The “Holistic Marketing” Craze….What’s it all about?

There is no such thing as a modern successful digital marketing campaign that focuses only on one aspect of digital marketing. Search engine optimization, pay per click marketing and social media strategy cannot be run independent of each other in order to work. There are simply too many barriers to entry from every angle – the major social media sites like Facebook are burying free organic content; SEO is based upon human interaction, and pay per click marketing campaigns are too short-term to work on their own.

When these and other digital marketing techniques are combined, they create visibility and conversions that are much better than the sum of their parts. This is becoming known as “holistic marketing.”

– Holistic Marketing

When SEO, SMM and PPC are put together, holistic marketing occurs. Each of these three disciplines support each other more than you can know, and slowly but surely people are figuring it out. If you are trying to stay ahead of the curve, then you need to incorporate holistic marketing into your digital marketing plan immediately. Here is a simplified version of how holistic marketing works.

First of all, you must realize that most of all holistic marketing is focused on creating a positive relationship with the major search engines. 85% of new businesses found through Google, Yahoo and Bing – having a high rank in the search engines is the new word-of-mouth.

The major search engines are much more sophisticated than they were even five years ago. In more ways than one, they now function more like a human than ever before. They are able to determine not only how long people have stayed on your website after clicking there, but also their general attitude while they were there. If the people are clicking away from your site five seconds after they click on it, you will definitely not have a high ranking within the major search engines.

In order to rank highly on the three major search engines, you need more than search engine optimization today. A large part of the analytics that make a difference in search engine ranking come from the major social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Google, Yahoo and Bing are also set up to analyze statistics such as “social momentum,” “stickiness” and “link building momentum.” In short, if your site is not becoming more popular by having real human visitors tweet and post about it, then you will not achieve the high search engine ranking that you may think you deserve.

In order to obtain these new social engagements, you need to understand the ways in which the social media sites curate content on their pages as well. The same keyword functionality that defines how search engines index content are now a huge part of how the major social media websites index content as well. In short, you need “red flag words” for the major social media websites to properly index the content that you are trying to bring to your followers. In some extreme cases like Facebook, your content may not even be served to the people who like your page if top keywords are not used in the content.

One of the ways in which you can find these keywords is through a pay per click campaign. Pay per click campaigns bring back results more quickly than either search engine optimization campaigns or social media marketing campaigns. From the results that you are able to garner from a PPC campaign, you can more easily find the keywords that will work in your SEO and SMM.

The above timeline is only one of the ways in which you can generate positive feedback for yourself online. However, any other dissemination of data will function in a similar way – all three of the major digital marketing disciplines work off of each other in order to create a total profile for your website online. This profile will then be used by search crawlers in order to determine your relevance to the audience that you are targeting. If you are seen as relevant and popular, you will be shown more often to the audience that you are trying to reach.

All of this may seem very complicated; however, starting a holistic digital marketing campaign is actually quite easy. Make sure that you have original content that is relevant and up-to-date. Try not to syndicate content, and try to write with a personality that will keep people on your page for a long time.