Why you NEED an Online Marketing System

Why YOU absolutely need 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?

The quote above gets to the heart of this question. It’s true, marketing, while a necessary aspect of business, is one that is rife with wasted dollars and missed opportunities. With traditional marketing strategies, it can be very difficult to understand what’s working and what’s not. Are your efforts actually turning into sales? Or, are the dollars you spend on marketing efforts getting lost? In a general sense, this is the major appeal of an integrated online marketing system; to ensure the effectiveness of your marketing budget.

But how?

A system like this is designed to provide you with all the feedback necessary to be able to assess every aspect of your efforts. You know where your dollars are going, what marketing channel is connecting with your potential customers, and what connection is converting the most leads into sales. This sort of accountability is achieved with a series of applications that track every lead from start to finish. That lead’s attributes are then automatically loaded into your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), so you’re able to attribute that lead to a specific marketing effort. You’re able to establish an automatic feedback loop to assess your strategies and adjust from there. In this way, you can achieve the lowest cost per lead, and cost per acquisition possible.

What do we mean by an ‘integrated’ system?

‘Integration’ refers to the cohesive nature that you want your marketing and sales efforts to embody. As illustrated in our diagram, the key to ‘integration’ is to have every component of your system working to better your strategy for Lead Generation. As you draw leads to your site (where you house your content) you’re able to establish contact and convert those leads into sales. Then, with the help of web analytics, you’re able to track those conversions in order to understand how the customer was lead to your site. Thus, your sales team gets prime leads while your marketing team reaches out to the right people. The ultimate goal in implementing an integrated system is to create a marketing campaign wherein the sales and marketing teams are communicative to a degree that allows the system to be almost entirely self-correcting.

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

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

• Accountability

• Everything is accounted for; every effort, every dollar spent, every lead attribute, every lead converted, everything that works, and everything that doesn’t work, is all accounted for.

• Maximum automation

• As leads come in, each lead’s attributes are tracked and automatically entered into your CRM. You get an instant picture of what ads are working for which type of customer. As you generate more leads, the detail of that picture increases.

• A Closed Feedback loop

• Because Lead attributes are automatically accounted for, you’re able to see what ads are generating the most leads, and what type of leads are most often converted into sales. The sales team can then tell the marketers which type of leads are most often converted, the marketers can then work to generate better leads, and so on.

• Alignment of Marketing and Sales efforts

• This is the premiere benefit of an integrated online marketing system, and it’s ultimate goal. Ideally, your marketing and sales efforts will present a unified front. Because your feedback is automatically available, and your sales and marketing teams are being communicative, your process of generating and converting leads can be streamlined into a more focused 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 technology, you can account for every dollar spent in order to understand the true value of your marketing efforts. You no longer have to worry about which 50% of your dollars are being put to good use. Instead, you can create a system which allows you to achieve more for less. 

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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