Strategic integration: How social media empowers a CRM

Social Media and sales go hand in hand; all it takes is logging into Facebook or Instagram to see product and service offers. These platforms play a fundamental role within our Digital Marketing strategies, making integrating them into your CRM the missing piece to finally optimize your sales channels. In this article, we'll show you why you should integrate social media into your CRM.

In this article, you will learn about:

• Integration of CRM with social media
• Why should my company integrate CRM with social media?
• What benefits can you gain from this integration?
  

Integration of CRM with Social Media

Integrating social media with a CRM essentially involves managing customer relationships through social media channels. Leading CRM platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, and Oracle are increasingly compatible with social media. This allows customers to interact with companies through their preferred channels, resulting in improved customer service and better marketing insights from data.

Why Should My Company Integrate CRM with Social Media?

This integration enables a company to communicate with customers through their chosen channel, be it phone, text, chat, email, or social media (e.g., Facebook or Twitter).

Beyond these interactions, a social CRM system helps companies gather richer actionable information about customer sentiments towards their company, brand, and specific products or services.

The best CRM systems can leverage this dynamic customer profile and effectively distribute it across various teams, including customer service, marketing, and sales.

1. Capturing real-time customer voice

Integration allows you to capture real-time customer voice. By bridging these two realms, you can monitor mentions, comments, and conversations on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For example, platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce allow such tracking, providing deep insight into how customers engage with your brand, leading to a richer understanding of their needs and desires.

2. Social-connected personalization

Personalization holds significant value in the marketing world. By integrating CRM with social media, companies can build more comprehensive customer profiles, including preferences and social behaviors. Marketo offers advanced capabilities to segment and target customers based on their social media activity. This enables more precise interaction personalization, which, in turn, enhances the relevance and effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

3. Borderless conversations

Integrating CRM with social media breaks down barriers between online and offline interactions. Companies can follow conversations initiated on social media and continue them through other channels like email or phone, greatly contributing to the omnichannel nature of your marketing strategy. Salesforce and Oracle, for instance, provide integrated solutions that enable sales and customer service teams to maintain consistent interaction.

What Benefits Can You Gain from This Integration?

Companies can act faster, respond better, and even anticipate future customer needs.

For marketing, sales, and customer service departments, social CRM can help generate more leads that transform into happier, satisfied customers, who in turn can become brand advocates. It can shift the perception and scope of the brand while providing access to a wealth of new information about customer behavior and opinions.

Remember, social interactions occur one-on-one and one-to-many, meaning how these interactions are handled can directly influence brand sentiment.

Benefits for Your Company:

• Offer customer support on the online platforms they use
• Interact and collaborate with customers in real time
• Resolve issues quickly by monitoring social media for complaints
• Identify and reward brand advocates and customers who assist others
• Achieve greater exposure where audiences spend the most time
• Increase engagement and deepen customer relationships

Integrating social media into your CRM is both possible and necessary. It's a tool that will save you a lot of headaches and streamline customer service. Ultimately, keeping customers satisfied and loyal is one of the most important aspects.

Remember that there are always other applications that can be integrated into your CRM. However, social media is often our best data entry point due to the high usage of these platforms by users. Moreover, the process is generally quick and straightforward, with considerable benefits. It quickly increases user data in the CRM and enhances campaign efficiency and product delivery.