The leadership author and a retired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has made a suggestion that, “Many leaders are tempted to lead just like a chess master, striving to control every of the move. When they should be the ones leading like the gardeners, creating and also maintaining a viable ecosystem in which the organization is operating.”
This holds true when it is you apply it to a company’s marketing efforts as well.
However, what if you are just thinking too small in regard to your company’s marketing ecosystem? What about if the larger network your company is existing within? Are you among those that are missing out on being part of the conversations in your industry’s overarching and their permeating ecosystem? Let us take a step back and see, what is a business ecosystem anyway, and why should you care about it at all? How can thinking about the business ecosystems be of help to you, and how can an agency be helpful to getting you there? You should put on your favorite gardening gloves and read on.
What Is Ecosystem Marketing?
The idea of a marketing ecosystem has in recent time become a hot term. Referring to the creation of a connected system of the analytics and the content. With you and your website serving as a central hub.
Looking at this view, the idea of an ecosystem web. Featuring some aspects like the social media feeds, the hosted blog posts and the SEO efforts. Has replaced the concept of a lead funnel. Let us call this just a small-view ecosystem.
While this approach is indeed a very useful approach, narrowing your scope this much just to only your business’s own ecosystem of channels. It can result into missing out on the industry forest for the marketing trees. What will happen when we take a broader, richer look at what a marketing ecosystem can be?
In “The Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” the writer and advisor James F. Moore describes the idea of a business ecosystem as:
Business communities, unlike the biological communities of co-evolving organisms, are social systems. And the social systems are mainly made up of real people who make decisions. The larger patterns are being maintained by a complex network of choices. Which are dependent, at least in part, on what the participants are aware of. As the [anthropologist] Gregory Bateson noted, if you have changed the ideas in a social system, then you have change the system itself.
Building Followers
You might have an engagement in a Twitter campaign to tease your followers for them to view your Instagram account. Where you have posted a short animation or short video that then drives people to your YouTube account. Where they can possibly watch an extended video or a webinar about your product or service. From here, they are encouraged not to only visit your website just to join your email list but also initiate a conversation or sale as well. You might even ask for them to expand your reach through sharing opportunities on their own personal social channels. Which would provide an insights into other ecosystem-expansion opportunities to explore as you are growing your influence.