CRM Software and Integrated Marketing Can (Should) Work Together

Today’s customer expects a great deal more customer service. According to a recent Booz & Company survey, 75 percent of marketers understand that customer service is often the primary function of social media. The other 25 percent maybe need to get caught up with the times.

The customer service landscape has certainly changed, which is why it’s important to develop a strategy to keep up with customer service trends, including adapting CRM (customer relationship management) software to function in alignment with your integrated marketing strategy. It can be done and it absolutely should be done by marketers and businesses hoping to remain competitive in our tech-driven society.

What is CRM?

CRM, or customer relationship management, is the system businesses use to track and measure sales. Back in the day, a CRM required manual data entry which resulted in a great deal of human error. Today, there is CRM software which is far more sophisticated and virtually error-proof. The best CRM platforms tie into other core business needs, such as marketing solutions. The three most notable CRM platforms are Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM, but based on features, the choice is Salesforce vs. MS Dynamics.  

Traditionally, CRM has the following standard features:

·  Contact Management

·  Lead Tracking

·  Basic Workflows

The best CRMs go beyond these basic offering to offer advanced communication and collaboration systems, data analytics and reporting, extensive automation abilities, and third-party app integration. Applications can be downloaded and installed to work seamlessly with your CRM, including some dynamic marketing applications.

What is Integrated Marketing?

Integrated marketing, sometimes called multi-channel marketing, is an effort to create a brand experience for the consumer everywhere. It’s basically cross-platform (online, offline, in-store, elsewhere) marketing campaign that creates consistent and seamless brand awareness for your company. Integrated marketing is how small businesses become household names and how huge companies, such as Domino’s Pizza, turn negative branding around and overcome media disasters.

The intelligence your CRM gathers can actually be used to create a customer profile (both of buyers and potential buyers). Your sales and marketing leaders don’t have to leave their departments to transmit and benefit from this information; instead, they’re welcome to use the collaboration and communication tools already functioning in the CRM. Together the two departments can work together to create prospect profiles or the company’s ideal customer.

Here are some other ways companies benefit by aligning their CRM and integrated marketing strategies:

·  Content. Integrated marketing means content should fit into a very specific niche and represent your brand at all times, but when sales and marketing teams aren’t working together, some content is sure to misrepresent your brand. When everything is run through the CMS or an integrated application, all content can be analyzed to determine its value.

·  Build unique KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for customer behavior.

·  Determine a lead generation strategy that works for both the marketing team and the sales team. Together, they can define what makes a good lead, what rules should be used to disqualify bad leads, and how leads should be managed.

·  Create Service Level Agreements.

·  Create step-by-step instructions for lead management, such as when leads are handed off from marketing to sales or vice-versa.

There are many more benefits beyond just those. Perhaps what is most notable about the relationship between CRM and marketing is that it improves customer service throughout the company, and as previously stated customer service is a service that is expected to function better than all others. To build a branding platform with solid customer service, you’re going to need to get your CRM and integrated marketing strategies totally aligned.