Editor’s Note: This post about integrating your CRM and social media management tools was written by Julia Flaherty and originally appeared on the blog of Ledgeview Partners, an Act-On partner.
Social media management in combination with your CRM, bridges the gap between your sales and marketing departments to create an optimal experience that will benefit your whole business.
It’s a story as old as the digital age: your marketing team is working tirelessly to post new tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates, and more. Meanwhile, the sales department is working to engage prospects and leads, take meetings, guide the customer, and close sales.
So, where is the connect?
Social media management should not be a feared term in the world of CRM anymore.
When you complement your CRM system with a social media management tool, such as Act-On’s Social Media Automation tool, you place the customer right at the heart of your organization.
This will help you drive sales and create new opportunities.
Social media management with a CRM offers a complete picture of the customer experience to your team, so you aren’t wasting time as a sales or marketing team member chasing the wrong people, and your prospects are getting the messages on social media they want to be getting. The right marketing automation software can help bridge the gap you are trying to fill.
Win-win!
By practicing social media management through your CRM, you stop interrupting people with content they aren’t interested in and begin offering what they are interested in. Here are six reasons why you should get started today:
Building Deeper Relationships
As your customers become well-known between your sales and marketing teams, your ability to understand and empathize with your customers becomes more apparent.
This, ultimately, gives you an advantage in communicating with them effectively through social media.
Competitive Intelligence
With social media management and your CRM, you can monitor why your leads, prospects, or “unknowns” are angry with their current platform and how you may be able to help.
This gives you the advantage of reaching out to them, resolving their problem, addressing their needs, and closing the deal.
With Act-On, you can suppress or delete contacts that aren’t relevant to keep your data clean and consistent as marketers, and help salespeople prioritize what accounts they should follow-up.
Improved Research and Organization Growth
Social analytics are thorough in most CRM systems, but when integrated with your marketing automation platform, you go a step further in combination to deliver the intelligence your organization needs to succeed.
Within your CRM, you can monitor customer conversations, and develop better branding initiatives to meet your customers’ ongoing social media and product or service demands.
Encourages Team Proactiveness
Social Media allows you to get ahead of the curve if you know how to monitor it, but if your marketing team’s specialty is not with social media, monitoring social media analytics through your CRM system poses a huge benefit for their education and awareness.
Your efforts will be boosted and focus will become clearer with where you should be posting and targeting your customers in social media.
Even if your customers aren’t directly tagging you in content, there is the ability to set up tracking to stay involved in your brand’s conversation with your customers, whatever your level of experience with social media.
You can build email message templates within Act-On that further encourage your CRM contacts to engage with you on social media, adding wonderful extra pro-activeness to your marketing team.
Increases Inter-Departmental Communication
Once you implement social media tracking in CRM, it will be easier for your sales and marketing team to visualize their connection, and see how they can work together to achieve success with your customers.
This can be done by connecting CRM to your marketing automation system, that way, the people that need to see these analytics do, and those that don’t need to see aren’t overwhelmed by information they don’t need or know how to utilize.
Getting your team members on the same page encourages conversation between them.
Productivity Increases
Once you can see social media analytics in your CRM and marketing automation systems, you are able to create a more efficient task list to meet your company’s social demand.
Engage and interact better with your customers! Relate to them. Practice the art of social conversation, not social selling. Customers want to be a part of your brand and strategy in a way that feels organic to them. Marketing automation can certainly help with this.
Sales and marketing will see a dual-benefit in where to reach your customers and how.
Social media management in your CRM connects you to your customers, but it also connects your marketing and sales departments.
Deciding what social media management tool to use
There is a variety of tools that can be used to accomplish effective social media management in your CRM.
About the Guest Author:
Julia Flaherty is the Marketing Coordinator at Ledgeview Partners, a business and technology firm in Appleton, WI, that helps organizations transform their sales, marketing, customer service, and CRM approaches to drive results. At Ledgeview, Julia focuses on a wide variety of projects that showcase her skills and passions in marketing such as with content creation, social media strategy, web development, video production, and much more. In former roles, Julia has worked as the a Digital Leader and Strategist for leading entertainment and beauty companies, like Wetpaint and Dana Classic Fragrances, Inc.
About Ledgeview Partners
Ledgeview Partners is a business and technology consulting company who partners with organizations to transform sales, marketing and customer service operations & processes that are supported by core technologies including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation.
Ledgeview Partners’ consultants combine savvy business intellect with strong technological aptitude to provide solutions that extend well beyond software implementations. It’s about building relationships, transforming business, and delivering phenomenal customer experiences.
Ledgeview Partners is a Microsoft Dynamics Gold Partner and a Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner.