Most modern businesses have a social media marketing strategy. However, to get the most from your social media strategy, it must be well integrated with the rest of your company’s activities. Check the best 9 ways social CRM software can benefit your business media channels, top customer relationship management tools & strategies.
A social strategy that feels separate or disjointed from other touchpoints can give customers a negative impression. One of the best ways to solve this problem is to use social CRM (customer relationship management).
Social CRM allows you to integrate your social media strategy more efficiently with the rest of your marketing efforts. As a result, social media marketing becomes a central part of your business model so that you have a cohesive strategy that improves your customer experience.
Now let’s take a closer look at what social CRM is and what it entails.
What Is Social CRM?
Social CRM is the process of integrating your social networks into your customer relationship management system. However, there is a lot more to it than that. One of the leading social CRM benefits is how it helps streamline the customer experience.
Without proper integration of social channels with other aspects of the business, the customer experience can become disjointed. For instance, If you want to market a SaaS brand, your company’s message must be consistent across all platforms. In addition, prospects who encounter your business at various touch points should be able to understand what your company is all about.
So, bringing all your social media channels together with social CRM and integrating them with the rest of your SaaS marketing strategies helps ensure this consistency.
Social CRM also helps with lead tracking. Analytics tools on social media channels allow for better visibility of prospects’ information across all departments. This means your teams can learn from previous interactions that the customer or prospect has had with your business on social media.
Having access to this information is hugely beneficial. It gives you a better understanding of your audience; what they want, what they like, and what they don’t like. This knowledge allows your teams to tailor different aspects of business communications to satisfy your customers better.
9 Social CRM Benefits for Your Business
Now that the basics have been covered let’s look at some social CRM benefits. Check the best 9 ways social CRM software can benefit your business media channels, top customer relationship management tools & strategies.
1. Provides an Omnichannel Experience: Social Media CRM Tools
Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service report suggests that using omnichannel experience and AI enables a comprehensive view of your customer journey for faster and more precise issue resolution. Thanks to social CRM, you can seamlessly implement this in your organization.
Social CRM software integrates data from all social media platforms and presents it in one unified dashboard. This means customer interactions from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can be accessed and analyzed in one place.
Take the screenshot of the BigContacts CRM dashboard shown below as an example. Each contact’s profile has a link to the client’s social media profiles, phone numbers, email addresses, records of past meetings, and pending tasks.
Having all customer data in one place is hugely beneficial. First, this allows you to build customer profiles for each individual based on their activity across all platforms.
While individual customer profiles are helpful, the real value is in how social CRM provides a better understanding of your audience and their preferences.
For instance, with data from social CRM, you can find out which topics interest your customers. Let’s say you’ve integrated data from your Instagram account into your CRM. Tracking KPIs like Instagram likes, reshares, and comments can tell you what type of content performs best. You can then use those insights to create relevant content that’ll keep your audience engaged.
As you can see, Social CRM gives you insights into what type of content you need to produce for your audience on different channels. If a particular post performs well on social media, chances are the same topic will do well on your website, email, and other channels.
2. Allows for Prompt Customer Service: Social CRM Benefit Business
One of the leading social CRM benefits is its positive impact on customer service. First of all, the collective data source across all platforms allows you to make a more detailed assessment of any customer queries. You will have a broader scope of data to help you assess each situation and provide a suitable solution.
Besides that, the quick access to information that social CRM platforms offer contributes to a streamlined customer service experience. For example, according to KPMG, 90% of customers say that resolution is their predominant customer service concern. So, ensuring you can resolve customer issues quickly should always be a priority.
Now, if a customer complaint has to be passed from one department to another, the transition should be smooth. The unified data source social CRM provides allows for a smooth flow of information between departments. Hence, your customers can experience prompt service. Your customer service processes will also be more efficient.
Similarly, your customer service teams can use records of previous customer conversations to assist them. The customer does not have to wait too long for a response since your team can quickly pull the relevant information.
