How To Using CRM to kickstart your social media marketing

Sage Business Solutions Social CRM: Using CRM to kickstart your social media marketing by Mark Atterby Many organisations are engaging with online communities (blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, twitter, Facebook etc) to generate exposure, opportunities and sales. By linking social media marketing with the latest CRM systems, you can simultaneously reduce marketing expenditure while increasing brand awareness and sales. We show you how. Now more than ever, marketing departments need to eliminate waste and become efficient, optimised machines. For the most part, traditional marketing activities (advertising, direct mail campaigns, trade shows, etc) are not delivering costeffective results like they once were or the results are just too hard to measure. Many marketers and organisations are turning to the social media resources and networks associated with Web 2.0, as an alternative to the traditional marketing channels. As Michael Stelzner, from WhitePaperSource.com, comments, “Many marketers see the social media frontier as the next marketing gold rush. Given the low costs of entry, many marketing pros are doing more than just dipping their creative toes into this gold-laden water.” Social Media Marketing Traditional marketing is about delivering a message to an audience, whether that’s via a television ad, direct marketing piece, or an email blast. Social Media Marketing is about generating conversations, the purpose of which is to create and improve understanding about one’s organisation and its products and services. Social media marketing is, in many ways, related to viral marketing, where word of mouth is generated through social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or other Web 2.0 resources such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, as well as video and photo sharing websites. “These methods enable organisations to communicate in a personalised manner to an audience, and also enable ‘unofficial’ communications (peer-to-peer rather than brand-toconsumer) that many users accept as more relevant, more authentic and more credible than the official sources”, says Kristin Moyer from Gartner Research. It’s about distributing and sharing content quickly and cheaply in the hope that customers or prospective customers start conversing about one’s products and services where they then pass that information onto their networks. The benefits of Social Media Marketing According to the Social Media Marketing Industry Report , 81 per cent of marketers believed that their social media efforts have generated exposure for their business, with improving website traffic and growing lead generation lists being secondary benefits. Another significant benefit has been the building of new partnerships. The report also highlighted that organisations engaged in social media marketing experienced a rise in their search engine rankings, which have resulted in improved business exposure, more effective lead generation efforts and a reduction in overall marketing expenses. “About one in two marketers found social media generated qualified leads. However, only slightly more than one in three said social media marketing helped close business” . Traditional CRM versus Social CRM Traditionally, CRM has been used as a management tool to help drive direct marketing campaigns, monitor the success of those campaigns and track the sales pipeline. Allen Duet, Senior Product Manager for Sage, comments, “In the past CRM was employed by management to track the sales pipeline rather than a solution to help sales people complete the sale. It’s been technology-focused around centralised databases, driving marketing, sales, service and contact management automation.” Social CRM aims, by linking traditional CRM systems with social media marketing, to empower sales users to be more effective by leveraging knowledge and experience of the broader sales and business community. Sales and marketing professionals can use Social CRM and media marketing to help get inside the mind of their customers and prospects. What social networking websites are customers visiting? What topics are important to them? How do they get that information? Who are they talking to? What are they saying about one’s products and services? Social media sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn and the information posted on blogs and wikis, allows marketers and Social CRM: Using CRM to kickstart your social media marketing Page 2 salespeople to engage in the market conversation about their products and services. Duet asserts, “The main benefit of linking CRM with social media activities is the ability to track interactions across a variety of mediums to provide context to the relationship that a CRM user or the business they represent has with prospects, customers, or marketing targets.” “The richer the capture of interactions, the more actionability a business has in terms of communicating with these contacts”, adds Duet. As well as the ability of correlating this data with customer information held in a CRM database, social media can also provide a public data warehouse, allowing marketers to identify trends and hot topics along a variety of lines (demographic, publisher type competitor, etc). Duet says, “These sites are like a data warehouse in the sky and the application of BI tools to help identify trends and hot items should marry up well with CRM’s actionability and contextual consumption of BI”. Where does one start? And how much effort and money does it take? There are numerous social media tools out there for marketers to use including Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and other video sites, social bookmarking sites (Del.icio.us), Forums, StumbleUpon, Dig, Reddit, Friendfeed, etc. If you are new to it, it may appear an extremely daunting task to figure out where to start. Which tools are going to deliver the best results? How much time or effort needs to be allocated? Or how do you measure the success of what you are doing? To some extent this depends on the type of industry that you are in and the nature of your organisation. If you sell business-to-business products and services, then Facebook is unlikely to be of much use to you as compared to LinkedIn or Twitter. If the products and services you sell require extensive education or a consulting element to them, then producing whitepapers, customer success stories, news updates and other content for blogs with sound advice and helpful tips may prove to be the most effective tool to start with. The Social Media Marketing Industry Report highlights that Twitter, Blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn are the top four tools by far, used by marketers . The more experienced social marketers and those who spend a significant amount of time on social marketing, will tend to start investigating and using other tools. Engaging in Social Media isn’t so much about cost as it is about time commitment on the part of your sales and marketing teams. And how much time you spend is up to you. It does take time to develop relationships from conversations that lead to actual business and a large percentage of marketers who take the time find great results. Over 60 per cent of marketers who have been using social media report it has helped them close business. More than half who spend 16 or more hours per week find the same results . It also requires a cultural shift in the organisation and how it promotes its products. Rather than viewing social media as a vehicle to reach a mass audience with a well constructed corporate message, it’s more about targeting the people who are most interested in your products and services and engaging them in a conversation. People in productive conversation don’t repeat what they’re saying over and over. They learn from each other and move topics forward. In social media marketing, brands are not simply emblems, but living entities that evolve and change as people interact with them. The future of Social CRM and the Sage Roadmap At present most CRM solutions offer some form of integration with social media, typically where they have a function to associate an online web page or resource to a contact record. Duet comments, “ACT! by Sage has the facility to directly import contact information from Facebook as well as latest status information. The typical business benefit we are aiming for is to have all interaction information associated with a contact readily available for quick research before or during interaction with a contact.” “However”, as Duet points out, “no solution at this stage can fully capture and aggregate that interaction information into traditional CRM information buckets such as history”. This is where the real business value of social media and linking it with CRM lies. By capturing and aggregating the information gained from conversations people are having in regards to your products, services and brand should allow greater opportunities to close as well as generate sales. “Sage is very interested in understanding what the real business value of social media integration is and developing feature flows that envelop these rather than a superficial integration. From a business perspective we don’t think Social CRM: Using CRM to kickstart your social media marketing Page 3 customers get a lot of “bang for their buck” by just doing the contact correlation to social sites. But having a CRM system that acts as a social aggregation platform, extracting trends and market insight from these resources, has an obvious and significant appeal”, concludes Duet. Social CRM: Using CRM to kickstart your social media marketing Page 4