What’s in this article:
- How social CRM can help you better understand your customers and build better relationships with them
- Knowing how customers use different social media channels throughout their buyer’s journey allow you to use these channels to attract, engage, convert, and retain them
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By today’s standards, it’s common knowledge that customer relationship management is vital to the success of your business. In fact, brands must always strive to grow through their existing customers. And scaling your CRM is the only way to do that.
- A full 91% of businesses with ten or more employees use CRM software
- Use of CRM software leads to an average 29% increase in sales, as well as increases in sales productivity and forecasting
- Brands that use CRM software earn higher-than-average customer satisfaction ratings and retention rates
It just makes sense:
When your team is able to quickly react to your individual customers’ changing behaviors, needs, and expectations, you’ll always be able to serve them to the best of your ability.
To be sure, customer relationship management—both as a concept and as a tool—has evolved quite a bit over the years. One area in which we continue to see growth is in the area of social CRM.
In this article, we’ll break down what, exactly, social customer relationship management is—and why it’s now an essential part of your approach to customer relationship management, overall.
Let’s get started.
What is Social Customer Relationship Management?
Social customer relationship management, or social CRM, is the use of social media and other communication tools to engage with and collect data on your target audience.
Though social CRM (or SCRM) isn’t a brand new concept, it’s becoming increasingly in vogue as we march head-first into the new decade: According to data collected by Algoworks, social CRM has become a $10 billion industry as of 2019.
Social CRM can be used for a variety of purposes within your organization. In fact, back in 2010, the Altimeter Group defined 18 potential use cases for social CRM as follows:
When integrating social CRM into your overall CRM practices, you’ll need to make a few adjustments to your various processes.
For example:
- Marketing becomes more conversational and individualized, with less of a focus on one-way, “blast”-type campaigns
- Sales becomes more focused on nurturing individual prospects based on their unique needs, as opposed to targeting more generalized personas
- Customer service and support becomes more personal and personable—leaving behind the scripted, hands-off approach for good
- Customer feedback is collected both via structured means as well as on-the-fly, directly and indirectly
You can probably already see how making this jump can lead to major gains for your business. Still, let’s take a closer look at the key reasons you’ll want to integrate SCRM into your customer relationship management initiatives.
5 Key Benefits of Social Customer Relationship Management
With the understanding that integrating social into your CRM processes requires a bit of an internal shift, you might be left asking one ever-important question:
Is social CRM actually worth it?
The answer:
Absolutely.
Let’s get a bit more specific, shall we?
Gain A Better Understanding of Your Customers
First and foremost, adopting SCRM makes it easier for you to truly understand your target audience—and, in turn, to better provide for their needs at all times.
This is because SCRM allows you to collect much more—and much more important—data on your customers.
In terms of quantity, SCRM can allow you to unearth a treasure trove of data on your customers, including:
- Additional demographic data
- Information about their interests, hobbies, and pastimes
- Info regarding their network (e.g., what brands they follow, who they engage with, etc.)
The idea is that you’re not just collecting information that your customers have provided directly to your company. Rather, you’re collecting info that they’ve voluntarily put “out there” on the web for all to see—and are using this data to paint a more complete picture of who your customers actually are.
(Which, incidentally, is exactly what the modern consumer wants: According to Google, one of the key expectations of today’s consumers is for brands to know them better.)
Now, you might be asking whether you need to collect every piece of data you possibly can from your customers’ various social media profiles.
To be clear: You absolutely do.
Reason being:
You never know when learning something about your customers will lead to an opportunity for your business. What’s more, information that may seem irrelevant or superfluous at the present moment may become much more valuable to your team at some point down the road.
Basically, it’s better to know too much about your customers than to know too little. SCRM guarantees you leave no stone unturned when earning about your audience—making it all the more likely to uncover insights that can change the way you approach your customers altogether.
Engage With Your Audience on Their Terms
Social CRM is all about understanding how your audience thinks, acts, and speaks in different (digital) social settings—and using this information to engage with them more effectively.
SCRM allows you to log conversations, comments, and other verbal exchanges made by members of your audience on various social media platforms. This can not only help you better understand your customers’ issues, but also see how they actually talk about these problems. In turn, you can mimic your audience’s speech and word usage in your ad copy, marketing content, and chatbot scripts to set a familiar and comfortable tone for your customers.
What’s more, you can also use SCRM to determine the right platform to use when engaging with a customer at a given point in time. This may involve consulting their activity and engagement history on multiple social channels, the outcome of these engagements, and the sentiment behind the engagement).
(Or it may simply involve consulting your customer’s stated preferences.)