Finally, your customer service team can communicate with prospects and customers across social media platforms using social CRM software. This way, they can offer live, on-demand assistance when the need arises. Some CRM tools also have live chatbot integrations, which typically make your customer response time faster.
3. Social CRM Benefit Business: Improves Interdependence between Departments
Social CRM coordinates your departments and makes for a more streamlined internal process. This not only makes things accessible and efficient for staff, but it also benefits your customers.
While you may primarily use social media for marketing purposes, it’s also important that you integrate social media with other departments in your company. Why? The results from your social media activities can provide useful insights to other teams within your organization.
For example, if a lead messages you on social media in relation to an offer, your sales team needs to be informed quickly. Social CRM’s streamlined internal system allows for efficient interaction between departments under such circumstances.
Customers predominantly communicate through social media nowadays. As a result, customer queries may come in through social media, as shown below.
With a social media CRM, the details of a customer query on social media can be passed to the relevant department. The department will either handle the issue or provide the information your customer service team needs. This again highlights how social CRM improves the interdependency among teams in your organization.
Another example of this interdependency is how social media data can assist your recruitment operations. Social media interactions with potential employees can tell you a lot about them. Social data can also show you how potential employees perceive your business.
As a business owner, you need to keep up to date with how potential employees and customers view your business. The data can then be used as a guide on recruitment marketing in the future to ensure you attract the correct type of employees.
4. Can Help Build a Meaningful Relationship: Social CRM Benefit Business
The cohesive approach to customer relations allows you to make more informed decisions regarding your customers. With the wealth of data available, you know your audience better and can easily keep them satisfied.
For instance, you can use Social CRM tools to assess the specific challenges your customers face. So, when you send messages to them or reach out via phone calls, you know exactly what to address. This makes it easier to provide an effective solution to their needs.
Listening to and taking action based on customer feedback is a simple but effective way to build more meaningful relationships with them. And when customers notice that you understand their needs, wants, and complaints, they’ll be assured that you genuinely care about them.
To take this a step further, social CRM allows you to revamp relationships with potential leads who have become unresponsive. Insight from social CRM can help you identify reasons why prospects have pulled out of a sale or stopped responding to your emails. Ultimately, you can use this information to craft personalized follow-up emails or re-engagement campaigns.
Integrating CRM with social media can also inform you of significant milestones or events in your customers’ lives, like birthdays or anniversaries. With this, you can celebrate with them and use the opportunity to foster meaningful relationships.
5. Increases Lead Generation
Social customer relationship management can also enhance your lead-generation processes. CRM tools have a centralized leads database that makes curating relevant information for a particular prospect easy. So, for instance, when you add a new lead, the CRM tool will scout the web for any useful information about this lead.
Also, with social CRM tools like HubSpot and Zoho, you can set up automation workflows to help you identify prospects. This involves establishing a trigger—the consumer’s action that starts the lead generation process.
The trigger could be a post share, reply, like, or comment. Once this interaction occurs, the consumer is automatically added to your leads list. Then, your sales and marketing team can follow up. This automated process saves a lot of time and resources.
Social CRM also enables you to efficiently qualify prospects by tracking all activity and interactions with leads. The tools also provide a timeline of all activities, as shown below, so that you know what stage of the customer journey each lead is at.
This once again saves you valuable time by streamlining your outreach efforts. You can develop strategies to nurture leads at different levels of your sales funnel.
The data from social CRM can also help you identify leads that are more likely to convert so you can focus on them.
6. Ensures a Proactive Approach to Assisting Customers
Due to advancements in technology, the modern consumer has come to expect things to move quickly. Thus, you must devise means of helping customers before they realize that they have a particular need. Thankfully, social CRM allows you to do this.
Since social media insights across all platforms are available on one platform, it is much easier to monitor consumer issues.
With social CRM, you can easily pull up reports related to your brand mentions on social media. So, online conversions that mention your brand or products and services negatively can be detected and analyzed. That allows you to solve potential customer issues before they even contact you for assistance.
