Social Media Marketing: Social CRM

Social Media Marketing: Social CRM

Today I will be sharing with you the major key points I took out of the course “Social Media Marketing: Social CRM” taught by Meghan Adams. She goes over the fundamentals of social CRM and shows you how a social CRM strategy enables your organization to better engage with your customers in a transparent and more powerful way. Adams also explains how to choose a social CRM platform, how to allocate resources for this new initiative, while identifying working with online influences, engaging with prospects and customers, and how to build out social media focused customer service initiatives.

The new way of marketing

Social CRM helps to combine all information pulled from social media and other conversational platforms. And it uses CRM analytics to determine how an organization can best use this information. Social CRM adds in the social data points so organizations can better track and measure their audience’s behaviors online. Traditional CRM and social CRM are combining as consumers spend much more time online and on different social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter (Adams, 2018).

Benefits of Social CRM

• More meaningful engagement
• Creation of brand advocates
• Helps construct brands image and conversations online

How to add social CRM to your strategy:

• Marketing – Social listening to learn about your online audiences’ behaviour
• Sales – Understand where prospects are online and what they’re discussing
• Customer service and support – Real-time, multi-channel support
• Customer Experience – Understanding what your customers needs and wants are and creating an exceptional, unique experience for them

Choose a social CRM platform

Customer relationship management software has evolved from a simple contact management system into a robust set of tools, and all of these tools can be found in one central-hub and that is your CRM platform.

Three reasons to use a social CRM platform:

• Sales – Looking to automate and boost sales
• Marketing – Looking to streamline finding and engaging with customers and prospects
• Customer service and support – Looking to deliver outstanding and responsive customer support

When choosing a social CRM platform, there are some MUST HAVES you should look for when deciding:

• Support for social media platforms
• Brand monitoring
• Social CRM analytics
• Integration with your other platforms or services

Allocate resources

Your social CRM success will depend upon organizational support and allocation of resources (Adams, 2018).

Resource allocations to consider are:

• Top-level support and buy in
  • Identify decision makes and influencers
  • Making your business case
• Budget
  • Invest in growth
  • Use analytics to drive business case
  • Benefit to sales, marketing, and customer support
  • Work with your Social CRM provider
• Build your social CRM team
  • Staff your social CRM team with early adopters
  • Determine the roles and required headcount
  • Invest in your social team
• Training
  • Look to your social CRM provide for training opportunities
  • Direct resources to new initiatives
  • Support you social CRM team
• Monitor and Evolve

Develop Your Strategy

Branding

 A brand is a set of marketing and communication methods that help distinguish a company from competitors and hopefully create a lasting impression in the minds of their customers (Adams, 2018). When branding there are two social factors to consider when branding, humanization and personalization. Humanization is having an easy way to connect with people and their personality. Personalization is allowing the customers to choose and shape their own experience with your organization. Another way that branding in your social CRM strategy is so important is that it helps you really support your customer.

Rules of Engagement

How you manage, execute, and handle your social CRM all boils down to your rules of engagement. Laying out clearly defined rules will set the standard for every prospect and customer interaction your organization has. The standards you set are completely dependent on your organization but typically include tone and personality, set response to specific situation. personalized responses and guide lines for communicating company-wide announcements.

Some Very important other rules to consider are:

• Be sure you are responding in a timely manner
• Be proactive in your responses
• Use a social media monitoring tool
• Humanize your conversations
• Know when to take it offline
• Get feedback often

Manage Social CRM

Identify Influencers

Influence is defined as a power affecting a person, thing, or course of events, especially one that operates without any direct or apparent effort (Adams, 2018). When talking about influence in social marketing though a great quote that sums the meaning up is “True influence drives action, not just awareness.” -Jay Baer, social media guru

Here is an example of a video using a influence to help promote.

Here’s how you can identify influencers:

• Look at their audience and advocacy
  • Relevance: How relevant is their message and network to yours?
  • Reach: How many people can they reach with their message?
  • Engagement: How engaged is their network?

The main methods to find influencers for you is through social media monitoring, hashtags, blogger outreach and google alerts. When you have found an influencer that fits for your brand there are a few ways to work with them:

• Encourage content creation
  • Post photos and videos of them using your products/services
• Product giveaways and discounts
  • Keep them current with your latest products, or provide compensation or discounts

Engage with prospects

To engage with prospects successfully you will need to paint a complete picture of who they are. Which means your organization knows where they are in the sales cycle and what previous interactions have, they had with your organization. When engaging with a prospect be sure to connect your content to them, keep the content engaging and know when to pitch and when not to. Be sure you are always leading with value.

Customer Service

Integrating customer service with social CRM is the ultimate way to support the social customer (Adams, 2018).

Social CRM:

• Customer retention – Facilitating support in the customer`s preferred environment
• Issue prevention – Intervening before the issue is escalated

Here are some of the best practices you can implement in you customer support:

• Monitor – Understand what is being said about your brand
• Identify – Determine if the problem your customer is facing is product, service, user support
• Contact – Take real-time action and reach out immediately
• Acknowledge loyal customers
• Intelligent relationship routing
• Handle channel hoppers

Handling Negative Feedback:

• Monitor internet for activity
• Bring relevant postings into customer support queue
• Facilitate employee collaboration
• Kick off resolution with the customer

Be sure to remember that every customer issue that arises in the social space is a marketing and PR opportunity. The world is watching (Adams, 2018).

Your toolkit

Process documentation

Business process success criteria

1. Ownership
2. Goals
3. Metrics
4. Interfaces
5. Documentation
6. Integrity
7. Alignment with business vision

To ensure that all your organizational teams are on the same page, typically your organization will have three main goals. The first is creating a new standard for optimizing customer relationships. This is focusing on new systems and a new customer experience. Second will be building connections with customers via new technologies, so this is the social landscape. And it’s prioritizing a human driven, human centric interaction with these customers. Third will be leveraging new channels that offer a path to more personal communication. This will be communications say across mobile, video and social media channels in order to achieve more targeted and humanized approach.

Document your business process and use them consistently. Keep your team accountable (Adams, 2018).

Conclusion

One of the key points I took out of the course is the process of finding yourself an influencer. There are so many influencers now days, it seems a new on pops up every week, which can make it difficult to pick from such a large selection. But in that process the ability to really focus on What Adams said about what you should be looking for: Relevance, Reach and engagement is key and I personally feel its very easy to forget those three points. I personally can’t relate to an applied example of me finding an influencer because I have not yet created a brand or product of my own yet to send to one. But when that time does come, I will not forget the main points I stated above. Its not about who you relate to or who you connect with as a person, its about what your brand or product connects to and relates to. If I had to pick an influencer right now there would be a few on my list that probably would have nothing to do with my product. So, having the maturity to stay away from your personal favorites when looking for a influencer and following the three key points will play a big factor in the positive repercussions that follow after collaborating with an influencer.

Reference

Adams, M. (2018, April 11). Social Media Marketing: Social CRM. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-social-crm/process-documentation?u=2109516

Cook, K. 13 Influencer Marketing Campaigns to Inspire and Get You Started With Your Own Retrieved from

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/examples-of-influencer-marketing-campaigns