Use Your Marketing Strategy to Develop a Holistic Narrative

Last Updated on October 24, 2024.

It’s crucial for small businesses to focus on developing a holistic narrative in their content strategy. A holistic narrative goes beyond short-term trends and viral content, aiming for consistency and interconnectedness in every aspect of marketing. Let’s chat about the importance of a holistic narrative, how it can benefit your business, and practical steps to implement it effectively. By following this approach, you’ll establish a solid foundation for long-term success while something we consider more important, preserving your well-being as a business owner or content marketer.

The Concept of Holistic Narrative

A holistic narrative is a marketing approach that encompasses all touchpoints of a buyer’s journey, from branding and content to the website and user experience. It aligns your business’s marketing efforts with a cohesive and consistent throughline rather than solely focusing on current trends, tactics or trying to go viral. By doing so, you ensure that your messaging resonates with your target audience, enhances brand awareness, and reinforces your business’s value proposition.

The Role of Holistic Narrative in Content Marketing Strategy

A well-crafted content marketing strategy is essential for developing a holistic narrative. It provides a marketing framework that guides your content creation efforts, aligns them with your business goals, and ensures a cohesive brand voice across all channels. And it is the framework I use for all of my clients, including those I work with during my VIP Days. By integrating a holistic narrative into your content strategy, you can strategically engage potential customers, nurture relationships, and drive conversions. Using this method also ensures that you, as a marketer, are always in tune with the strategy. This way, you can focus on long-term goals and avoid unnecessary stress caused by getting caught up in the nitty-gritty details.

The Holistic Narrative Continuum

​While the toolkit you use in the Holistic Narrative Continuum may differ depending on your focus, the main characteristics (narrative, strategy and data) and what you need to do to achieve those characteristics (strategize, analyze and optimize) remain the same. The nine levers will guide your long-term digital marketing plan.

Narrative

Audit Your Schedule

Look at your weekly schedule and determine when you can make marketing fit, such as time blocking your marketing efforts.

The first step is to take a good look at your weekly schedule and figure out where marketing can fit in. It’s like going through your calendar with a fine-toothed comb to find the best opportunities for marketing. The technique (my preferred) that you can then use is called time blocking.

Time blocking is all about setting aside specific chunks of time just for marketing. So, instead of squeezing in marketing tasks here and there, you dedicate dedicated blocks of time solely to marketing activities. This way, you prioritize marketing and give it the attention it deserves – while also not letting it overrun the rest of your business. Here’s how you can go about it:

• Take a close look at your current schedule. Identify your non-negotiable tasks, recurring meetings, and any time constraints you have. Figure out your most productive hours and see where you can fit in some marketing time without neglecting your other important responsibilities.
• If you have a list already (if not, it’s coming!), prioritize your marketing activities. Sort them based on their importance and urgency. Maybe you need to work on your website, create content, manage your social media, run email campaigns, or analyze data. Focus on the tasks that directly contribute to your marketing goals.
• Now comes the fun part – allocating dedicated time blocks. Look for uninterrupted periods when you can solely focus on marketing. It could be daily, weekly, or even bi-weekly time blocks – whatever works best for you. The idea is to have focused and dedicated time for your marketing efforts.
• In order for this to work, you may have to set boundaries and/or communicate them to those around you. Let your team, colleagues, or family members know that during these specific time blocks, you’re committed to marketing and shouldn’t be interrupted unless it’s an emergency. This way, you create a conducive environment for productivity and minimize distractions.
• Be flexible if needed. And be willing to adjust your time blocks as needed. Regularly evaluate their effectiveness and make changes based on your productivity and the outcomes of your marketing efforts. Stay adaptable to evolving priorities and unexpected situations.

When you start time blocking in your schedule, you’re giving marketing the love it deserves and making it a key part of your routine as a business owner. This organized approach keeps you laser-focused, supercharges your productivity, and helps you steadily crush your marketing goals.

Define Your Brand

Identify all facets of your business’s brand, audit items that may need to be refined and define why your potential consumers need to work with you.

