How to Use CRM Data to Build Your Social Media Strategy
Today, social media customers demand more from companies. Most customers will leave your business for your competitors if your company has poor social customer support, lacks informative content and ads, or provides low-quality products and services.
Even with cloud-based solutions, these and other customer demands can easily overwhelm your team and cost you social media customers. For any company to avoid that, it needs an excellent social media strategy that is big on social listening to understand its customers.
CRM data can help you create that social media strategy. Social CRM, or the integration of your CRM software with your social media channels, makes it easy to track valuable customer social media data like customer interaction, journeys, identities, engagement history, social activity, and feedback.
Here are ways you can use CRM data to build your social media strategy:
1 – Capture New Leads
Attracting quality leads is at the top of the excellent social media strategies list. But while social media has the numbers, getting suitable potential leads is still quite challenging for most organisations. It is tough when you lack quality marketing data to use.
CRM data makes gaining quality leads easier by helping you understand your reach, consumer patterns, and behaviours. That allows you to identify quality potential customers from different social media platforms that you can convert into long-term customers.
Here’s an example of CRM data you can use to capture more leads.
The example shows Coffee Cabin’s engagement rates, demographic details, and potential impressions. With this data, you can note the new social media accounts interacting with your account and look at the content they interact with the most. Then develop strategies to turn them into customers.
If you’re using gated content, it is easier to capture new lead data into the CRM with the help of an effective landing page. In addition, it makes it easier to follow up and keep conversations going until you get to the lead conversion level of the sales cycle.
Since you have the social media activity data, you can give offers or discounts that encourage purchases and capture more leads.
You can also integrate other strategies to get better results. For instance, you can use email tracking software to help you see who opens and reads your emails to find genuine leads. Then you can nurture the leads up to the sales stage.
2 – Know Your Top Customers
There is no need to keep pumping money into growth marketing strategies that are not working. The foolproof way to know this is by identifying what works best for your loyal customers and what keeps them coming back every time.
CRM data will help you figure this out and reach each valuable customer for as long as your business runs. It makes it easier to identify your top customers. You can understand what they like about your brand from their purchasing patterns, social media posts, and social media interactions with your brand.
A social media strategy that retains top customers saves you time and resources. Research shows that organisations spend five times less to retain current customers than when acquiring new customers.
You also get much in return since your high-value customers generate at least 80% of a company’s revenue. In addition, most spend three times more than the average customer. That means you lose an equivalent of three average customers for every top customer.
After understanding your social media audience value with the help of social customer relationship management data, you can develop a strategy that helps you gain more top customers. It also makes budgeting easier since you know the areas that will boost your business’s growth.
3 – Create Custom Audiences for Social Ads
Though various factors affect the success of your social media ads, reaching the right audience at the right time is top of the list. People have the power to either consume or reject social media ads, which makes it easy for uninterested people to ignore your ads. But how do you know who to show what content and when?
CRM data helps you understand your consumers better by outlining their interests, demographics, purchasing patterns, and behaviours. That enables you to create a custom audience that will be interested in engaging with your social ads.
As a result, you can run more targeted social ads and campaigns that earn your customers' confidence and attract more customers. You can also take advantage of the Facebook Custom audience tool that makes it easy to develop a custom audience.
Here is an example
It is also possible to ensure your ads are viewed at each consumer group’s most active times on social media. A good example is the Meta Business suite which allows businesses to run ads and other social posts on their specific schedules based on consumer behaviours and patterns.
In the example, the ads are set to run from 9 am to 5 pm on weekdays and from 11 am to 4 pm on weekends. Therefore, Meta will show the ads to users in those specific time frames in their local time zones.
4 – Track the Customer Journey
Tracking the customer journey yields information about your customers and your customer experiences. Social CRM lets you keep tabs on each customer’s social activity data from the first inquiries to likes, comments, purchases, and other social engagement metrics.
From this social data, you can understand what works for your customers. You can also notice faults in your customer journey that discourage customers from making final purchases or repurchasing. That allows you to optimise your sales funnel to minimise leaks and optimise conversions and brand affinity.
The customer journey data you get from your social CRM helps you notice specific patterns, which are crucial when developing a social media strategy. You can always take advantage of that to create a sales opportunity.
For example, you might notice that the highest number of successful purchases are from paid Instagram ads, which take viewers to your Instagram shop. From the Instagram shop, they are directed to the website to purchase a product. So knowing this, you can invest more in social ads to attract more customers.
