“Social CRM is about moving from fans & followers to customers & advocates” – Jacob Morgan
86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience and customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than others.
Social media is the face of 21st-century marketing.
However, a robust social media marketing strategy falls utterly flat without having access to an equally robust and accurate customer data collection. Collecting information is a top priority as you get to better understand your customers.
This is why your social media efforts need to be complemented by an effective CRM platform. Social media CRM platforms gather detailed data from every interaction you have on social.
It creates a unique entity for a customer and tracks their online behavior allowing you to interact with them in a manner to hit the chord and drive sales. Social media CRM platforms will enable you to improve customer experience using insight.
This blog will walk through the importance of using a social media CRM platform and how you can choose the best one for your business.
- Why Merge Social Media & CRM Data?
- Who Can Benefit From A Social Media CRM Platform?
- Need Of A Social Media CRM Platform
- How To Choose A Social Media CRM Platform For Your Business?
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
Why Merge Social Media & CRM Data?
Social media + CRM = Happy customers
When focusing alone on social media, you can be informed immediately of the customer’s reactions in the form of tweets, posts, or likes. But what can you infer based on those tweets? Can you conclude why those customers dislike your brand and why they didn't make a purchase? Would you come to know how you can, as a brand, mold yourself to become more likable?
To answer these questions, you need to have access to more information about your customers, like their conversation history, demography, preferences, and segmented persona. And this information forms the crux of CRM data.
But what a CRM is without social media? You will have the data, but you will fail to transform that data into useful information. A lot of valuable information exists in the CRM database that needs to be linked to social channels.
As a brand, if you view social media and CRM as two separate entities, you will not be able to make ‘better informed’ decisions. Social media CRM platforms combine these two powerful assets and give you refined information to make better decisions and improve customer experience.
Who Can Benefit From A Social Media CRM Platform?
Social CRM platform is a tool that multiple departments of an organization can leverage to improve their customers’ experiences.
Sales Team
Using the prospect’s social media details obtained from the social media CRM platform, the sales team will be better able to identify where exactly leads are within the sales funnel.
According to Salesforce, Social CRM increases customer loyalty by 55% & sales revenue by 54%.
Marketing Team
The insights of the target audience obtained from the social media CRM platform helps the marketing team to increase brand visibility and reach by devising strategic marketing efforts.
Customer Support Team
The customer support team can increase the level of customer satisfaction by tracking customer activities and providing them with a personalized approach to problem assistance and solving.
According to Salesforce, 79% of customers believe that customer experience becomes better once social CRM is in force.
Need Of A Social Media CRM Platform
Social Media CRM Platform For Marketing Team
Create Effective Ad Campaigns
The traditional method of advertising only blasts messages out towards consumers. But social CRM seeks to create experiences that can draw consumer’s attention towards your brand’s ads.
Social media CRM has caused a massive shift from product or service-focused content to creating experience-based content. The interactive content shared by your customers across social media channels creates an experience that can be used to drive emotions effectively for your ad campaigns.
The marketing team can explore new market segments and design personalized high targeted campaigns and promotional offers for different social platforms.
Create Relevant & Engaging Content
Social media is full of noise today. There is a vast chunk of random information out there.
Social media CRM platform allows you to cut down on this noise. Use the information gathered from the platform to create meaningful and engaging content pieces to publish on your social channels.
By publishing such relatable content, you will be able to generate maximum traction and engagement on your social media content. You can deliver an unmatched customer experience with your social content.
Social media CRM platforms keep track of customers' digital trends. It helps you understand the content that your target prospects are searching for by tracking their shares and clicks. It also allows you to know about your customer’s keyword search terms.
All of this knowledge will help you to frame the content style that your target audience would like to read. This will help you accomplish your marketing team's goal and create attention-grabbing social content.
Better Customer Engagement
The better a prospect connects with your message on social channels, the higher their chances of converting.
Social CRM platforms empower you to boost your social presence and connect with audiences who engage. Using social media CRM platforms, you can effortlessly manage your social profiles to quickly like and comment on your customer’s posts and review and share relevant content on your social channel.
You can keep track of conversations about your brand and customers’ social behavior, such as what kind of content they are sharing and how they engage with your brand. You can identify the key influencers in your industry, spot current customer trends and needs, and receive crucial alerts on how customers feel about your brand. All this information will help you to devise profitable marketing decisions and build strong relationships with customers to drive sales.
Image Source: Cadbury UK Twitter
Social Media CRM Platform For Sales Team
Help Tame The Sales Cycle
Today, multiple touchpoints are available for customers to interact with your brand. Therefore, it becomes incredibly hard for you to track the customer conversation flow from several social channels.
Social CRM platforms streamline customer data input. All of the prospect’s data from several social channels are available within a single dashboard.
