Marketing Ecosystem: What on Earth Is It?

It's the overarching constellation of all your resources across brand building, lead generation, organic promotion, paid advertising, including both your in-house teams and external partners.

So why does this bigger picture matter?

Why the marketing ecosystem is important today

On the surface, the concept of the marketing ecosystem may sound like fancy jargon. But it actually serves a practical purpose—to bring order to the chaos of the modern marketing mix.

When brands don't take a holistic view of all their marketing investments and activities, a number of important things go wrong.

• Your customers get inundated by repeated, redundant messages across different channels, many of which make it seem like you don’t really know them. (And, let’s face it: None of your digital channels or analytics dashboards capture how annoyed that makes them.)
• Your teams end up competing with each other instead of coordinating their efforts across the customer journey. If the Social Media team and the Paid Media team aren’t on the same page about the target audience, it’s going to be hard to breed customer loyalty.
• You waste precious time and money investing in initiatives that are doomed to fail. If your content marketing operates separately from your digital advertising, which operates separately from your email marketing, you can’t build a cohesive strategy that improves customer lifetime value.

Marketing is no longer as simple as hiring an agency to devise a strategy, plan media, and implement creative. Today, most marketers operate in a complex, far-reaching digital ecosystem. Without a clear view of this bigger picture, it’s hard to be effective.

Is this really just about the digital marketing ecosystem?

It’s certainly true that much of what makes modern marketing so complex is the digital ecosystem of new marketing channels, social media platforms, website optimization widgets, SEO efforts, marketing analytics tools, and so on.

But the idea of an ecosystem extends far beyond the pixels and platforms used to engage customers in the digital world.

If you’re using direct mail to communicate with customers, selling through in-store distribution partners, or even just meeting potential customers at events and scribbling their details on Post-it notes, all these efforts make up an entire ecosystem of touchpoints and data sources.

That’s why, no matter which niche or sector you operate in, the vast majority of senior marketing leaders believe a viable ecosystem is critical to their ability to implement an effective marketing strategy.

Even if the digital marketing ecosystem represents just a part of your marketing strategy, you need a holistic view of the entire process to spend your resources well.

How to organize your marketing ecosystem

Perhaps the hardest part of the modern marketing leader's job is to synchronize and coordinate the efforts of multiple tools and teams across the different parts of the customer journey.

The fact is, most leaders aren’t setting up a complete digital marketing ecosystem from scratch. More often than not, you’re inheriting a hierarchy of disparate agendas and capabilities, hoping to shape them into a cohesive, collaborative system.

It’s why so much of the modern CMO’s job is really about change management. It’s about coordinating the various marketing efforts taking place across the business around a common set of goals and values.

Broadly speaking, this takes a combination of the following 3 things.

A shared marketing strategy

The first challenge is devising and communicating a clear strategy that accounts for all of the business’s goals when it comes to acquiring and retaining customers. The complexity of this strategy will likely depend on how many products or services you sell, how many markets you sell them in, and how many distinct business functions you serve.

But the purpose of a successful marketing strategy is to boil all that complexity down into a small number of actions that you can easily (and repeatedly) communicate across the marketing organization. It’s about making sense of all the marketing efforts being made across the business so they can all pull together in a common direction that benefits the business as a whole.

Clearly defined responsibilities

In order to implement that strategy, you then need to be able to convey the roles that different teams will play and how they all fit together. This can often be the hardest part of the change management process because it affects people directly. So, a clear vision of how different talents and capabilities can add value is critical to ensuring your marketing ecosystem is greater than the sum of its parts.

You need to be able to answer questions about how disparate functions like social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, and content marketing can all work together. What data do they need to share with each other? At what points in the customer journey should there be a handoff between different tools or teams? How do all these pieces fit together?

Well-connected technology

Given how much of the modern marketing organization operates in the digital world, it’s also vital to the health of your digital marketing ecosystem that disparate technologies connect to each other. From the point of view of your employees, this is about ensuring that any given workflow can be easily accomplished even if the user has to move between different systems.

From the point of view of your data, it’s about ensuring that you have the right integrations in place to make the right information available at the right times. Most importantly, from the point of view of your target audience, it’s about ensuring that no matter where someone is in the overall customer journey, they have the tools and information they need to become a customer without unnecessary friction.

How can a marketing strategy span the complete digital marketing ecosystem?

