“Strong customer relationships drive sales, sustainability, and growth.” – Tom Cates
As you can probably guess by now, the primary criterion for a successful Lead Generation strategy is personalisation.
In our Digital Blueprint section, we talked about building out persona profiles for your target market, and our conversational marketing tactics puts the personal touch back into our marketing – the common goal in all of these activities being to shorten the sales cycle.
Demand Generation and Inbound Marketing tactics focus on finding qualified prospects and introducing them to the brand.
Now that you’ve made the introduction with your prospective customer, you need a system to manage the contacts themselves, but more importantly, a way to communicate with them in a personalized way and send them content that they will be interested in and will help them progress down the buyer journey.
That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation software come in.
In general, CRM software helps you to manage the contacts themselves, while controlling the content that you send to specific leads falls under the umbrella of marketing automation software.
How can we help?
At WSI, we have experience helping customers get the most out of their marketing and CRM systems, whether that’s a market leader like Hubspot, Pardot or Salesforce or a less known platform like SharpSpring.
Starting at the top of the funnel, we help companies capture customer contact details by adding relevant forms to their website. If you are using a chatbot to get this information we simply connect the chatbot to your CRM so that all your customer contact data is in one place. Once the customer record has been added, we can then set up automation rules to filter users based on behavior, such as what content they have read, which pages they have visited, and which social media channels they use.
Using these filters, we then segment people into different lists according to their interactions with your company.
From there, we send tailored and personalized content to people on each lists based on their interests and preferences.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
According to research, by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. That’s because it’s crucial to forming relationships with customers enabling you to sell your product in the most efficient way, helping with both customer acquisition and retention.
Contrary to popular belief, CRM does more than just help you manage your contacts. Using a CRM system helps you build up relationships with customers and prospects by centralising the information and interactions you need to get to know them better – essentially the goal is to form a 360-degree view of the customer so you can understand how to better serve them.
More often than not, we are not leveraging the data they receive every day from their customers i.e not all of us are gaining that crucial understanding of what they really want.
On a basic level, we can help you use your CRM to automate the process of capturing and storing contact information via form fill, as well as integrating with other business systems (including marketing automation) to bring in all the necessary information to convert customers. All the information is stored in a customisable dashboard, including not just contact details, but also any previous purchases, any outstanding order statuses, or interactions with your brand through customer service or social media channels.
We can ensure that your CRM solution can also help you manage your leads throughout your sales pipeline, convert visitors into leads, measure marketing campaign success, and allow you to get insight from these measurements through dashboards and reports.
Marketing automation
While marketing automation software does just what the name suggests –– automate marketing tasks –– it can also help you prioritize key tasks, as well as streamline processes, and free up your time to better serve your customer.
We can use marketing automation to help your business with qualifying your leads by scoring them based on the interactions with you (via email), your site or your social media channels. This then helps you and your sales team prioritise which leads to follow up with. For example, you might assign 20 points to a lead if they visit a certain high-priority page, 10 points if they open your emails, 5 points if they watch a video and 2 points if they interact with your social content on LinkedIn or Twitter. In addition to keeping tabs on your most engaged leads, this type of information is like gold dust for your sales team; they can check if a prospect has opened their email, what pages they have visited on your website, etc.
We can also use marketing automation systems to help you get a better understanding of your customers so you can personalise any communications and content you send to them. This then helps convert visitors into leads and leads into customer (and one-time customers into loyal customers).
Bringing together CRM and marketing automation
Often marketing automation systems are said to be primarily targeted at marketers, while CRM solutions are more used by salespeople, but the line is blurring these days. As CRM and marketing automation processes go hand in hand, most software vendors in this space offer these functions in one marketing platform. At the very least, most CRM and marketing automation systems feature native integration, meaning the information can flow freely between the two systems. Some of the more well-known all-in-one marketing platforms include Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot and SharpSpring.
At WSI we have a global partnership with Hubspot and SharpSpring, but we can also work with clients who are using other CRM and marketing automation systems. The most important consideration when thinking about these two areas, and how we can help with your digital strategy, is building the correct workflows to support your lead generation strategy, rather than the software itself.
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