Also, social CRM data makes getting more details on customer engagement, communication history, and other informative customer details easier. That makes it equally easy to build a social media strategy to track and ensure better customer journeys.
Doing this will ensure that your customers have a good experience, which equals happy and returning customers. Remember to create a good style guide to ensure consistency in how your team engages with the audience.
5 – Build a Lookalike Audience
Remember how you identified your top customers earlier? You need to ensure you get more of them. Building a lookalike audience is one of the best ways to reach new audiences who are highly likely to be interested in your business.
That is because they share characteristics with current customers, who should act as your source consumers throughout the process. It is a given fact that it is easier for lookalike audiences to buy from you than random people who follow your content.
However, it would take ages to go through every consumer detail to find your lookalike audience manually. That’s why you need social CRM data. The data simply looks at your current consumer groups’ interests, behaviours, and demographic factors, like locations, age groups, occupations, and social groups.
The social CRM data helps you shape your target audience, allowing you to create more accurate lookalike audience lists. Most social media channels like Linkedin and Facebook have made this process easy for companies.
Also, as shown in the example above, you can choose the percentage you want your lookalike audience to match your source audience. After developing a list, you can add it to different ad accounts like Linkedin or Facebook ads manager to target your lookalike audiences.
6 – Use Personalised Ads
People connect with things they feel were made specifically for them because they fit their interests and personalities. That is why personalised ads perform better on social media than generic ads. Luckily, social CRM data makes it easy to create personalised ads.
Look at this example; prospective customers are likelier to click the visit Instagram profile button than if it were just a regular ad highlighting online therapy services. The ad text makes it more relatable to anyone requiring therapy services. It also encourages them to find out more about Talkspace.
CRM data provides you with details essential in helping you segment your consumers. You can quickly identify popular products among different social media users through customer segmentation. That enables you to create and run personalised ads and guides you on other marketing strategies like offers and giveaways.
Finally, you can also use social CRM data to predict the next relevant product customers might need after their previous purchases. Then, you can then make product suggestions that direct them to purchase it through personalised ads. For instance, if someone bought a phone, you can send them screen protectors or phone case suggestions.
7 – Improve Interdepartmental Coordination
To achieve organisational goals, different company teams must work collaboratively. Often, a business's social media, marketing, customer care, and sales team tend to be interdependent. That is why you need to invest in ways that encourage teamwork.
Teamwork is a big challenge for organisations, but it is pretty easy with the help of social CRM. Most conflicts between departments and teams are brought about by a lack of access to equal information. Social CRM data helps solve this by showing each customer’s social interaction and conversation history.
Not only that but the data is connected to the company’s CRM, where every team member can access it. As a result, potential leads can get constant feedback from a sales rep, customer care rep, or other employees with access. That reduces cases where social media users have to wait for the few employees with access and the information to respond.
You can also create customer support social media accounts that handle complaints and use the CRM to keep track of the social profiles’ activity. It makes it easy to keep track of each social media complaint. Here is an example from the Adobe Care Twitter account that ensures prompt social communication and responses.
Besides the timely responses to inbound customer queries, it also acts as a social media management platform. It helps the social customer service teams handle customer issues and take control of significant social media conversations, benefiting the entire organisation.
8 – Empower Your Team
Social CRM data can help improve business functions in different departments, from customer care to social media and sales and marketing teams. As a result, businesses can work faster and smarter, which helps them work through their sales funnel and increase their revenue.
But as much as this benefits the customers, it also serves your team by ensuring they get the best services. Social CRM data makes it easy for different team members, like customer service agents and sales reps, to see their connection firsthand and work together to achieve more.
That boosts morale, which reflects in the team performance, and of course, the positive results motivate them to appreciate their jobs and keep achieving more.
In Closing
CRM data can turn your business around by helping you develop social media marketing strategies to attract more customers and qualified leads. Mainly because, with the data, you can access vital details like purchasing behaviour patterns collected from different social media accounts.
CRM data helps you build robust social media strategies by allowing you to capture new leads, identify your top customers, and create custom audiences for your social content.
You can also track the customer journey to get more insights, improve your social media strategy, build lookalike audiences, make personalised ads, improve department coordination, and empower your team.
Integrate CRM data in your social media marketing strategy today, and guide your business towards more success.
Nico is the founder of Launch Space. The company works with enterprise SaaS clients, helping them scale lead generation globally across EMEA, APAC, and other regions.