In today’s marketplace, having a website and waiting for customers to come to you is not enough. With the rise of social media, businesses need to stay ahead of the game by engaging and interacting with consumers on these platforms.
Traditionally, organisations ‘owned’ their brand and led communications in this way. Social media has given power to the people; communications are word-of-mouth led.
Now, people own the brand and it is what they perceive it to be and say it is. They create blogs, videos and images about it, or comment on them, and often do it in their own time. While this word-of-mouth endorsement is great, it means that your sources of information are increasingly fragmented. No longer do you only have the usual TV/Radio/print media outlets, but additionally thousands of blogs and social platforms.
Where do you engage and which platform is right for you to promote business and interact with your customer base? At the same time as providing a listening platform which can be used to understand conversations taking place between prospects, clients, partners and other influencers, ultimately, social media can be used as a tool for effective customer relationship management.
It’s tempting to jump on the social media bandwagon and spread yourself around as many platforms as possible, but this won’t necessarily result in better customer engagement, increased traffic to your site or sales. Any business can run a social media campaign, but a savvy business uses an integrated CRM package to align their sales with their social media activity.
Marketing, sales and designated customer service departments have typically used a CRM strategy. However, the need to create a joined up data platform so that the customer experience is seamless and painless across all departments has increased. A CRM application is now expected to provide critical tools to enable smooth internal communications, staff empowerment and motivation, post sales service above customer expectation and management information which really delivers the facts and figures needed for future planning.
A vital part in the overall CRM mix is your social media strategy. It is commonly acknowledged that organisations cannot simply ‘choose’ to get involved in social media now. If they don’t want to be left behind, they must embrace it. This is not simply because competitors are embracing it, so they feel they must, but much more importantly that their customers are expecting it from them.
To shape your social media strategy, use data that you have already collected on your existing prospects, customers and others. For example, if you profiled your top 20 (or 50, or 1000) customers, what would that profile look like? Simple demographics can point you in the direction of the channel(s) that will ‘speak’ to a wider audience of a similar profile, and effectively target and tailor your communications for optimum results.
Using contacts that you already have such as customers, and reaching out through them (retweets, @replies, Facebook comments, LinkedIn contacts) engages with a whole new audience who respect your customer and their opinions. Getting testimonials out there is a good step, but engaging in a ‘conversation’ which others can be part of and contribute to is even more powerful.
If you use your CRM application to capture the details of and interact with this new audience as soon as possible after they have communicated with your organisation via social media, enables a new level of communication to be established; where more traditional methods of marketing and PR can then become the next steps in your sales process.
Furthermore, a crucial component of customer relationship management within social media is the process of building trust with your following or fans. Social media has resulted in businesses becoming increasingly reachable, leading to customers contacting the organisation through social media instead of through the traditional customer service channels. Whilst this may be great when a customer is an advocate of your brand, it is also very important to engage with users when their contribution to your Facebook or Twitter page is not entirely positive. In this situation the best solution is to reassure the contributor that you have received their comment and inform them that you have contacted the appropriate person, capable of resolving the situation. This publicly demonstrates that you are taking every customer and their contribution seriously, consequently generating and building trust.
To bring the whole process full circle, you can use your CRM application to measure the results by tracking the success of leads and sales. You then have results which can directly impact your strategic planning; who to target and where, and you’ll be in no doubt about the direct and indirect effect of a social media campaign on your bottom line.
On a final note, don’t be disgruntled if your company Facebook page isn’t inundated with ‘likes’ immediately, or your Twitter following doesn’t grow overnight. Creating a fan base on social media takes time; the key is to persevere.
