Social media is an indispensable part of marketing and, increasingly, customer support. Social networks are also fertile ground for insights on customers. With so much valuable customer data existing and continuously being created on online social channels, linking your customer relationship management platform to popular social networks is an easy decision.
It’s likely that social media is a part of your customers’ full experience journey. That is, social networks are among the primary channels through which your target audience and customers engage with your brand.
So, for starters, you need a CRM (customer relationship management) that can connect to all your social media accounts. Once you’ve connected social media channels with your CRM system, your team has a complete record of interactions with customers/prospects. With this in place, you’re all set to make the most of your socially connected CRM!
Broadly, customer data on social channels can be categorized into the following:
Variables like age, gender, income, ethnicity, marital status, household, employment and migration background help you further build out consumer profiles.
Use information on customers’ and leads’ interests, hobbies and lifestyles to create offers and tailor experiences that resonate with them.
Knowing what drives customers to buy from your brand will help you position your brand better, handle objections more effectively, and even strategize new products that address new pain-points or evolving needs.
Social media is hugely influential in shifting brand perception. How you want to be viewed and how customers really view you could be different. Customer interactions on social networks provide eye-opening insights into the impression customers have about your brand.
Combining all this data with the customer profiles and histories in your CRM can make a difference to the way you engage, market and sell. Here are some ways in which you can put your socially connected CRM to use.
Optimizing the customer experience is challenging and likely to be unsuccessful without a good understanding of the people your product/service is designed for. The more data you can collect on the customer, the better you can find key customer profiles.
Linking CRM and social data enables 360 customer profiling. You can go beyond transactional histories and measure customers’ pulse. Doing so will make adapting to evolving customer expectations and creating offers aligned to their life events easier.
How best can you use the data on leads stored in your CRM? This will depend on the extent to which you can collect useful information on them. This information can be used to personalize engagements with leads and move them down the sales funnel faster.
A socially connected CRM enriches data on leads, so you can engage them more effectively on all channels. Your social media marketing, email marketing and remarketing can benefit from a better understanding of your leads’ attributes, desires, lifestyles and so on.
The more successful you’re at convincing leads, the greater your chance of conversions and hitting sales targets. You can also make your sales approach more efficient by focusing on quality leads with a strong purchase intent as gleaned from their social media information and conversations.
If you take customer service requests on social media, a socially connected CRM can raise customer support a few notches. Your CRM will automatically record customers’ social conversations, including any complaints or issues they’re facing. This is helpful in three ways. One, your team will have immediate access to customer service issues and can solve them quickly.
The CRM pulls interaction histories from social channels and makes them available to all team members at a central location. Specific conversations can be routed to customer support, marketing support or tech support from a single platform. You can collect, manage and act on customer data proactively and efficiently.
The history of social conversations reveals how your team is handling customer complaints. Recurring grievances or unsolved queries help paint a full picture of the quality of customer support from your business.
Social listening involves tracking mentions of and conversations about your brand on social networks. It serves many purposes, from lead generation, social selling and reputation management to speedy customer service, product development and competitive insights. A socially connected CRM combines social listening on a single platform, simplifying how you check customer conversations on online social channels.
Linking your CRM to social media helps you design marketing campaigns fine-tuned to your customers’ profiles and preferences. With their social media habits and other vital information already stored in the CRM in one place, you can create highly-targeted campaigns and take tactical sell actions in an informed manner.
Demographic data and target audience interests form the basis of social media ads. Learning more about your customers helps you create ‘look alike audiences’ around whom you can create compelling advertisements.
Including several types of customer data into the mix is also great for generating insights and ideas on ads. For example, you may discover the potential in creating ads for complementary products. Or you can confirm opportunities for upselling, cross-selling or remarketing via social media ads.
Connecting your CRM to your social media supplies a clearer picture of how your social media marketing is faring. Understand how customers are engaging with your brand on social channels and whether your investment in organic social and paid ads are leading to purchases or subscriptions.
A CRM that integrates with social media builds on top of the customer information you already have by adding a social element – their social media habits and conversations. The best socially connected CRMs are intuitive to use too, providing familiar tools, dashboards and metrics to monitor social media communications.
Social media integration is a part of Sugar Sell’s robust suite of customer experience solutions. Talk to us to learn more about Sell feature and social tools.
Sugar Sell is a sales automation system that helps businesses spend less time on manual data-entry tasks and invest more time in building lasting customer relationships.
