Unlikely Friends: How to Partner Your CRM with Social Media for Great Results
As unlikely partnerships go, social media and a bespoke CRM are probably not a pairing you’d expect to work – they don’t immediately jump out as an obvious choice, right? In actuality, by bringing the two together, you can enhance both your business’ digital marketing efforts, and its customer service and sales offerings. Read on to find out how this pairing can really benefit your business, and then see for yourself!
Generating Customer Insights
As with any type of marketing, your business’ social media strategy needs focus – focus that comes from understanding the types of individual you’re hoping to target. Thankfully, your bespoke CRM contains all of that information and so much more by design - including whether or not previous sales attempts have been successful.
By applying the knowledge that your CRM contains to your social media strategy, your business can more easily market to the correct audience – whether that’s through a simple tweet, or a paid advertising campaign.
On the other side of the coin, monitoring social media channels can also help to improve on the level of detail your CRM’s customer insights contain. For example, it’s much clearer to see how the public are responding to your brand when you can keep an eye on real-time sentiment using platforms such as Twitter, where people are most vocal. Additionally, exploring potential new markets and how people feel about competitors can help to add an extra layer to the information your CRM contains.
Delivering Customer Service
In recent years, social media has become an important avenue for business’ customer service offering, with users actively engaging with brands online to let them know how they’re feeling and if they have any feedback – including any negative words they may have to share.
But having someone simply monitor social media for any comments or complaints is nowhere near as effective as allowing individuals to access your bespoke CRM as well. With this tool in their hands, they can respond to customers online with much more information and confidence to support them, which saves your social media team passing the query on to another member of the team. With this tactic, you can expect major customer service points!
Following Up on Prospects
The social media and CRM relationship is very much a two-way street – and the process for following up on prospects is no exception. Hopefully, your sales process will include entering prospects into your CRM for follow up at a later date in order to keep the pipeline constantly full.
Using social media, you can source more prospects for holding in your CRM, as well as following up on prospects already in the system by interacting online to nurture the relationship openly – especially useful for B2B organisations.
In conclusion, despite their differences, social media and a bespoke CRM can actually lend each other an amazing amount of support – all of which greatly benefits your business and your customers.
Interested in supporting your social media strategy with real-time, invaluable data (and vice versa)? Get in touch to arrange your free demo of Lunar’s bespoke CRM system and take your sales much further!