Understanding every little aspect of your business’s brand identity. It’s like taking a magnifying glass and examining all the different pieces that make up your brand. And along the way, you also assess what needs a bit of tweaking or refining. But most importantly, it’s about clearly explaining to your potential customers why they should choose to work with you. Here’s what we would do:

• Define your unique value proposition. What makes your business special? What problems do you solve for your customers? Are you faster, more reliable, or more innovative than your competitors? Identify your strengths and highlight them in a way that resonates with your target audience. Show them why you’re the perfect fit for their needs.
• Identify all the facets of your brand. Think about your company’s mission, values, and personality. What does your brand stand for? What sets you apart from your competitors? Consider your visual elements like your logo, colors, and overall design style. Don’t forget about your tone of voice and the language you use in your communications. All of these things contribute to your brand identity.
• It’s time for a brand audit. Take a step back and assess each element. Are there any inconsistencies in your messaging or visual representation? Are there areas where you can refine or improve? Look for opportunities to align your brand elements and make them more cohesive.

It’s crucial to clearly articulate your value proposition to your potential customers. Explain how working with you will make their lives better or easier. Use compelling language that speaks directly to their pain points and desires. Let them know the benefits they’ll receive, whether it’s saving time, saving money, or gaining a competitive edge. Make it crystal clear why they should choose you over anyone else.

Remember, your brand is not just a logo or a tagline. It’s the essence of your business, the perception people have of you, and the promise you make to your customers. By defining your brand and refining its elements, you’re laying a solid foundation for your business’s success. And by effectively communicating your unique value proposition, you’ll attract the right customers who see the incredible value in working with you.

Specify Your Goals and KPIs

Use your business goals to specify your marketing goals and determine what KPIs you will measure to ensure you are on the right track.

Connect your overall business objectives with your marketing goals. It’s like bridging the gap between what you want to achieve as a business and how your marketing efforts can contribute to those goals. And to keep track of your progress, you’ll define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that act as signposts along the way. Here’s what we should discuss in this section:

• Start by looking at your business goals. What are you aiming to achieve in the grand scheme of things? What are you trying to achieve this quarter? What are your content goals? Maybe it’s increasing revenue, expanding your customer base, launching a new product, or establishing yourself as an industry leader. Whatever it is, take those big-picture goals and break them down into marketing goals.
• Think about how marketing can support and align with your business objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase revenue, your marketing goal could be to boost sales by a certain percentage within a specific time frame. If you’re looking to expand your customer base, your marketing goal might be to increase website traffic to generate a certain number of leads.
• Once you’ve established your marketing goals, it’s time to determine the KPIs that will help you measure your progress. KPIs are like milestones that help you gauge whether you’re on the right track or need to make adjustments. For example, if your marketing goal is to boost sales, your KPIs could include metrics like revenue generated, conversion rates, or average order value.
• Make sure your KPIs are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This way, you can track your performance and see how well your marketing efforts are contributing to your overall business goals. Keep in mind that different marketing channels or campaigns may have different KPIs depending on their specific objectives.
• Regularly monitor and analyze your KPIs to assess your progress. Are you meeting your targets? If not, it may be time to adjust your marketing strategies or tactics. KPIs provide valuable insights into what’s working and what needs improvement, helping you make data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing efforts.

By specifying your goals and KPIs, you’re creating a roadmap for your marketing activities. You’ll have a clear direction and a way to measure success along the way. This alignment between your business goals and marketing goals ensures that your marketing efforts are focused, effective, and directly contributing to your overall success. It also makes marketing easier when you know the plan and can pivot if needed. Pro-tip: It’s a good idea to have a mid-month check-in. Does the goal need to be adjusted? Or what in you marketing plan needs to be changed to hit the goal?

Strategy

Do Your Research

Finalize your buyer personas and research your competition to determine your business’s advantage and where it can improve.

