The Bonsai Online Marketing System

Why A Marketing System?

 “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; trouble is I don’t know which half,” - John Wanamaker

So, why do you need a marketing system?

It’s true. Marketing, while a necessary aspect of many businesses, is one that is rife with wasted dollars and missed opportunities. With traditional strategies, it can be very difficult to tell what’s working and what’s not, which means it’s even harder to tell what to do to improve.

~Are you connecting with potential customers? Are your efforts turning into sales? Or, are the dollars you spend on marketing going to waste? ~

These questions are difficult, maybe even impossible, to answer without a system in place. Now we get to the primary appeal of an integrated online marketing system; to understand your marketing campaign in and out, from your and your customer's perspective, ensuring the effectiveness of your strategy and budget. 

But how?

  

1. Bonsai’s Integrated Online Marketing System begins with a strategy for generating leads. Typically, these strategies involve the leveraging of search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and email marketing, among others.

2. As you generate leads, you draw them to your website where you inform them of your products and services, gauge their level of interest and analyze their behavior.

3. Every lead and conversion is loaded into your CRM, regardless of their particular level of interest. The CRM is where you're able to glean the necessary feedback for bettering your strategy for Lead Generation, and the marketing system as a whole.

4. As you can see, feedback is generated at every step in the process, so you're able to see what's working and what's not at each step of the way. However, optimizing for leads, while helpful is not enough! You need to optimize your system to convert sales. After all, it's called the 'bottom-line' for a reason.

Bonsai’s Integrated Online Marketing System is designed to provide the necessary feedback to allow you to assess every aspect of your marketing campaign. With such a system in place, it’s easy to tell where your dollars are going, what marketing channel is producing results, and which efforts are crucial for converting leads into sales.

The system achieves this with a series of web tools that track every lead from start to finish. From their first interaction with your company to the time spent on your website, through the sales/conversion process, everything about the lead is tracked. Now you’ve got automatic feedback on your efforts, and you can adjust from there. In this way, you can play to your strengths and optimize your marketing system with the strategies that work best for your business. This, in turn, allows you to achieve the lowest cost per lead and cost per acquisition possible. 

What do we mean by an ‘integrated’ system?

‘Integration’ is significant for two reasons:

1)- It refers to the way the components of the marketing system seamlessly interact with one another.

2)- It refers to the sort of unity the system can foster among members of your team, namely sales and marketing.

 As illustrated in our diagram, the key to ‘integration’ is to have every component of your system feeding back into your strategy for Lead Generation (note the dotted lines leading back to the 'strategy' block).

 As you draw leads to your site (where you house your content) you’re able to analyze the behavior of those leads. Perhaps they were converted to a sale. Maybe they needed to call in for you to achieve the sale. Perhaps, they remained on one page of your site for a time and then left.  

Whatever the lead did on your site, with the help of web analytics, you’re able to load their data into your CRM to understand what worked and what didn't.

This feedback helps integrate your sales and marketing teams. Sales and Customer service are better able to handle leads and existing customers. Likewise, feedback helps your marketing team to reach out to the right people, eventually giving your sales team the best possible opportunity to close.

The ultimate goal of implementing Bonsai's Online Integrated Marketing System is to create an environment in which the sales and marketing teams act more like a single unit, rather than separate entities. This sort of unity helps you to generate more leads, close more sales, generate more feedback and continue to generate more leads, and so on. 

What are the specific benefits of an integrated online marketing system?

   Aside from how an integrated system works, here are the specific benefits:

Accountability

You're able to account for everything in you campaign; every effort, every dollar spent, every lead attribute, and every conversion. Everything that works, and everything that doesn’t work, is all accounted for and made clear to your team.

Maximum automation

As leads come in, each lead’s attributes are tracked and automatically entered into your CRM. Here, you get a near instant picture of your campaign; which efforts are working and for which type of customer. As you generate more leads and more feedback, you're able to automate more processes within your campaign, streamlining the sales/conversion process.  

A Closed Feedback Loop

Remember, it all starts with Lead Generation.  As you generate more and more feedback, your marketing and sales processes become more streamlined. Streamlined processes within your campaign allow you tighten and eventually close your feedback loop, greatly reducing the amount of time it takes to optimize further the system at large.  The sales department will tell the marketers which types of leads most often convert and the marketers can then work to generate better leads, and so on.

Alignment of Marketing and Sales efforts

Ideally, your marketing and sales efforts will present a unified front. Because your feedback is automatically available, and your sales and marketing teams are communicative, your process for generating and converting leads can be streamlined into a more focused, effective effort.

John Wanamaker, widely known as a pioneer in marketing and advertising, uttered the above quote back in the 1800’s. Surely, we’ve come a long way since then. Now, with the aid of online applications, you can account for every dollar spent. Understanding the true value of your marketing efforts is priceless, but not unattainable. You no longer have to worry about which 50% of your dollars are being wasted, you can now ensure that 100% are going to good use.

Hopefully, that wasn’t too much to unpack! In our next post, we’ll begin to delve into each component of an integrated marketing system, and how they all work in tandem.

 

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