Marketing today would be impossible without a degree of automation. It is why marketers have been turning to integrate their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software and marketing for better automation capabilities. However, it’s not enough to incorporate CRM and marketing platforms and expect your content marketing, web marketing, lead nurturing and customer retention to skyrocket. You need a plan for how you’re going to use these capabilities according to your business needs.
But what is it you need to know when you’re connecting your marketing to CRM automation? Let’s start with the basics:
Planning the Integration
An essential requirement for successful integration is preparing. Take a long, detailed look at your business goals and evaluate them in the context of marketing and CRM. Which tasks can automation help you with? If there is any preparation to do beforehand to identify what you should work on. How about website optimization for better lead capture? Or can you organize your email subscribers into segmented lists to be able to plan better offers for them?
These will largely depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. Some marketers turn to CRM automation to help them re-engage cold leads, while others want to create a more automated sales process.
Taking Care of Leads
When CRM and marketing automation platforms are integrated, they can make a marketer’s life much more manageable. You can use your CRM to identify the leads (as they come in from any source) you want to target in your marketing campaign and build a list based on the campaign goals. Once you’ve filled out all the necessary fields, the marketing automation platform can take over to deliver a campaign that will target a specific message to specific leads per a specific plan. With integration, you can map out the entire content marketing strategy directed only at the leads you want to target.
Not only does integration allow for incredibly detailed and specifically targeted campaigns, but it can also help build an early funnel. During the content marketing process, you will get leads that are at different points in the funnel. You can nurture these early marketing automation platform leads by providing them with more information about the content they consumed – a channel that ultimately leads to entering them in your CRM as sales-ready prospects.
Keeping Track of Prospect Lists
CRM and marketing automation integration also help you keep track of your prospects and re-engage leads. In your CRM, you can create files based on different triggers, such as last activity or closed opportunity dates, post-sale campaign objectives and more. These will help you automate campaigns for those prospects, and send out well-targeted emails aiming to spark engagement or offer more value for leads subscribing to your emails. It helps you have a better-defined content marketing strategy that can deliver only the information that’s relevant to the leads, encouraging them to stay engaged.
Your digital marketing goals will be easier to accomplish with automation, but it could still take months before you see the results you desire. If you don’t want to wait that long, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll gladly discuss ways in which I can help you reach your digital marketing goals more quickly, whether that’s through SEO and website optimization, or ads and creating campaigns.
Rob Dunford is a Marketing Consultant in the Great Toronto Area with over 20 years of experience in implementing marketing plans for small businesses.