Gathering valuable information to make informed decisions for your business. Put on your detective hat (or FBI agent hat) and dig deep to understand your target audience and competition. By finalizing your buyer personas and researching your competition, you can identify your business’s unique advantage and uncover areas where you can improve. Here’s how we can make the most out of your research:

• Start by finalizing your buyer personas. These are fictional biographies of your target customers, helping you understand their needs, preferences, and behavior. It goes beyond demographics – think about their demographics, such as age, gender, location, and income, but also consider their goals, challenges, and motivations. By getting to know your target audience on a deeper level, you can tailor your marketing strategies to resonate with them more effectively and you can make sure you are targeting the right people.
• Once you have your buyer personas in place, it’s time to research your competition. Take a look at other businesses that offer similar products or services in your industry. Study their websites, social media presence, customer reviews, and any other available information. Look for what sets them apart and try to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
• The goal is to determine your business’s advantage over the competition. Identify what makes you unique and how you can differentiate yourself in the market. Maybe it’s your exceptional customer service, innovative product features, or competitive pricing. Highlight these advantages in your marketing messaging to showcase why customers should choose you over your competitors.
• While researching your competition, also pay attention to areas where you can improve. Look for any gaps or shortcomings that you can address in your own business. Are there any customer pain points that your competitors haven’t fully addressed? Can you offer a better user experience or provide additional value that sets you apart? Use this knowledge to refine your business strategies and enhance your offerings.
• Remember, research is an ongoing process. Keep tabs on your target audience and competition to stay up-to-date with any changes or trends in the market. Continuously analyze and adapt your marketing strategies based on new insights you gather. By staying informed and responsive, you’ll be better equipped to serve your customers and outshine your competition.

Doing thorough research sets the foundation for effective marketing and business strategies. It helps you understand your customers better, identify your unique advantages, and find opportunities for improvement. By leveraging this knowledge, you can position your business for success and ensure that your marketing efforts are targeted and impactful.

Finesse Your Journey

Review your customer’s journey and ensure it is simple and provides your buyer persona(s) precisely what they need.

Fine-tune the experience your customers have as they interact with your business. Hopefully, your potential customers find you at the right time of their journey, but if not – you want to make sure you offer them something for each piece of it. Make sure it’s smooth, seamless, and tailored to meet the precise needs of your buyer personas. Here’s what we can review to ensure that we meet their search intent:

• Review your customer’s journey from start to finish. A great way to do this is to put yourself in their shoes and go through each touchpoint they have with your business. Look at each step and assess whether it’s simple, intuitive, and aligned with what your buyer persona(s) need. Do you answer their important questions? Examples of this are:
  • Consider their initial discovery of your brand. Check your Google Analytics and see what pages they are most likely to land on. Check your social media and see what they could most likely interact with.
  • Check the user experience of your website. Is the site map correct? Is the information architecture easy to navigate? Is it possible that your buyer personas need a free tool for their questions?
  • If you are e-commerce, check the experience of your store, the purchasing process, and even post-purchase follow-up. Check to see if it is missing anything or if there is anything that could be improved on.

Simplicity is key. Ensure that every stage of the customer journey is easy to navigate and understand. Simplify your website’s navigation, streamline your checkout process, and eliminate any unnecessary steps or barriers that might cause frustration or confusion. Make it as effortless as possible for your customers to find what they need and complete their desired actions.

Personalization is another essential aspect. Tailor the customer journey to meet your buyer’s specific needs and preferences. Use the insights you have gathered about them to create a more personalized experience. This can include sending product recommendations, offering targeted promotions or discounts, and including in your content production relevant content that addresses their pain points and interests.

Consistency is crucial too. Ensure the messaging, branding, content design and overall experience across different touchpoints are aligned. Whether new customers interact with your social media, visit your website, or contact your customer service, they should feel a consistent and cohesive brand experience. This helps build trust, reinforces your brand identity, and enhances the overall customer journey.

Remember, the customer journey doesn’t end with the purchase. Continuously engage with your customers even after they’ve made a purchase. Follow up with personalized communications, provide exceptional customer support, and nurture the relationship to encourage repeat business and foster customer loyalty.

