Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

What the Heck is Holistic Marketing?

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 314

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The creator economy has unleashed a new generation of creators who seek to become niche experts.

While having niche expertise in an industry can be helpful to your business if you want to market in that industry, does hiring a niche expert to help with your marketing make sense?

On the other hand, what is the holistic marketing concept, and how does working with a holistic marketing expert differ from working with a niche expert?

These are the questions I will answer based on my own experience in helping companies and transitioning from one to the other - you'll find out all about it by listening to the end!

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Neal Schaffer:

Hey, Neal Schaffer, your digital marketing coach here. We're all talking about AI. But how exactly can we leverage the power of AI to transform our small business marketing? Well, no one is teaching us how to do this. I saw an opportunity. And I said, You know what, I'm gonna get together with my friends over at tailwind who are developing AI tools as well. And we're going to put on a free webinar for my community. That's right, it's going to be a free masterclass on how to harness the power of AI to transform your small business marketing. We're going to cover topics such as why you should use AI to automate processes, how to find the best AI tools for your business, how to get started with AI and small business marketing, how to measure your success, and also give you tips and tricks for getting the most out of AI in your small business marketing. By the end of this webinar, you will have the skills and the knowledge to start using AI to take your small business marketing to the next level. If you're interested. This is going to be April 19. On a Wednesday at 10am. Pacific. I hope you'll join me go to Neal schaffer.com/tailwind ai that's ne l Sch. Ff er.com/taillon di t ai LWIND. A, I look forward to serving you on that webinar Wednesday, April 19. In your marketing efforts, you might be wondering, what are the types of people, the types of businesses, the types of organizations that you should reach out to. There are many consultants and organizations that have niche expertise. And there are others that have more general expertise, and look at things in a more holistic perspective. I believe when working with marketing consultants and service companies, you really need to decide which is the best for you. Well, I'm going to focus today on holistic marketing, what it is, and why it is so crucial for you to understand this concept. If you want to be successful in your organization's marketing. The same applies to who you end up hiring. So listen in. And I guarantee you this episode is going to help you see your business's marketing in a brand new way on this next episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got, Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Maybe you have heard of this term, holistic marketing. Maybe you've heard of the term holistic and associated it with medicine. But holistic marketing is almost the exact opposite of niche expertise, marketing, or working with someone that is a niche expert in something. We are a culture that is fostering the creation of niche experts. You know, the riches are in the niches, you got to be niche. The whole crater economy is sort of built on people having niches. And I think when we apply this to marketing, it gets to be a little bit interesting. Now, what prompted me to record this episode came from it was actually a conversation on Twitter. Yes, I'm still there. And the conversation was about tick tock, you know, and its potential for being banned here in the United States. And so and commented that a whole new generation of content creators are going to understand what it means to not build their property on rented land, right, this notion that we are all on rented Now YouTube has rented land as well. I'm not gonna lie, right? I prefer YouTube as rented land compared to other social networks. And it's been pretty consistently stable over the past, you know, more than decade. But needless to say, over time, and I think for those of us that have been through many, many different social networks, and I'm talking like stumble upon Empire Avenue Elotes Sue, I can go on and on Google Plus, I can go on and on about social networks that have come and gone. And whenever there is a new social network, they're also a group of niche experts. And the group of niche experts say you got to do this. You got to do that. And this raises the question, do we have to do This or That. So I want to take a step back in my career. When I finished writing. It's a story that I've shared before, when I finished writing, maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing, actually, it came before that. I finished writing windmill networking, understanding, leveraging and maximizing LinkedIn in March of 2009. I ended up publishing in 2009, in September, but after I finished writing the manuscript for that, I decided that I didn't want to just be seen as a LinkedIn expert. The reason why is that the needs of businesses go far beyond just LinkedIn. Right? If it's a b2c company, LinkedIn might be far down on the list of important social networks. And I wanted to be like the doctor, the doctor who says, Let