knows the plan, the truth is that frequently many people aren't on the same page. A study by IBM found that 72% of employees don’t completely understand their company’s overall strategy. This is a problem for marketing and the entire business, regardless of your company’s business models.
To make your marketing ecosystem work, everyone should know their role and how their job contributes to a larger comprehensive strategy. This alignment will ensure that everyone works towards the same business goals and can quickly adapt when needed.
3. Avoid taking up too much time with meetings and information sharing
Meetings are an important part of any digital ecosystem, but they can easily become a time-suck if not managed properly. Make sure that all meetings have a clear agenda and specific outcomes in mind.
Additionally, make sure that teams are only sharing information that is needed. Although you'll need to share some information to stay unified, too much information will only swamp teammates and possibly cause information overload.
4. Utilize automation in your digital marketing whenever possible
Automation can be a great way to streamline your marketing efforts and ensure that the right tasks are done at the right time. Automating routine tasks like email campaigns or social media posts helps reduce manual effort, freeing up team members for more creative and strategic work.
For instance, you could use automated text messages to quickly communicate with customers about confirmed purchases, expected delivery times, and much more. This way, you don’t need customer success members working on sending repetitive messages at the expense of more high-value customer interactions.
5. Leverage omnichannel marketing
Omnichannel marketing is about using different channels to reach potential leads and customers. This can include email, SMS, social media platforms, etc., and should be tailored to the customer’s preferences. Utilizing multiple marketing channels will ensure that your message reaches as many people as possible, giving you better chances of turning leads into loyal customers.
However, the key to making your communications omnichannel is to ensure that messages aren’t siloed. Most customers expect that if they message a company on Facebook and then call customer support a week later, the rep won't need a recap of the earlier conversation.
6. Identify which channels are best suited for different marketing tasks
Not all channels will work for all marketing tasks, so it’s important to identify which ones are best suited for your specific goal.
For example, if you’re trying to generate leads, then organic search and PPC ads might be more effective than an email campaign. On the other hand, emails and SMS might be more effective if you’re trying to increase customer retention.
Get started with tools that support a digital marketing ecosystem
Creating a marketing ecosystem is an effective way to unify your marketing efforts and make them more efficient. By setting team-wide strategies and KPIs, making sure everyone is on the same page, leveraging automation whenever possible, utilizing omnichannel messaging, and identifying which channels are best suited for different tasks, you can create a powerful system that will help boost sales success.
However, if you're going to truly develop a marketing ecosystem perspective, you'll need tools that allow for automation and easy data sharing. Emotive is an SMS marketing software that makes it easier to make SMS messaging a central pillar of your outreach strategy. With it, you can set up SMS automations, create subscriber lists and speak directly with your target audience. Learn more about how Emotive can help you boost your marketing efforts by signing up for a free demo today.