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CRM software has evolved over the last few years - and with it, the use of CRM tools in digital marketing.
As more businesses adopt CRM software to manage their customer and prospect relationships, early adopters are seeing significant gains in digital marketing ROI and business growth.
With a CRM system in place, companies can track customer interactions and preferences along the entire customer journey. This ethically collected personal data can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns that produce results.
If you're a marketing manager, business owner/executive, sales professional or a forward-looking entrepreneur, this brief article will explain how you can leverage your customer relationships and use CRM for digital marketing.
What is CRM?
CRM stands for customer relationship management, the process by which a company manages their potential and existing customers.
What is CRM Software?
CRM software is used by businesses to enable effective customer relationship management. CRM systems allow companies to track customer interactions and preferences.
What is a Marketing CRM?
Most of us associate CRM with sales. A sales CRM enables salespeople and their managers to manage their sales process by logging deals and activities and forecasting sales numbers. In basic terms, it's contact management.
A Marketing CRM adds some marketing tools into the mix, and enables businesses to keep track of their prospects and customers as they interact with their website, email marketing, ads, social media and more. In better CRMs, this will extend to marketing automation, very granular analytics, and tracking down to a contact level.
How does CRM impact Digital Marketing?
By tracking prospect and customer interactions and preferences, businesses gain a deeper understanding of their wants and needs. This information can be used to create targeted marketing strategies and campaigns that appeal very specifically to audiences' requirements.
CRM tools can automate time-consuming marketing activities like email nurture campaigns, social posting, and paid ads. Additionally, they provide transparency into the customer journey from a prospect to a lead.
Additionally, Marketing CRM systems help sales and marketing teams work better together. With a centralised CRM solution for tracking customer data and interactions, sales and marketing teams can communicate more effectively, focus on the correct prospects and get better results.
Benefits of using CRM in Digital Marketing
There are many benefits of using CRM in digital marketing. Some of the key benefits include:
- Personalisation - Personal data gathered by both marketing and sales can be used to hyper-personalise marketing campaigns.
- Increased ROI - By targeting campaigns more effectively, businesses can see a higher return on investment (ROI) for their marketing efforts and paid spend.
- Improved customer engagement - When businesses know what customers want and need, they can more easily acquire and retain them - improving customer satisfaction.
- Additional data for sales - Website revisits of high levels of enablement in emails or social media channels can be shared with sales on the fly. This empowers them to reach out with valuable information - quickly. E.g. "I saw you were on our pricing page. Is there anything that I can assist with?"
- True spend ROI - By linking the sales pipeline to engagements in the Marketing CRM, it becomes easy to determine that the large deals come from Google Ads, for example, and smaller deals come from Facebook Ads. With this intel, more budget can be pushed to Google Ads.
- Attribution - Attribution reports can easily report on revenue that was assisted by marketing or entirely marketing led. This is always a bone of contention between sales and marketing teams. More often than not, both teams have a hand in the sale.
- Marketing Automation - Automate some of your marketing tasks to focus on the things that matter. Qualify and automate lead rotation to the sales team using marketing automation tools.
The Future of CRM and Digital Marketing
With the increasing popularity of CRM systems, businesses can target their marketing efforts more effectively than ever before. Additionally, CRM systems are helping sales and marketing teams work better together. More robust customer data leads to improved customer engagement and conversion results.
As CRM systems continue to evolve and become more connected, their impact on digital marketing will only continue to grow. Businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve should adopt CRM systems and use them to their full potential. By doing so, they will be able to see a significant improvement in their marketing results.
Marketing CRM integrations
We work with HubSpot CRM and sometimes Salesforce CRM. These CRM systems have modules covering marketing, sales, service, website integration, etc. Like most modern CRM systems, they are cloud-based, making them very easy to use and giving you access to your data from anywhere.
Recently, we've been working on many projects that integrate HubSpot CRM into our client's ERP and accounting systems. These projects get us excited as they enable businesses to connect their sales, marketing, and accounting data in one place.
This helps our clients gain deeper insights into how their marketing efforts are impacting their bottom line and make informed decisions about their future marketing plans and budgets.
Final thoughts
CRM systems are changing the digital marketing landscape. Businesses can better understand what customers want and need by tracking customer interactions and preferences.
By having a centralised system for tracking customer interactions, sales and marketing teams can communicate more effectively, focus on the correct prospects and get better results.
The intersection of CRM and marketing is the key to customer engagement, customer retention and business growth. Businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve need to get involved.