By finessing your customer’s journey, you’re optimizing their experience and creating a seamless path for them to engage with your business. This level of attention and care ensures that they have a positive and satisfying experience at every touchpoint. As a result, they’re more likely to become loyal customers, advocates for your brand, and repeat purchasers. And you’re solidifying that throughline for your brand.

Determine Your Toolkit

See what marketing tactics you want to ensure are in your toolkit for this particular strategy or campaign.

Now that you are sure the journey will be good, you can begin selecting the marketing tactics and tools you want to have for your overall strategy. What should be included in your tool kit? That depends on what you are doing, but here are some ideas:

• Start with your goals and KPIs already determined. What did you decide you wanted to achieve? Was it increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or boosting sales?
• Consider the available marketing strategies and tactics that align with your objectives. There are numerous options to choose from, such as content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising, influencer partnerships, and more. Each tactic has its strengths and can reach different audiences in unique ways. Consider incorporating new and innovative strategies that can give you a competitive edge or help you better reach your target audience. Remember that the tactic itself is not a strategy, which is why we are determining the toolkit. You want an overarching strategy, for example, SEO and then the actual tactic: creating a pillar page for The Importance of Website Content.
• Consider your available resources, including budget, team capabilities, and time constraints. Some tactics may require more financial investment, specialized skills, or significant time commitments. Assess what you can realistically handle and prioritize the tactics that align with your available resources.
• Think about the synergy between different marketing tactics. Some tactics work better when combined or integrated with others. For example, you can use content marketing to attract an audience, social media marketing to engage with them, and email marketing to nurture leads. Look for ways to create a cohesive throughline for a holistic narrative.
• Remember, your toolkit is not set in stone. It can evolve and adapt based on the specific strategy or campaign you’re executing, as well as the results and feedback you receive along the way. Be open to experimentation and continuously evaluate the effectiveness of your chosen tactics.

By determining your toolkit, you’re equipping yourself with the right marketing tactics to achieve your objectives. This thoughtful selection ensures that you have the necessary tools to connect with your audience, deliver your message effectively, and drive the desired outcomes for your strategy or campaign.

Data

Connect Your Systems

Ensure that all systems you use are connected so you can gather analytics, keep track of your KPIs and see tangible results.

We are all surprised by how many tools we can use for our business, but we want to ensure we integrate the various systems and tools you use in your marketing efforts. If we can create a  seamless flow of data and information, you can gather valuable analytics, track KPIs, and see tangible results.

• Create a list of the systems and tools you utilize in your business and marketing operations. This may include your e-commerce software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, email marketing platform, social media management tools, website analytics tools, and any other software or platforms relevant to your marketing efforts.
• Assess whether these systems are connected and can communicate with one another. Look for opportunities to integrate your tools, either through native integrations or by using third-party solutions like Zapier or custom API integrations.

Sometimes things just don’t connect – we’ve all been there! Then the best thing to do is figure out how you are going to interpolate that data into the rest of the points you have connected, primarily since integration provides a holistic view of your customer’s journey and helps you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, allowing you to identify areas of success and areas for improvement and make informed optimizations to your campaigns.

And sometimes, if it is not a native feature built into something you already use, you can use tools like Looker Studio for automated reporting and data visualization. Instead of manually compiling data from different sources, you can set up dashboards or reports that pull data from your integrated systems. This saves time, streamlines reporting processes, and provides you with actionable insights in a more efficient manner, which allows you to make better data-driven decisions.

As a side note, regularly review and maintain your system connections to ensure they remain up-to-date and functioning smoothly. Technology evolves, and updates or changes to your tools may require adjustments to your integrations.

Tackle Your M.O.S.T.

Time to get to work and execute your marketing strategy, focusing on the mission, objectives, strategy and tactics for each funnel stage.

