With loads of publishing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more offering online homes to millions of people, personal narratives are everywhere. These social media outlets offer content created by people, for people. It gives everyone an opportunity to share their thoughts, experiences & profiles using free tools such as blogs, podcasts and video sharing.
So says David Beard, CRM Principal at Sage.
Beard is responsible for orchestrating an understanding of the customer, delivered anywhere, anytime, embedded within & surrounding the business processes. He develops and executes commercial activity to maximize Sage globally and works across the functional teams of Sage’s product development, marketing and partner management – influencing and delivering positioning, benefits & customer messaging.
He also knows a thing or two about Sage CRM – and the power of social CRM in today’s marketing environment.
Recently, Beard shared his thoughts on the connection between customer relationship software – Sage CRM – and an enterprise’s business strategy.
“Often the first approach in a customer-relationship programs, the supporting software, is likely to be managing lead prospecting activities,” Beard shares. “Capturing names and supporting information – product needs, preferences – is at the very heart of these first steps. However, access to more of a prospect’s interests and background from social conversations can be extremely useful, enriching a prospect’s information and enabling richer customer relations.”
Beard is talking about social CRM. What is social CRM? Social CRM integrates Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions and social media tools to create a customer-centric marketing and sales engagement platform with punch. A perfect combination of customer data and advanced analytics merged with social media’s unprecedented power to connect businesses and brands with the masses, social CRM is the best of both worlds – a customer-centric platform on which to share, service, support, socialize and sell.
Social CRM is a new frontier in customer-centric sales and marketing which is reinventing the customer relationship and creating a real-time landscape for enterprises of all sizes to connect with existing and future customers – leveraging Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram and more.
Why does Beard view social CRM as pivotal to an effective, comprehensive digital marketing advantage?
7 Social CRM Benefits
- Connecting social to a customer strategy – listening for and managing the content.
- Investing time in monitoring social media outlets provides an opportunity to ‘listen in’ to the conversations being discussed, benefiting from insights within their communities.
- With companies – of all sizes – getting more than half of their customers through word of mouth, staying tuned in and monitoring the flow of social conversation leads to prospect insights.
- Social monitoring should be a sensible and sizable part of marketing activity – attainable with social CRM.
- Social monitoring – listening in to your customers via social media interactions – also offers a chance to deal with issues when things go wrong.
- By tuning in to relevant conversations, unhappy customers can be recognized and serviced quickly, hopefully before any serious brand and customer relationship damage.
- Enabling more from a CRM program investment is the beauty of social CRM – it takes CRM and makes it social, interactive and aware of customer activities, views and trends.
Harnessing social media is an essential part of an effective customer support and marketing strategy – and vital to keeping customers happy and brand engaged. With brand awareness and brand preference as the leading social business objectives, companies of all sizes, serving all markets, are aligning how they measure performance and gain actionable insight from social marketing – leveraging social CRM to fine tune customer engagement.
