“Attract and Convert!” is a mantra that echoes through the halls of marketing and sales departments everywhere. It is repeated ad nauseam as if it were a simple, 2-step process where step 1, Attract, magically gives way to step 2, Convert. Abracadabra, just rinse and repeat! But, hang on, what about the countless marketing actions needed to actually move prospects through your marketing funnel to the point of conversion?
It’s probably safe to assume that social media plays an important role in your company’s content marketing strategy. But, the real key to designing effective marketing actions between Attract and Convert lies in reimagining social media as the gateway to personalized marketing. More than just your brand’s social presence, you need to be paying attention to the qualitative user data being shared on social media. Combining this layer of social data with demographic and transactional data from your CRM is crucial to designing dynamic content to guide your prospects through your marketing funnel.
This qualitative user data can be used to build target segments that also take into consideration who your users are as people, with their individual interests, likes, dislikes, and behavior across social networks. Here’s our list of 6 reasons to merge social data with your CRM, obtaining a Social CRM:
- 1. Understand how users relate to your brand based on their reactions to your content. Learning which content streams work best will in turn help you design a more effective overall digital marketing strategy.
- 2. Track user behavior as a function of their likes, dislikes and interests. Not just as it relates to your page’s content, but also how users interact with content from other brands.
- 3. Identify Top Influencers. Design content streams to leverage your most influential users for maximum impact. Reaching these users can be the key to achieving your campaign objectives.
- 4. Create optimized target segments based on interests and online behavior. Today’s users expect content tailored to their unique interests. These expectations can only be met by maintaining well-defined user segments that combine user interests, demographics and behavioral data.
- 5. Personalize your marketing actions. All this information combined with proper segmentation will allow you to define more personalized marketing communications and content for each target audience. Take it even a step further and merge these social segments with your DMP (Data Management Platform) for realt-time bidding display campaigns.
- 6. Calculate the true value of each user, client, and customer (both current and potential). Understand that a user’s value is not determined solely as a function of their previous purchases. By taking into account user social influence and identifying brand ambassadors you’ll see higher returns on each marketing actions, and identify which actions just aren’t worth it.