Time to put all our thoughts into an action plan to get started! Here is how we would set up your plan:

1. Mission: Start by reminding yourself of your mission—your overarching purpose or goal. Whether to inspire, educate, entertain, or solve a problem, keep your mission at the forefront of your mind as you execute your strategy.
2. Objectives: Clearly define the objectives you want to achieve at each stage of your marketing funnel – time to bring out our favorite acronyms TOFU, MOFU, BOFU. This could include building brand awareness, generating leads, nurturing prospects, driving conversions or fostering customer loyalty.
3. Strategy: Develop a strategy that outlines how you will achieve your objectives. What are you going to use to reach your objectives? Some best ways are blog posts, SEO, lead magnets and newsletters – honestly, the list goes on and on.
4. Tactics: Determine the specific tactics and actions you will take to implement your strategy. These are the practical steps and activities that will bring your strategy to life. It could involve creating pillar pages or other types of content for organic traffic, running targeted advertising campaigns, optimizing your website for page views or conversions, leveraging social media accounts, conducting email marketing campaigns or any other relevant tactics that align with your objectives.

Remember, your MOST should be tailored to each stage of the marketing and sales funnel; typically, this is how I plan for a quarter. For example, in the awareness (TOFU) stage, you might focus on content marketing and social media to generate brand awareness. In the consideration (MOFU) stage, you might employ lead-generation tactics like gated content or a newsletter. And in the conversion (BOFU) stage, you might optimize your website to drive traffic to your sales page or implement remarketing strategies to drive conversions if you run ads.

By tackling your MOST, you’re making a comprehensive plan to bring your marketing strategy to life. It’s about executing your plans with a clear mission, defined objectives, a well-thought-out strategy, and actionable tactics. This focused and systematic approach increases your chances of success. It enables you to progress toward your marketing and business goals and is a better way to ensure you’re not completely overwhelmed.

Access Your Results

Review how the marketing strategy performed to continue to iterate on it and do more of what works and less of what does not.

Once everything has been completed, this is all about closely examining how your marketing strategy performed and using that information to refine and improve your approach. Before we take the next step, we want to explore the outcomes of your efforts to identify what worked well and what didn’t, so you can make informed decisions moving forward. Here’s how we can access your results and leverage them for ongoing optimization:

• Start by collecting and analyzing the data related to your marketing strategy. By already connecting your systems, this should be easy. Still, the right way to do this and a great place to start would be to include metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, email open and click-through rates, social media engagement, lead generation numbers, and sales revenue. Use your analytics tools, reporting dashboards, and other measurement mechanisms created to gather the necessary information.
• Review the performance of each aspect of your marketing strategy. Look at the individual tactics, channels, and campaigns to assess their effectiveness. Identify the ones that generated positive results, such as higher engagement, increased conversions, or improved ROI. These are the areas where you should consider allocating more resources or doubling down on your efforts.
• Similarly, identify the aspects of your strategy that didn’t deliver the desired outcomes. It could be campaigns that underperformed, channels that didn’t yield the expected results, or messaging that didn’t resonate with your target audience. Use this information as an opportunity to learn and adjust your approach. Consider whether certain tactics must be refined, discontinued or replaced with other alternatives.
• Please make sure to take note of any external factors that may have influenced your results. Market trends, competitive landscape, economic conditions, or even changes in consumer behavior can impact the outcomes of your marketing strategy. Considering these external factors, you can better contextualize your results and make more informed decisions. The good news is that sometimes the data is NOT the whole story – we want to ensure we account for that.

Based on your findings, iterate on your marketing strategy. Build on the successes by investing more resources, optimizing the tactics that worked well, and scaling up your efforts in those areas. Simultaneously, address the weaknesses and challenges by refining or replacing ineffective tactics, adjusting targeting or messaging, and exploring new opportunities.

Continue to monitor and track your results over time – consider doing a mid-month check-in, a monthly check-in and a quarterly check of your overall strategy if you plan by quarter. Marketing is an ongoing process, and trends and preferences can change, requiring continuous refinement to stay effective and aligned with your business goals. Regularly assess your performance, comparing it against your objectives and industry benchmarks.

But by accessing your results, you gain valuable insights that enable you to iterate on your marketing strategy. It’s about leveraging data, customer feedback, and market trends to make informed decisions and optimize your efforts. This ongoing evaluation and improvement process empower you to do more of what works, discard or improve what doesn’t, and ultimately drive better results for your business.