This builds trust with your clients and will also improve your brand’s reputation. In addition, taking a proactive approach to assist customers keeps them satisfied. In turn, this will encourage customer loyalty and retention. Keep reading to check the best 9 ways social CRM software can benefit your business media channels, top customer relationship management tools & strategies.
7. Empowers the Entire Support System: Social Media Channels Software
The positive impact of social CRM is felt throughout the support system in your organization.
First, with the analytics feature on social CRM tools like BigContacts, you can get real-time data about the effectiveness of various aspects of your business operations. This information will help you make informed decisions regarding key areas of your business, like accounting, marketing, sales, and customer support.
For instance, tracking your social media engagement and observing patterns in customer behavior can help you identify new opportunities and maximize them.
Additionally, social CRM gives your customer service representatives access to all the information they need to analyze customer issues and provide adequate solutions to them.
It helps your marketing team have enough details to create buyer personas that are effective representations of your ideal customer. This allows you to create marketing strategies that are more targeted and productive.
Also, using social CRM ensures your customer service representatives and other employees who interact with customers are accountable. How? The CRM platform provides records of client conversations so you can observe how these conversations happen.
The social CRM software also allows team members to provide specific reports about their interactions with customers. This makes for a more transparent process, so proper communication and customer relations standards can be maintained.
8. Bridges the Need and Service Offering Gap
By combining the previously mentioned social CRM benefits, you can close the gap between your customers’ needs and what you can offer.
Social media data will tell you a lot about what your customers want. It will help you analyze their interactions with your posts to gain some insight. It’ll also allow you to track what customers say about your company’s products or services through sentiment monitoring software.
For example, if you release a new product feature, you can get insights into conversations around that feature. These insights will reveal whether the feature works correctly and whether the users find it valuable.
Sentiment monitoring data will show you what customers like about your offer and what changes they would make if they could. No matter what industry you’re in, customers can find a replacement if they’re dissatisfied with your services. So, you must be able to evolve if you are to retain your customers.
So, present in the top ways social CRM software can benefit your business media channels, top customer relationship management tools & strategies.
9. Helps You Adapt to Changing Landscape: Social Media Channels Software
Things are constantly evolving in marketing. We see constant changes in affiliate marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing practices.
Similarly, the social analytics capabilities of CRM software are becoming more and more sophisticated. These tools provide highly detailed information on customer activities, as seen in the example below.
With the help of this kind of analytics, you can now predict trends and catch them while they’re hot instead of reacting when it’s too late.
Businesses can develop products and services in direct response to customer needs rather than taking risks on ideas that may or may not work.
You can also monitor your competitors’ social media interactions with their customers to comprehensively assess your target market. Whether the interactions are positive or negative, you can learn from them and use this information to inform future decisions.
Finally, with social CRM, you can stay tuned to conversations in your industry. This will help you gain a broad view of new events that may impact the industry so that you can devise strategies that will give you a competitive edge.
Social Media CRM Strategies & Tools In Closing
To summarize, social CRM should be integral to your marketing strategy. It has several direct benefits for your business.
First, it provides your customers with a seamless, omnichannel experience, streamlining their journey. Next, social CRM creates more prompt and proactive customer service. This, in turn, allows you to build more meaningful relationships with your audience.
Social CRM also streamlines the internal process of your business as departments become more interdependent. This increase in interdependence strengthens your support systems; departments are better equipped to help each other.
Finally, the analytics information that social CRM produces allows you to enhance your lead generation exploits. This information also makes adapting and continuously fulfilling your customers’ needs easier.
With all of these benefits, why not give social CRM a try? I hope this social CRM software can benefit your business media channels, top customer relationship management tools & strategies.
Author Bio
Nico Prins
Nico Prins is the founder of Crunch Marketing, a SaaS Link Building Agency. The company works with enterprise SaaS clients, helping them scale lead generation globally across EMEA, APAC, and other regions.