So much of modern marketing is about striking the right balance between different functions. Leaders need to be able to craft a vision that encapsulates both sides of every coin.

You need to be able to split resources between brand building and lead generation. You need to devote enough investment to both organic social media and paid advertising. You likely need to cover both digital advertising and real-world activations, such as events. You need talent focused on creative and conversions. You need both in-house resources and external partners.

Indeed, depending on the scope of your responsibilities as a marketing leader, you may even need to factor in relationships with other departments like customer success and sales.

To devise a successful marketing strategy capable of covering all this complexity, it helps to take a customer-centric view of the whole ecosystem.

For instance, many leaders choose to map all their teams, processes, and technology investments to a linear view of the ideal customer journey. This way, you can plot exactly where functions like email marketing and social media marketing fit in, while also highlighting the long-term impact they have once a potential customer has converted.

This helps to share your unifying vision across teams so everyone can see how the different puzzle pieces fit together. But it also gives everyone a realistic view of just how much needs to be done to convert the interest of ideal customers into repeat purchases.

What a cohesive marketing ecosystem looks like

In practice, when a complete marketing ecosystem is working in unison towards common goals it has a few notable traits.

A truly omnichannel approach to communication

A lot is said about omnichannel marketing strategies, most of the time it’s just multiple channels targeting potential customers in tandem, with little cohesion between them. In a truly cohesive omnichannel approach, different channels are used at different times to convey different messages to people at different stages of the buying journey.

Your social media posts will convey your brand identity, your email campaigns will target your most engaged prospects, your direct mail will engage your most qualified leads, and so on. An effective strategy takes a holistic view of how all these channels work together as a healthy ecosystem.

A shared view of data

Young businesses can afford to monitor their progress with little more than a Google Analytics dashboard. For bigger brands with a more complex digital marketing ecosystem, it takes a deliberate effort from leaders to ensure all the data generated by disparate teams comes together to form a single view of the truth.

It’s important that different teams see how well their tactics are performing but, crucially, they need to be able to see it in the wider context of the overarching buying journey. This is essential to fostering a culture of collaboration between these teams to improve business results.

Integrations and automation across the stack

A truly cohesive ecosystem relies first and foremost on a culture of unity between the people that make up the marketing organization. But given how big a role technology now plays in modern digital marketing, it’s vital that the tools your people rely on work together as well.

A well-integrated stack that uses automation to move relevant data between systems is critical to running a well-oiled marketing machine. Users need to be able to switch between different interfaces for workflows and leaders need to be able to glean holistic insights from all the technology they’re investing in.

What if I have multiple marketing ecosystems?

Marketers that sell multiple products in multiple markets across different geographies may find that, realistically, they’re operating multiple ecosystems. In the interest of economies of scale, it may be worth consolidating some of these technology investments.

But so long as each unit’s marketing leader has a holistic view of their technology footprint and its resulting impact on the customer experience, there’s no reason it should impact sales or customer loyalty.

Principles for unifying the marketing ecosystem

In conclusion, let’s summarize the most important takeaways for leaders trying to make sense of complex ecosystems.

You need a holistic view of the ecosystem everyone can see

Mapping the complete digital marketing ecosystem isn’t an academic exercise. It’s about understanding the full scope of the organization’s capabilities and sharing that insight so every team can understand the specific role it plays.

The CMO needs to lead the ecosystem approach

The process of bringing cohesion to all these disparate resources really needs to be driven by the leaders of the marketing organization. Even if the initiative to map all the component parts stems from within the department, it needs leadership buy-in to foster the right culture of collaboration.

This doesn’t happen overnight and it needs to keep evolving

There will always be new tools, new initiatives, and new ideas. Indeed, the process of mapping the whole ecosystem will itself lead to new notions of what’s possible. The goal is not to lock in the way you work—it’s to improve the way you operate with a holistic view of what you’re working with.

Technology should bring teams together, not pull them apart

The tools you use should be helping your marketers work together, not hide away in silos. So long as a tool adds value to the customer experience or helps teams collaborate, it’s a worthy member of your ecosystem.

Ultimately, this is about the customer

At the end of the day, the purpose of understanding your marketing ecosystem is to ensure the complexity on your side of the equation doesn’t equate to unnecessary complexity on the customer’s side. It’s about ensuring that the hard work you put in turns into a better experience, across the customer’s lifecycle.