Using Social CRM to Expand Your Network and Reach New Customers

With more than 4 billion people using social media and spending an average of 144 minutes per day on social media apps, these channels can be an extremely effective way to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and engage existing customers. A social CRM can be a helpful tool that allows businesses to engage with customers on their favorite social media channels. They can then develop actionable insights from that engagement.

Social CRM insights can be used for providing better customer service, improving marketing and sales strategies, and building engagement and relationships with prospects and customers. Read on for more information about what a social CRM is and how to best use it to reach company goals.

What is Social CRM?

Social CRM, or social customer relationship management, integrates your social media channels into CRM platforms. A social CRM allows a business to do several things, like:

• Deliver customer support on social media channels
• Interact and engage with customers in real time
• Resolve issues quickly and personally
• Monitor social activity more accurately
• Increase engagement and relationships with customers
• Share prospect and customer insights across teams

Connecting your social media channels to your CRM gives employees the ability to view and act on records of interactions on social channels with a customer or prospect. This makes it possible for businesses to communicate with customers through the channel of their choice, including social media.

CRM systems can be used to help gather insights about customer sentiment. They can also be used to build data profiles on those engaging with your brand. The profiles and insights can then be shared across teams, making collaboration easier between customer service, sales, and marketing.

How to Use Social CRM to Expand Your Current Customer Base

Social CRMs provide a comprehensive view of consumer habits and behaviors, supplementing traditional metrics with relevant social media data. Customer engagement becomes two-way communication using a social CRM, and users can become active participants with a brand, in turn seeing the brand as a greater value.

When a marketing team produces content and shares it on social channels, and tracks engagements with that content, a social CRM can help identify and communicate with brand advocates, influencers, and customers. It also helps increase the number of brand advocates for your business, referring new business and increasing revenue.

Initiate and hold meaningful conversations with customers, humanizing your brand and increasing likelihood of retention. Plus, the more you know about your customers, the more you can generate personalized nurturing efforts to cross-sell products or encourage long-term relationships.

How to Use Social CRM to Generate New Customers

Gathering social insights allow your company to nurture social leads and work toward closing a sale through a long-term, trusting relationship.

Data from the CRM allows you to create highly targeted, custom audiences for social ads, which can increase the effectiveness of your ads, such as lookalike audiences.

You can also better qualify leads with social data. Gathering information from prospects and incorporating social interactions into lead and customer profiles can help you find the best leads and convert them faster.

Social CRM insights can be fed into other marketing tactics, driving lead generation and sales. The CRM can track each prospect’s progress in the sales funnel. Sales teams can create more personalized experiences for those users.

Real-time data can provide valuable insights into what makes your target audience make decisions. This can be used to offer prospects a personalized customer experience.

Making a Social CRM Work for Your Business

Start by setting up a social listening program, which tracks brand mentions and conversations about your company, products/services, employees, and targeted keywords across social channels. This can happen even if your brand isn’t directly tagged.

Next, consolidate all social and customer support efforts to ensure your CRM data is tied to actual people, not just social media profiles. This will help with tracking leads and converting prospects. It will also help personalize marketing efforts. Integrate your social data into your CRM using platform integrations like:

• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• Zendesk
• Microsoft Dynamics 365

There are others available as well.

Once you’re collecting data, use the social CRM to understand the value of your leads and customers. You can also use the data for better and more effective customer service, ensuring all teams involved with resolving issues have the same information and cohesive responses.

Social CRMs can also be used to schedule and push content on social channels. When leveraging information gathered from social to create engaging content, the CRM can publish it through the right channels.

Social CRM Tips to Know

Whether you already have a social CRM set up and are trying to learn how to better use it, or this is all brand new, there are a few things to keep in mind along the way:

• Change is difficult. Employees may have to learn new tools or change the way they are doing things. Implementing a new tool and platform can also be challenging. The important thing is to make sure they get the proper training. This way, they can feel comfortable with using the tool and they understand how the social CRM will benefit them.
• Gathering data takes time. Especially if you have a small social following, gathering enough data to get actionable insights can take longer. However, as you grow your following, and as existing followers continue to engage with you, the amount of data you have will grow.
• You may feel there’s too much data. If you have a large following, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the volume of data in your CRM. If this happens, you must determine what data and interactions are most important and should be added to the CRM.
• Contact customer support if you need it. Implementing and effectively using a CRM can be overwhelming, especially if it’s new. Most CRM platforms have customer service and support teams that can help with implementation, training, and proper use. If you need help, ask the experts.
• Identify and engage social influencers and reward loyal customers. Use your social CRM tool to find who is driving conversations about your brand. You can also use it to reach out to those users and build a relationship with them. If customers are engaging with your brand, create loyalty codes or other special offers. This will help retain those customers or to encourage prospects to convert. Also be sure to reward positive feedback.

Contact Dragonfly Digital Marketing

If you are interested in growing your business through social CRM and/or developing your marketing strategy, contact Dragonfly Digital Marketing today. We can help you improve your social media presence and connect with a broader range of potential customers.