A social CRM platform can be used to streamline the sales cycle for your brand by giving you a complete 360-degree view of all your customer conversations from several social channels.
A social media CRM tool will streamline your sales process by building a sales pipeline, automating key tasks, and analyzing all of your sales data in one centralized place, thus increasing sales and team productivity.
From a lead to a customer for life, you’ll be able to tame the sales cycle and keep the entire customer’s journey in control with the help of social media CRM platform by making sure that the data is updated, accurate, secure, and accessible.
You can review your past performance in terms of sales and strategize plans for the future. The automated sales report from a social media CRM platform helps you identify key trends and get an idea of what you can expect from your future sale cycle performance. This will help you to adjust your goals and metrics to suit your needs.
Boosts Social Selling Capabilities
Selling your products and services via social networking sites is commonly known as social selling. But social selling needs to be done strategically to increase the chances of closing deals. The social data and customer behavior captured by social media CRM platforms can be used for this purpose.
You can get detailed insights into your customer’s demographics, tastes, preferences, and buying behavior. These insights will help you to accelerate your sales process by identifying qualified leads that have a high possibility of converting rather than reaching out to random customers.
This will result in enhanced productivity of your sales team and bring the desired ROI.
Image Source: Sonos Twitter
Improved Customer Segmentation
Social media CRM platform unifies your customer information so that brands can personalize their interactions based on segments or individual customers.
Traditional CRM is a centralized database that groups customer qualities like age, region, or purchasing history to target similar customers.
Whereas social media CRM is about customer behaviors and their social profiles. Groups of customers emerge based on common interests and habits from social media CRM platform’s analysis. This information tells your brand infinitely more about a customer than just demographic information.
A social media CRM platform will automatically segment your customer’s contact lists based on your criteria, thus making it easy to find those you want to contact at any given time. Contacts can be sorted by location, gender, age, buyer stage, and more.
By passing your customers through the sales pipeline, you can get detailed information like which products are more geared toward a particular customer than others.
Get Automated & Customized Sales Report
Having plenty of customer data is excellent, but you also need to know how to use this data. Social media CRM platform contextualizes the data and breaks it down into actionable and easily understandable metrics.
A social media CRM platform takes care of all your reporting needs. You can easily track the number of open opportunities and how your campaign is performing. By obtaining metrics such as bounce rates, click-through rates, and demographic information, you can judge the success of your marketing campaign and optimize it.
This data will help to move a sales opportunity through the funnel. It also allows you to create customized reports that include the information about the metric that matters most to your brand.
By analyzing these reports and working on them, your team can grow its efforts in a sustainable way. It also allows team members to evaluate their performance, track goals and check the progress of each project from their dashboard.
Learn more about Tips To Get Benefited By Personalized Reporting
Provide Superior Customer Service
Customer service is a gateway to establishing your database of loyal customers.
The social media CRM’s monitoring tools will help your brand to identify the customers who are actively engaging with your content. You can consider rewarding such an audience with special offers and discounts, thus encouraging them to spread the word about your brand across various social channels.
Social media CRM platforms centralize your efforts across all forms of customer outreach so you can achieve consistency in your brand’s voice to deliver consistent customer service effectively.
This includes ensuring that your team members have all information that they need to know about the customer at their fingertips. This information will allow them to provide a better customer experience to boost customer satisfaction.
Social Media CRM Platform For Customer Service Team
Be Proactive
Sentiments are those aspects of conversations that allow us to share our thoughts and emotions with others.
Your customers can either express positive sentiments that convey their satisfaction or negative sentiments that convey dissatisfaction.
A social CRM’s sentiment analysis is like a magical seashell to your ears that allows you to hear the collective voice of your customers.
But how do you begin to figure out your customers' sentiments?
Social media CRM shows its mettle with sentiment analysis. You can track your customers' sentiments from their conversations online without putting in much human effort.
Social media CRM platforms will look through your customers' conversations, phrases, and words that come up from your customers. It will also keep a note of polarizing connotations.
However, the platform can sometimes miss irony, sarcasm, metaphors, and nuances. Hence, you will have to glance through the results for accuracy. Still, you will be saving a lot of time reading through the comments all by yourself.
You can gather richer and actionable insights about your customer’s sentiments regarding your brand and your product and services. It will help you know what your customers feel about your product or services, what inspires them, and what bothers them. This will help you improve your brand visibility and interact with your prospects better.
The sentimental data obtained from social media CRM platforms help you serve and provide customer service more personalized.
Centralized Database Of Information
92% of companies use databases to store information on a customer or a prospect.
The volume of social conversations is quite overwhelming. Retrieving information scattered across various places manually will waste your time and has chances of human error.
Lack of a centralized database will limit the productivity of your team. Also, it's as important to update this data as it is to centralize it. Using old and inaccurate data will impact the effectiveness of your marketing, sales, and customer service team. This incorrect data, when used by your team, will quickly soar a prospect's customer experience.
