Key Takeaways
- Maintaining a consistent brand voice helps drive overall identity. Your identity on Facebook needs to be the same as it is on Twitter and LinkedIn.
- Keeping your voice controlled and consistent isn’t easy, but working to integrate CRM and social channels gives you a centralized system to keep track of this information.
While customers will always expect friendly, efficient, and reliable service, expectations have been heightened. Modern customer expectations have evolved with technology — specifically in terms of communication and social media. Leaving social media out of your CRM strategy can have serious negative effects on your brand. Integrate your CRM and social channels to make it possible to track, benchmark, and engage with customers through their channel of preference.
Social media brings benefits to the sales, marketing, and service trifecta of CRM:
- Insights learned from social media are valuable in product and service planning.
- Social channels are key avenues for marketing campaigns.
- Social connections serve as potential leads and increasingly use social media for customer service assistance.
There are numerous reasons to integrate your CRM and social channels, but here are 5 great ones. If you’re looking for a CRM solution, check out our CRM Product Selection Tool to get a free, no-hassle shortlist of the best CRM software for your business. Click the banner below to get started.
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1. Better Customer Service and Engagement
Customer experience should always be the focal point. 59 percent of customers say tailored engagement based on past interactions is important to winning their business, and 82 percent say personalized customer care influences loyalty.
Combining social channels with your CRM gives you a 360-degree view of your customer — no platforms are left out. Store client information sourced from your social channels, including issues, challenges, or praise about your product, in your CRM software. This gives your client success team access to real-time, in-depth information, allowing for personalized responses and better interactions with clients.
Most people are uninterested in calling companies directly and instead rely on chatbots or social media to complain about less-than-satisfactory products or services. Because you’ve integrated your social media channels with your CRM, you can proactively monitor for customer sentiment and feedback and join the conversation in real time, even if your brand isn’t directly tagged. This allows you to quickly respond to customers so they feel heard and valued.
2. Greater Marketing Insights and Analytics
Valuable data is added to the social sphere every minute. A CRM solution aggregates this data to give you a broad, analytical overview of demographics, goals, interests, and buying behavior. Your customer profiles are richer and have more insight into who the customer is and their position in the sales funnel. Having access to this type of data allows you to better understand your target market and concentrate on the leads you know have a high probability of closing.
Many CRM tools include a social listening feature. This monitors and analyzes your brand’s social media profiles for customer feedback, direct mentions of your brand, and any conversations with relevant keywords, topics, competitors, or industries. It helps your business determine the best strategy for social media, brand awareness, and social presence, and allows you to build better relationships with prospects and customers.
3. Suggest Relevant Purchases
When you integrate your CRM solution to your social channels, you’re able to make more accurate decisions about your customer’s future needs. The rich data you’ve gathered in creating your customer’s profile we mentioned a couple paragraphs ago can be used to anticipate what’s relevant to your customer.
When you know what products your customers are interested in, which retailers they follow, and what they’re sharing, you are more adept at predicting what they’d be most likely to buy next. Build audiences for specific products and produce customized ad campaigns for suggesting similar products.
Use purchase patterns and social media mentions to create targeted messaging. Using social media platforms to guide your targeted purchasing suggestions makes the experience more precise and personal for the customer, increasing the likelihood they’ll spend more money.
For example, if your company sells plants, using a CRM such as Salesforce allows you to import customers’ social posts into the CRM and see that many are tweeting about the difficulties of keeping a plant alive. You’re subsequently able to use this information to market your hard-to-kill succulents to these customers.
4. New Relationships (New Leads!)
Any time you expand your network, the potential for new relationships grows. Creating social media campaigns are becoming one of the most effective marketing strategies to winning new clients.
For these campaigns to be successful, you must identify the right timing and targeting. This is where the analytics your CRM solution has gathered comes into play. Identify the most effective timing to deliver messages, and segment customers into target groups according to contact details, past interactions, behavior patterns, or spending habits. As your social media base grows, so does your customer base.
5. Build and Improve Brand Reputation
You want a consistent brand experience across all channels, but especially social. Your brand’s reputation hinges on its voice and your social interactions. Consumers appreciate an accessible and caring response to their concerns about your product. But if there was radio silence from one of your social channels, the negative impact would not only involve that customer, but likely have a domino effect, as they would take to the interweb to vent their frustrations.
Consider building your brand’s voice to resonate with your target audience. If your target audience is younger, use language familiar to them. If your target audience is mainly on the east coast, using west-coast slang won’t have an impact and will confuse your audience.
Maintaining a consistent brand voice helps drive overall identity. Your identity on Facebook needs to be the same as it is on Twitter and LinkedIn. Keeping your voice controlled and consistent isn’t easy, but working to integrate CRM and social channels gives you a centralized system to keep track of this information.
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