me first look at the symptoms and decide what is best for you. So I could have gone with the LinkedIn niche and just did LinkedIn 24/7 for a decade. And I might be viewed a little bit differently, but I didn't, I made that strategic decision. Yes, I published one more book, maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing a little bit later. But regardless, I decided that as a at the time social media marketer, now digital marketer, needing to help the businesses that relied on me for expertise, I would be doing them a disservice if I only recommended what I was familiar with. And it almost gets back to when I published maximize your social in 2013. Because it was the same thing. In order to create a social media marketing strategy, I needed to know all of social media marketing, so that regardless of what needs they have, there is a prescription that I could provide them that would help them get there rather than just say, Oh, you got to be on LinkedIn or you know, these days, oh, you got to be on tick tock. So fast forward even more. And it's interesting because my evolution as a holistic Digital Marketer, as I'm going to call myself versus a niche expert comes down to when I published the age of influence. So the age of influence is a book on influencer marketing. I primarily wrote it in 2019. It was published in March of 2020. And at the time, I was not known as an influencer marketing expert. But I understood influencer marketing enough to know that it was one of the most powerful, yet least understood marketing channels out there, and that I wanted to learn it. And I wanted to teach what I learned. And that was the book. But a funny thing happened. Now that book got published, the day that California went on lockdown is March 17 2020. Right. But I had a lot of companies reach out to me, and they wanted consulting help. And, you know, fortunately, I already had a fractional cmo program. I have a program that I can funnel them into where we could work virtually over zoom, right? But the interesting thing is, they all wanted influencer marketing. They assumed that that was the cure, but they were not doctors. So how do you know if influencer marketing was best for you, without understanding what your objectives are, and what might be the best way to meet those objectives. And in many cases, influencer marketing was not the best way. Now, maybe at some point with a phased approach it might be, but it wasn't always the best way to meet their strategic objectives. So once again, I'm the doctor, right? The doctor of marketing, holistic marketing, I see things holistically. It's not based on what I emotionally think that you should do. Because I've invested a lot of time there. I've written a book on that subject, it goes down to what are your needs? What are you trying to do? And then what are the pieces that can help you do that? In some cases, it's not even social media. And that's why, you know, with COVID, I realized that there was a whole lot of digital marketing outside of social media marketing, that I needed to know for my own brand, I need to help my clients with and that's why I said earlier, I really focused just on that social media marketing. But now I've really evolved into looking at digital as a whole. And it makes me a better doctor, it makes me able to prescribe solutions at a quicker pace at a more accurate pace, and more efficiently, and really provide the best solutions for my clients. So I bring this up, because I talk with a lot of clients. And they think well, who should I hire, either full time or freelancer or what sort of agencies that I work with? And the conversation is always around? Well, we have a web agency, but they can help us with our social media, too. They said they can do SEO, oh, and they can do this and that. And the problem is that there are a lot of companies that have niche expertise, but they try to do everything. But because they're an agency, their business model is to sell you more services, there is a conflict of interest. It is the same conflict of interest that I talked about it in maximizing social, the conflict of interest that says if you allow an agency to create your strategy, there's an obvious conflict of interest, they're obviously going to recommend things to build up business with you. And I see this happening a lot in many organizations that I work with, and that I have friends that work with. So it really gets down to, you need to have this holistic approach. Ideally, you have the approach in house so that, you know, what are the core things you need to do to reach your objectives. And if you don't have those core skills, you want to be making sure you're working with the right organizations, the right consultants, you're hiring the right people. But if you don't have this holistic marketing perspective, if you're not dangerous enough, in every aspect of digital content, influencers, social media marketing, and therefore you cannot assess like a doctor could what might be the best approach. You might end up hiring someone for content marketing, someone for influencer marketing, selling for social media marketing, and then based on their niche expertise, they are going to want you to go down a route that may not be best for your company. And that's really my message here. So niche experts have a role. Once you've determined that, wow, we are getting 90% of our business from SEO, let's hire an SEO expert, or let's go to an SEO agency that is just really good at