With the social media CRM system in place, you can store all your customer data in one place. The data is also accessible to every system user which helps all team members remain on the same page.
The social media CRM platform's functionality enables you to update customer information periodically and in real-time to ensure you are always working with accurate data. Basically, it saves your team time in digging through old records and files to make a better and productive customer experience.
Track Your Customer’s Journey
"One great advantage of CRM platforms is that you can see your customer's journey holistically," - Michael Miller, CEO of VPN Online.
Social media is not just to attract new customers; it’s also a powerful medium for strengthening relationships with your existing customers. You need to constantly provide value to your patrons so that your brand always remains on top of their minds whenever they need something related to your industry.
Social media CRM platforms collect detailed customer conversation threads from different channels; saves this in an organized manner and segment the conversations according to the users. This helps you to view previous conversations specific to a user and communicate effectively according to the earlier conversations.
It gives you a glimpse of the particular customer’s journey whenever they have encountered an issue with your brand. Having this information handy will provide you with valuable insights at which stage of the funnel the customer stands and how to approach them for engagement.
Learn more about How To Build Your Marketing Funnel For Sales-Ready Leads
Social media CRM platforms allow you to preserve past customer conversations so that you can track your customer’s journey whenever you want.
Improve Coordination Among Different Departments
While the interdependency among various departments of an organization has increased, the key to success is effective communication to ensure that work gets done on time.
Using a social media CRM platform between your marketing, sales, and customer service team, all team members can stay updated with the latest customer activities by accessing real-time data from each customer's profile.
When receiving customer complaints at a large scale, teams might have to divide the efforts to provide quick support. Social media CRM platform allows sharing messages efficiently and effectively within the team ensuring that every inquiry receives a response immediately and the opportunity to improve customer journeys is always taken.
Such team communication also ensures that no tasks slip through the cracks. A social media CRM platform shows a dashboard of team workflows.
A social media CRM platform makes it easy to see how other team members are communicating with potential customers, which can help maintain a unified brand voice. It also allows team members to tag each other and assign conversations all within one system.
Learn more about How Can I Assign Conversations To A User/User Group?
Helps To Identify & Solve Business Challenges
If you don't know there is a problem, how can you fix it?
And even if you know that there is a problem, do you know how to fix it?
Social media CRM platform provides you with the data required to develop strategies that not just solve your customer problem but also helps to deliver solutions that your customer desires.
Customers reflect their interest in features that they would want in a product through their online activities. You will track such customers' activities that reflect what changes they desire in your product or solution.
Social CRM platform gives you the ability to develop products that your customers want.
How To Choose A Social Media CRM Platform For Your Business?
Now that you understand the requirement of a social media CRM platform for your brand, you might wonder what your social CRM software of choice should include. The key here is to choose such a social media CRM platform that meets the unique needs of your business.
A comprehensive social media CRM platform will retrieve all customer useful information and maintain an updated and accurate repository to streamline your business operations. Here are the essential services that a social media CRM platform should provide:
Unified Social Inbox
When you have customer requests and messages coming from different social platforms, it can get hard to keep track and manage all complaints quickly.
With a social media CRM platform, you will be able to streamline all your notifications in one place so that you can read and respond immediately to customer service requests and exciting engagement opportunities. The social media CRM platforms should have a way to manage, prioritize and assign messages to the right team member.
Whenever you receive any conversation on your social profile, Statusbrew syncs it and adds it to your unified inbox. It also pulls the social contact & profile details of the particular customer and displays them in the contact sidebar.
Learn more about Introduction to Engage
Maintaining An Accurate Customer Contact Database
Customer contact records are the butter and bread of your sales team. When choosing a social media CRM platform, the key to looking for is to deepen your customer records by tracking a lot more than just their last interaction with your brand.
By gathering and integrating your customer’s contact records from several social media platforms, you can save your support team from manual work and paint a clear picture for everyone who engages with your brand on social media.
Statusbrew CRM feature makes it easier for you to manage customer data by understanding their queries and identifying common patterns to win them over.
Learn more about Introduction to Social CRM
Social Listening & Sentimental Analysis
The features of a social media CRM platform that can help you stay on top of criticism are social listening along with sentimental analysis.
Social listening will allow you to monitor the conversation around your brand space or otherwise using specific keywords related to your brand. This tool can be used to never miss a mention about your brand or product, find new leads, and study the industry trends.
When social listening is combined with the sentimental analysis, you cannot just get to know whenever people are talking about your brand but also understand how they are speaking about it.
Statusbrew helps you discover a new audience with its social listening feature by tracking social conversations about your product, brand, or industry topic.
Learn more about Introducing Statusbrew's Listening Feature
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