Digital marketing will be at the numerouno position in most markets and customer segments in a year or two if it is not already there. The scope of conventional print and electronic media is shrinking with the space for them in people’s minds. So much, so that print and electronic media have co-opted digital tools to spread themselves and grab the eyeballs of billions of smartphone users.
Digital marketing companies of all sizes have come up to serve the same needs of the providers, influencers, social and religious organizations, political outfits, and institutions. Every digital marketing company worth its salt has multiple clients. They run many digital campaigns, search engines, yellow pages, social media, mobile games, OTT platforms, and all other conceivable digital properties.
It becomes challenging for a digital marketing company with limited resources, workforce, and time to juggle between different campaigns, projects, clients, manage their aspirations and acquire new clients. Many smaller digital marketing companies fear that they may remain small just because they could not handle their clients very well. Here’s where CRM enters into the picture.
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management, or CRM for short, is a management practice and software tool to implement those management practices. The purpose of all-in-one CRM is to plan, organize, communicate, monitor, and control all those strategies, events, activities, and tools needed to manage interaction and current potential customers better.
Technologically a CRM solution refers to the multitude of applications used in managing customer contacts databases, customer interactions – online as well as offline, meetings & schedules, campaign & other important dates, campaign statistics and details, account details & billing information, and everything else about your potential leads and customers. The integrated system offers benefits of easier collaboration, on-time delivery, and always customer satisfaction.
With a CRM software tool, your digital marketing company and its employees can:
- Maintain up-to-date customer contact records.
- Easily record and retrieve data for future references.
- Track outcomes of digital campaigns for each client and analyze their results.
- Share and keep members’ sales & execution teams on the same page regarding customer expectations, commitments, and the distance to cover.
- Initiate proactive communication, improve follow-ups, and be a responsive agency.
- Schedule client meet-ups, create strategy groups, and never miss a deadline.
- Share resources & references, share campaign analysis data, share digital links for campaigns, and make the system process-driven.
Why does a small business need a CRM?
The difference between a small and a large business is not the level of activity or revenue. Neither is the headcount of the number of clients. It is in the level of organization, management practices, and process-driven approach of the large business that help them grow large and stay large.
With more work, you need to make the organization process-driven from a personality-driven set up and take a backseat. You must be able to organize, plan, delegate, and most importantly, automate tasks and processes that are low on your priority list, are routine, and occupy more time & space on your desk than they deserve.
Well, CRM is the answer to most of the problems we listed above and can help you organize, automate, and better manage your business.
Following are some of how a CRM helps small businesses:
Learn more
You can now learn more about your customers. Things such as who they are, their preferences, which campaigns were appreciated and received well, and which were not. You can get a trend and a forecast in their order histories with you suggesting potential break-offs giving you time to work on the relationship.
Organize
With CRM organizing your data & schedules and automating many processes, your operations become more efficient, less prone to errors, and leaving no room for missing deadlines. Many procedures such as client acquisition, sales, marketing, campaign management, billing, and sharing of analytics stats by emails can all be automated.
Optimize
You can optimize your customer interactions by scheduling meetings after or before reaching campaign milestones. Timely communication can help iron out many of the problems arising from incomplete pictures being served to customers.
Share Analytics
CRM for digital marketing companies can analyze the campaign statistics from multiple campaigns for the same client and different clients. With these statistics’ help, you can upsell better plans to your clients by citing comparative data of what has worked or not worked in the past under similar conditions.
Collaborate
Digital marketing requires collaboration among different agencies, content writers, copywriters, designers, and marketing managers – both from the agencies and the client. A CRM collaboration becomes simpler as all information is shared readily with all authorized persons, and tracking requests can be made digitally. It becomes easy to identify the bottlenecks and therefore remove them.
Benefits of a CRM for Digital Marketing Companies
Any business that has even one client or customer can benefit from the right CRM solution. It is advisable to adopt the CRM when you do not feel the need for it, then at a time when you cannot do without it.
CRM solutions are an excellent tool that allows digital marketers to enhance customer satisfaction, efficiency, and profits.
Contacts Management
Contact is the key person who can get your work done in an office. Knowing and nurturing connections at the organizational level was considered impossible, as it was regarded as personal likeability. But a CRM solution can help you assess and evaluate a contact in many ways to build a trustworthy relationship with your organization as a whole.
Know about your clients and their customers
Understanding the needs of the target customers of your clients is key to serving them with proper digital ads. If you can help your clients retain, attract, and build a strong customer base, then they will not leave you. A CRM can help you understand both of them.
Reporting
Many digital marketers, who are great at their work, fail to report the progress from time to time. With irregular reporting, the client’s key personnel, especially in the organized sector, find themselves in an embarrassing position regarding their decision to choose your agency. A CRM can help you automate the process of regular report generation and email to a specific list. These reports can be related to marketing campaigns, their results, schedules, campaign performance statistics, capture & conversion ratios, and customer feedback.
Efficient Working
CRM software can help you save precious time by automating many processes, like pulling campaign statistics, reporting, allocating work, scheduling meetings & reminders, sharing info with the team, etc.