SEO, that makes a lot of sense. But until you can get to that conclusion where it makes sense to hire a niche expert full time or you know, or even part time, I would say, you really need to look at everything holistically, look at the whole and decide what is the best solution to meet that objective is Tiktok the best solution to reach Gen Z, probably. It's not the only solution. There's other solutions out there. There's a paid strategy, there's an organic strategy, there's influencer marketing, there's a lot of different things that go into it, right. So maybe that tick tock experts only has experience in organic, they don't have experience in paid. They've never done influencer collaborations. For instance, this is where you really need, ideally, obviously, you own your digital marketing strategy. But on top of that, you have this holistic perspective. Ideally, that holistic marketing perspective is data driven. But this is why a lot of companies come to me because they want that holistic perspective, they know that I have various expertises. But you first need to get grounded into what you need. And once you understand those channels that you need to become more proficient with, then it makes sense to make those investments with niche experts. So the riches are in the niches. But if you are a business owner, entrepreneur, and you're trying to figure out which way to go, you need to be holistic first, reach out to niche experts or companies with niche expertise second, because otherwise, you may be led down a very, very long rabbit hole, that you end up spending a lot of money and you don't get the results that you should get. It's all about the doctor wants to prescribe the best medicine to give you the results that you should be getting for your precious budget to meet those strategic goals. So this topic, like I said, just came to mind from over the last few weeks various conversations with various clients and various other people in the industry. I don't know if you've ever thought about this. I don't know if you've ever thought about this concept of holistic marketing, which I'm a huge fan of and it really explains everything I do. You know, I have two books about LinkedIn. What about social media marketing strategy? What about influencer marketing? My next book will be about digital marketing. I'm hoping it becomes the digital marketing playbook. Right? And to me, it's natural, because you need to be everywhere. We talked about omni channel marketing, will marketers need to be omni channel as well? And if you're not, you start consuming content and becoming a user of those channels. And you learn and there's various resources. I was talking with a client and they're just getting started on YouTube. There's so much they don't know what's like Neil, how did you learn this all? Well. It's a lot of sweat equity, right? It's a lot of doing it's going to conferences like Vid Summit. It's reading books like The YouTube formula by Derral Eve's it's listening to awesome people that talk about YouTube like Roberto Blake, you know, the to buddy Express podcast, VID IQ is to talk podcast, golden gains, or Dan Goldin, I always get the name wrong, his video marketing value podcast, but you need to both have historical perspective. You also need to be well versed in it by doing it yourself. And you always need to be studying from the Masters right and learning from them. So there's no shortcut to all of this. And if you are a content creator and you want to go that niche route, by all means, go for it. I mean, a niche is a great way to be differentiated in the market. And I just hope though, when a client contacts you, if you're new is really not the best fit for that client. I mean, back in the day, I'd say, look, I do not do Snapchat, if Snapchat is part of what you want to do, I am not the person you want to work with. So if you can set those boundaries, then I think you're going to have much happier clients. And I think you're not going to get bogged down in work that you don't want to do either. But it's all about best practices is always about providing what is best for the client. It's that Oh, kick summer all summer Japanese proverb, you know, customers is getting customers always right. It's really having that mindset, right. Combined with that holistic perspective of marketing that I think will set you as a marketer, you know, apart as well as hopefully you becoming a home for holistic marketing in your organization to really get the best out of whatever is possible with your marketing program. Well, that is my rant for today on the your digital marketing coach podcast. I hope that you got value from that. Is there something you know, do you agree disagree with that? Is there something that you'd like me to talk about in this podcast? Is there a guest that you'd like to recommend? Feel free to reach out to me, my email is Neil any al at Neal schaffer.com, any al sch FF er, I really hope to have a conversation with you and get to know you better. And another way you can do this is by simply leaving a review on your favorite podcast app. I know I've asked this several times, and most podcasters do but it really, really makes a difference in the virality and the spread and the reach of the podcast. So that's all that stuff for this week. I look forward to serving you again next week next week. For those that haven't subscribed will be an interview episode. And until then, this is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.