Additionally, you’ll understand how to approach a given customer (and even an entire audience segment) on different channels, as well. Depending on your audience, this may mean taking a more formal approach in certain instances, and a laid-back approach at other moments.
The goal here is to engage with your audience in a way that will most effectively allow you to communicate your message. Doing so, of course, requires that you meet the customer on their terms and deliver your message in a way that makes sense to them—which is exactly what SCRM allows you to do.
Supercharged Audience Discovery Efforts
In addition to learning more about your current audience and customers, social CRM also makes it easy to uncover new prospects.
In some cases, this feature is built right into the social media platform in question. Facebook, for example, allows you to easily find Lookalike audiences—individuals not yet on your radar who are similar to your current audience in some way.
In these cases, SCRM ensures you have a comprehensive customer profile from which to pull information from—in turn optimizing your chances of finding ideal “lookalike” targets. Because this data is pulled from multiple social media channels (and not just the one in question), it’s less likely that a vital piece of information will go overlooked. The new audience, then, will be compiled of individuals who are much more likely to become paying customers in the near future.
SCRM can also supercharge your manual audience discovery efforts, too. This goes beyond merely “copying” your current customer profile and focuses more on finding new prospects based on specific similarities shared with your current audience.
(The other side of this is that you won’t end up focusing on superficial or less-important traits when searching for new prospects. This can help you avoid chasing after those who look like your current audience “on paper,” but actually don’t fit the mold of your ideal customer.)
Overall, the goal is to go beyond customer profiles and personas, and to look for prospective customers who show clear signs of intent to engage with a brand that can provide for their needs. By assessing your current audience’s social data, you can uncover exactly what these signs are—and begin looking for others exhibiting these behaviors throughout the social internet.
Grow and Enhance Your Social Media Presence (and Overall Brand)
As adopting SCRM leads to a more clear and comprehensive understanding of your customers’ needs and expectations, it then makes it easier for you to optimize your social media presence with these needs in mind.
As we said earlier, you’ll have a better idea of which channels to operate on, as well as why and how to do so. Think about the channels your audience is active on in terms of how you’ll use them to:
- Deliver high-quality content
- Provide top-notch customer service
- Engage in one-on-one conversation with your individual customers
In some cases, a certain channel may check all of these boxes—and more. For example, many brands have begun using Facebook Messenger to engage with customers for a variety of purposes.
You can also use your social data to quickly capitalize on trends as they emerge on different channels. This may lead to further content creation, development of promotional offers, and other data-driven marketing decisions—both on your social media pages and elsewhere.
(Just avoid stepping out-of-bounds when it comes to trend marketing and the like.)
Another key part of social CRM is social listening. Bringing social data into your CRM processes allows you to quickly identify mentions of your brand on the web—both positive and negative. Social listening also digs deeper into the reason behind the mention, as well.
This, of course, can lead you in a variety of directions, such as:
- Making improvements to your product or service
- Allocating additional resources to a specific social media channel (again, for a specific purpose)
- Tailoring your content, promotions, and marketing materials more accurately to a certain target
Again, the data you collect on your customers via social media is vital to your ability to engage with them on these very same channels. Keep this info in mind as you grow your social media presence, and you should have no trouble doing so.
Become the best CRMer you can:
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Align Your Approach to Social Media With Your Business Goals
So far, we’ve focused mostly on the idea that SCRM allows you to improve your audience’s online experience with your brand.
While it is, of course, incredibly important to make that happen, it’s just as important to ensure your social media initiatives align with your overall business goals.
(In other words, you shouldn’t be using a social media channel just because you can, or because everyone else in your niche is. We’re looking at you, Tiktok bandwagoners who jumped in without a plan of attack.)
But it’s not so much a question of whether or not you should be using a certain channel. Rather, it’s a question of how to use each channel to accomplish your business goals.
Again, this can lead you to a number of data-driven business questions and decisions, such as:
- Should you try selling on Instagram, or is your audience more likely to be using the platform for top-of-funnel purposes?
- Is your target audience prone to engage with Facebook Ads, or should you take a more organic approach?
- Will your audience be receptive to chatbot-based customer service and support, or will it cause more problems than it solves?
By understanding how your customers use different social media channels throughout their buyer’s journey, you’ll know exactly how to use these channels to attract, engage, convert, and retain them. The easier it is to make all this happen, the easier it will be for you to meet and exceed your business goals.
Wrapping Up
Given the amount of time your audience spends on social media—and the amount of information they share on their platforms of choice—adopting social CRM is a no-brainer for your business.
Not only will you be better able to track your customer engagements, but you’ll also uncover a ton of information about your target audience that you would likely have missed otherwise. From there, it’s a matter of using what you learn to provide a better overall experience—and streamlined path to purchase—for your customers.