We all know that social media is a vital communication channel for any brand. However, when you start to ramp up your social media marketing, it can be hard to integrate it effectively into the broader vision of your sales pipeline.
If you’ve recently adopted a social CRM, but you’re not quite sure how to use it for maximum effect, this guide is for you.
Here are seven of the best ways to apply your social CRM, develop a closer relationship with your target audience, and drive more activity in your sales pipeline.
1. Increase User Engagement
One of the most powerful features of a social CRM is how it informs the way you engage with your customers and helps you develop more meaningful interactions across disparate platforms.
Many of the best social CRM tools come equipped with social monitoring or listening features. These will allow you to track various datasets pertinent to your social media presence, such as customer sentiment, brand mentions, and industry trends.
Once you’ve built a large enough data set from these functions, you can start to apply it by personalizing both the posts making up your social content calendar and the two-way conversations you have with your audience on social media platforms.
As you gather data and engage in conversations, you’ll become more adept at tailoring interactions based on the nuances of your audience segments. This will help your existing audience feel seen and appreciated, generate engagement from outside your most engaged followers, and help you have more meaningful engagements with everyone you interact with through social media.
2. Launch Targeted Marketing Campaigns
Aside from the more direct interactions you have with your audience on social media, a social CRM tool can also help you inform paid and organic marketing campaigns with data that contributes towards your audience segmentation.
Imagine that you’re an ecommerce brand selling sustainable products. Using a social CRM, you might find there are certain members of your target audience who engage more frequently with content relating to the impact plastic packaging has on the environment, while others are more likely to interact with content about reforestation initiatives.
Using this data, you can create audience segments based on nuanced interests, then plan and execute two distinct marketing campaigns:
- One focused on the USP that your brand uses 100% recycled, sustainable packaging.
- One focusing on the USP that you donate a percentage of all purchases to a tree-planting initiative.
By studying the data gathered through a robust social CRM, you can ensure a certain standard of relevance for your marketing campaigns, helping to maximize engagement and conversion rates.
Aside from this, smarter segmentation and targeting will help make your marketing campaigns more cost-efficient, helping you avoid pouring money into content or ad campaigns that are unlikely to bring in a healthy ROI.
3. Build Brand Loyalty
By helping you understand your audience, and fostering more effective data-driven marketing and communications, a social CRM can also be a powerful tool for nurturing brand loyalty and building a cohesive online community.
One of the stand-out features of a good social CRM is its capacity to identify your most active followers - those social media users who reliably view, comment on, and share your content whenever you post it. If you’re like most brands, this part of your audience is going to have a significant crossover with your most valuable and loyal customers.
Using the traffic and engagement metrics in your social CRM, you can create a new segment of highly engaged “super followers” who recognise the value in your brand and bring plenty of value by clicking through to your site.
With this switched-on segment in your crosshairs, you can carry out highly effective initiatives to build customer loyalty and develop a community around your band, such as:
- Get feedback from the people who care about your brand most, and using these insights to tailor your products and services around audience segments with similar traits for better long-term value.
- Proactively anticipate the changes your most valuable customers are going to want to see, and strategizing new solutions around these needs.
- Create loyalty programs that are particularly attractive to your most active followers, and retain them with benefits that make them even more motivated to keep buying from your brand.
4. Improve Customer Service
Today, social media is the first place many consumers will go when looking for customer support.
With the modern expectation of a quick response and the fact that many issues or complaints will be visible in public, your customer service must be up to standard on social media.
CRM social media integration can be a huge asset when you’re looking to improve your customer service, allowing you to keep a close eye on brand mentions, comments, and messages so you can respond promptly and keep up customer satisfaction.
If you’ve got a particularly large following on social media or occupy a niche where there’s a lot of discussion around a certain topic, social CRM tools can also help you streamline large volumes of comments, messages, and so on. This means you and your team can effectively prioritize customer service tickets and distribute your resources so the most pressing issues are addressed first.
Aside from enabling you to respond quickly to issues customers might be having with your product or service, a social CRM can also help you organize data from customer feedback, understand it, and incorporate it into product or service development to help align your offering with the customer’s needs.
This efficient approach to customer service will help you resolve more issues in less time and further contribute to your online brand loyalty.
5. Gather Customer Insights
Outside the core audience segments that are the focus of your social media marketing, social CRMs are also great for gathering insights that can benefit your customer acquisition.
As your social CRM data becomes a bigger and bigger part of your approach to social marketing, you’ll become more adept at monitoring the sentiment of your audience and behavioral trends.
This allows you to proactively adapt many aspects of your marketing and wider business, strategizing new campaigns or product offerings that will keep your brand relevant in an evolving market.
6. Develop Relationships with Influencers
The best social CRM tools come equipped with functions specifically for helping you develop relationships with influencers in your niche, and enjoying greater exposure for your brand through already-established audiences.
Your CRM’s social listening features will allow you to set keywords and queries you can use to automatically track conversations with a topical relation to your brand. From there, it’s a small step to identify potential influencers and grade them according to their reach, authority, and other engagement metrics, so you can focus on the influencers who are most likely to generate high-intent interactions from your audience.
Your social CRM’s role doesn’t stop once you’ve established these influencer relationships, though. Some of the other key areas where this tool can help include:
- Monitoring influencer performance over time helps you adjust your investment and focus resources on the influencers with the highest returns.
- Automating repetitive tasks such as sending out proposals, tracking deliverables, and monitoring the status of payments.
- Segmenting your relationships with influencers to keep influencer marketing cohesive with your campaigns in other marketing channels.
- Integrating data from influencer campaigns and your direct customer interactions, giving you a better understanding of the customer journey.
By using your social CRM as a key touchpoint in developing influencer relationships, you’ll be able to align goals and activities and streamline your activities in a way that’s more likely to move the needle.
7. Measure ROI and Performance
While a social CRM tool’s core purpose isn’t analytics, it can be a very useful tool for monitoring campaigns in progress, identifying trends, and informing your future strategy.
Social CRMs come with readily configured analytics reports to highlight your best-performing content, the most engaged audience segments, and changes across metrics such as impressions, new followers, profile visits, and more.
Once you can reliably attribute value to growth in these areas, it’s easy to calculate the ROI from your social media marketing drives and use this to inform future decisions.
A social CRM’s efficient data monitoring means you can quickly identify what’s working and what isn’t, adjust your strategy based on these insights, and create new iterations of your strategy that are more likely to succeed.
Start Using A Social Media CRM
When you’re first throwing resources behind social media, it can be hard to determine exactly where a social CRM fits into your tech stack and pipeline. We hope this guide has helped you understand how these platforms can bring you closer to your audience, highlight the right decisions, and supercharge ROI from your social media campaigns.
To discover more about how social CRMs can help you, sign up to Highperformr for free!
