Today the world is globalized and digitized like never before. As a result, the market dynamics have changed, and the phrase ‘customer is the king’ has an entirely new meaning. The market is brimming with e-businesses where social media plays a vital role in marketing and sales.
When we establish our businesses online, there is a constant need to gather and analyze all the information related to customer interaction.
Conventionally, the collected data was passed to a huge team of professionals who categorized and analyzed the data to deduce profitable outputs. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the software that effortlessly performs all the tasks related to customer activity.
What is a Social Media CRM Platform?
Social media CRM is the software to manage customer relationships. It is integrated with different social media platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and more. It streamlines customer communication on social media, allowing users to pre-plan the communication to attain desired results.
Companies use it to track consumer activity on their different social media platforms and refine customer engagement. It captures the consumer activity into its database for you to follow individual activities with your company on social media. In addition, it integrates with any other customer relationship platform to give a unified customer profile.
Why Merge Social and CRM Data?
- Merging the social and CRM data allows you to get a bigger picture of any customer’s activity. You can understand different aspects, such as the customer’s purchasing pattern and interests. Understanding the customer activities helps you optimize your relationship with each customer.
- Knowledge of the social media trends and hashtags will help you have a better reach in your audience. You can tailor and customize your content to create the right impact. The analytics from the social CRM will help you devise the perfect social media strategy to boost customer engagement.
- Social CRM will help you immediately respond to customers in case of negative reviews. Merging the social and CRM empowers you with the capability to stay aware of each customer’s activity, market hustle, and reviews about your company to address them on time.
- Social CRM will help you immediately respond to customers in case of negative reviews. Merging the social and CRM empowers you with the capability to stay aware of each customer’s activity, market hustle, and reviews about your company to address them on time.
- Creating a highly productive marketing campaign is the best benefit you can get from CRM social media integration. Based on past purchases and current interests, you can directly promote your offers to these customers. Analysis of customer buying behavior will also help you identify many new customers with a similar user profile.
What Are the Ways to Use Social CRM Platforms?
Social CRM platforms can be beneficial when used in the right way. You can:
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Create an innovative social media strategy
The reports generated by your CRM tool will help you create a better strategy. The sales, social media, and marketing teams can come together to create an innovative out-of-the-box approach that enables you to create extraordinary customer journeys. Use social media to interact with customers to appear as a very responsive and responsible company.
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Track customer journey
Use the tool to track the customer journey. Have conversations with your customers and track the engagement metrics to analyze your success. Use social media to penetrate the masses and reach out to new customers.
Prepare effective materials to educate the new customers and convert this new relation into sales. You can scan the purchase and communication history of any customer to develop a better relationship with them.
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Respond fast to reviews
Fast response to customer complaints will help you establish a great brand image. Use the tool to keep a check on every negative review and address them immediately. In addition, a great response time to complaints will give out a strong customer care message and will fetch customer loyalty.
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Use hashtags and keywords to target the potential customers
You can identify the trending hashtags to understand consumer sentiment. A quick analysis will help you find the trending topics, competitor keywords, and keywords for your brand to develop a better customer engagement using all the social media platforms.
How to Implement a Successful Social CRM Strategy?
Successful social CRM strategy demands a step-wise execution.
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Identify your problems
A social CRM will bestow you with plenty of opportunities. First, you have to be sure about the problems you want the CRM strategy to solve. Then, invest your manpower and time in a particular direction to achieve your goals.
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Select the social CRM tool
There is much social media CRM platform in the market. However, it would help if you analyzed different aspects, including user-friendliness, speed, managing, and tracking functions, to choose the CRM software you want to invest in.
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Create management team
Create a team of professionals to check the feed on the social CRM continuously. The team should be professionals who gather the data from CRM to the management, professionals who analyze the data, and people who prioritize the data based on the required response.
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Identify the functions that need automation
Not every user-facing function would require automation. For example, automating and tracking unnecessary details will waste and time. Instead, automate only those functions that deliver value to you.
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Create a prototype and train employees
Create a prototype of the social CRM tool to see the changes that your existing methods of operation might go through. First, you have to understand the impact of the CRM before implementing it. Then, create a team and train your employees to work with the new implementation.
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Administer consistently
Besides the team that uses the tool, assign someone to test and ensure that the CRM software works correctly and gives accurate data.
Conclusion
Social CRM software has become essential today to stay competitive. Custom CRM development is the other aspect that you can look for while choosing the social CRM software. Your social CRM strategy will determine your pace in establishing your brand recognition across every social media platform. It has become imperative for every business to step up its social media game to stay ahead in the competition.
Frequently Asked Questions about Social CRM:
Q1. What is an example of a social CRM?
A1. Here are some examples of Social CRM in action, as well as its benefits: A business — or even a customer — creates a fan page for your company or product on Facebook. People who like your brand and the way you conduct business will sign up as fans, creating a venue for communication, marketing and networking.
Q2. How does the CRM integrate with social media?
A2. A Social CRM is your Customer Relationship Management software integrating with social media channels, allowing your teams to leverage social information to understand and engage customers, gain market insights, and provide better customer service.
Q3. What are the benefits of social CRM?
A3. It helps you to Provide quick, accessible customer service for easy-to-resolve issues, Engage with customers and prospects in real time, Create a positive brand image by helping your team flag and respond to social media complaints, Find and celebrate your biggest fans and advocates.
Q4. How does Social CRM empower customers?
A4. Instead of marketing or pushing messages to customers, brands now talk to and collaborate with customers to solve business problems, empower customers to shape their own experiences and build customer relationships, which will hopefully turn into customer advocates.