Analysis and Forecasting
With a better analysis of past data, it becomes much easier to forecast the future. Instead of working with complex tables and formulae in Excel, your CRM can quickly generate forecasts for each of your running campaigns. Moreover, if the actual results are divergent, then it can update its model automatically to produce better results next time.
Customer Profiling
Profiling your clients and their customers is necessary to design different sales funnels for them. As each person is unique, their falling off the sales funnel cannot be at the same point. Such segmentation of your contacts can help in identifying the most promising leads and how to approach them.
Scale your sales
Usually, in a small digital marketing agency, a sudden jump in the number of clients may result in chaos as no one knows what to do and how to do it. With CRM, it doesn't matter how many clients you have; all their details, data, and campaign stats will be meticulously organized and manageable. You can scale your operations within no time and leap ahead of the competition.
Employee Satisfaction
A usual point of grudge among employees is not adequate recognition can be attributed to their efforts for client acquisition, sales, conversion, and service. With an integrated CRM tracking all details, like who did what and who closed an issue, such tracking can allow more objective and transparent employee appraisal.
No more personal dependence
Many clients move with a marketing or sales representative. It is because the sales rep goes through all the critical information about preferences and client interactions. With a CRM, all such details can be captured in detail, allowing a new representative to take over the client account as smoothly as possible. It saves time, effort and avoids client frustration, and most of them will continue to retain your services.
Real-Time Dashboard
A Dashboard or a control panel updating real-time data about your live campaigns can allow digital marketing agencies to tweak their strategy mid-way and avoid wasting limited budgets. Each client can be granted access to a more straightforward dashboard to check simple data points in real-time. It will help you make them understand why you made changes to the campaign strategy.
Manage Projects
Most CRM solutions or software programs allow you to manage projects for multiple clients. The tasks can include the digital marketing campaigns and any other creative or marketing-related work you may have executed for your clients. It is one systemic proof of your efforts put in for the client.
The Importance of CRM in Digital Marketing
A customer is a queen or the king, and a satisfied customer not only returns but also drives in more business. Conversely, a dissatisfied customer is more likely to spread bad publicity about your business and may affect your current clients as well.
Following studies and research data show the importance of adopting CRM in businesses in general and by digital marketing agencies.
- Early adoption of CRM results in nimble operations and a better-trained workforce from the word go. According to Buyer Zone, a subsidiary of Business.com, nine out of ten businesses with eleven or more employees use CRM software.
- Forrester’s research shows that half of all the teams that used a CRM reported improved productivity levels oversix months to a year.
- Comparing the sales-quota achievement rates for CRM and non-CRM users, a Nucleus Research report showed that close to two-thirds of CRM user companies achieved or exceeded their quota, while only less than a fourth achieved among the group who did not have access to CRM.
- According to a Mobile Marketer Study, CRM is accessible via smartphones, making it more widespread. The global mobile-based CRM market will grow at 11% to touch USD 15 billion this year.
- Cloud-based CRM is not far away; in fact, it is now leading the segment in CRM installations with 87% of deployments in 2020, compared to just 12% in 2008.
- Finally, a Gartner report says that CRM software revenues went past the DBMS solution revenues to become the largest selling software product category!
- Revenues from CRM software alone are expected to cross USD 80 billion worldwide as per a study from Grand View Research.
- Like earlier, email marketing will top the list for digital marketers’ budgets in 2021, according to a Business 2 Community report. The ROI on email marketing is estimated to be USD 51 for every dollar spent, and a total spending of USD 350 million means a potential sale of USD 17,500 million or USD 17.5 billion!
- The same Business 2 Community report asked digital marketers where they are most likely to increase their ad-spend in 2021. More than 60% said Email marketing, close to 50% said social media, almost 40% on mobile marketing, another 38% on Search engines (including SEO and PPC), a similar number for display ads, and a mere 18% tradeshows and online events.
Why Do Digital Marketing Agencies Need to Implement a CRM System?
Knowledge is Power!
The CRM adoption in all sectors and industries is witnessing staggering growth over the past decade, and the 2020s are not going to be any different. The digital marketing world is heavily skewed against the smaller and leaner agencies. With deep pockets and access to the latest and expensive tools, and the best talent, larger agencies can garner the most lucrative deals.
A right CRM solution can offer many advantages for small digital marketing agencies and tilt the balance a little in their favor. CRM can help you remove process bottlenecks to smoothen the flow of information and help you target your audience better.
Sales, campaigns, marketing, and analytics all aspects of a CRM can be analyzed, monitored, managed, and shared from a single dashboard. Collaboration becomes easier, communication is automated, and anyone on the team can handle client queries.
A digital Marketer can almost attain Nirvana with the right CRM solution in place!
Author Bio
Kinjal Shah is extremely good at two things for the past few years - helping SaaS companies voice their ambitions and read the hell out of books from across the world. She is quiet during the day and quite LOUD during the night with her fingers swishing through her laptop keyboard.
Kinjal loves staying updated with the latest digital marketing trends, and you can often find her conversing with other speakers on their blog comments. She is the happiest when hanging out with friends and traveling to local places. You can connect with her over LinkedIn or mail her at shah.kinjal208@gmail.com
