While many social marketers are aware of the potential value a social media CRM can bring to your sales pipeline, knowing how to apply these kinds of tools can be very challenging for the uninitiated.
Even if you have a strong social media marketing plan, it's crucial to understand how to use your social media CRM alongside it to maximize sales traction. When you make smooth CRM integration a priority, you’ll be better equipped to analyze the data your CRM collects, adjust your strategy based on the trends you discover, and empower you and your team to get a higher proportion of leads over the conversion line.
To help you get off to the right start, here’s five tips for understanding your social media CRM and getting the most value possible from your data.
1. Start With Good Buyer Personas
The buyer personas you use in your social media CRM are going to provide the foundation for all the sales data you collate, so it’s important to make sure they’re detailed and robust enough for your sales goals.
Like with a regular CRM, you should start with some of the basic identifiers for your target audience, such as industry, job title, company size, budget, etc.
Past this, however, it’s important to consider some of the nuances that separate social media from other marketing channels to ensure your personas are serving their purpose.
Some key things to consider when building social-oriented buyer personas include:
- Preferred social media platforms and how your audience splits their time between them.
- Content consumption habits, e.g the split between video, images, and text-based posts.
- Content style preference, e.g. whether they’re more likely to interact with content that’s informative, interactive, or humorous and lighthearted.
- Social interaction styles, e.g whether they’re more likely to lurk, post, comment, or share on their chosen social media platforms.
By creating buyer personas along these lines, you’ll be better equipped to develop a marketing and sales strategy that’s laser-focused on social channels, and keep this mindset when using your social media CRM.
2. Study the 3 Phases of Data Flow
Social media CRMs work by harvesting data from the various platforms you’re set up on, and collating this in a format designed to help you optimize sales.
As the sources of data and the way you’re going to apply them may differ from your previous experience with sales, it’s a good idea to look at the three phases of data flow and contextualize them in the functionality of your particular CRM.
Take some time to analyze:
Data Collection: How your CRM gathers data from different kinds of engagement, such as follows, comments, likes, and shares, as well as profile data from the users who interact with your brand.
Data Storage: The structure of the centralized database where your CRM maintains datasets from your interactions. Getting familiar with this organization will make it easier for you to navigate and draw findings from as efficiently as possible.
Data Accessibility: Understanding how user accounts and permissions are managed, and how you can navigate this interface to ensure the right members of your sales, marketing, and customer support team have access to all the features they need.
By understanding your social media CRM in terms of the three main stages of data flow, you’ll be much better-equipped to use it with maximum efficiency and turn it into an asset for your campaigns.
3. Set Policies for Engagement
When you begin nurturing social media leads, things can potentially become confusing if you’re too lax about jumping between different communication channels and picking up where your social media conversation left off.
To maintain the integrity of your social media CRM data, it’s important to set clear rules for engagement, and try to limit the way you develop relationships to the social channels where your buyer personas prefer to talk business.
Though it’s important to stay flexible, limiting engagements to the social channels where you made first contact with your leads will not only make things simpler for leads, but also streamline data and transcripts on your CRM so you can easily review the state of a given customer relationship.
This means you can spend more time digesting data and patterns quickly and easily, and less time trying to tweak your sales methods to match the changing needs of your brand.
4. Clean Up Your Data
Nothing will undermine the potential of your social media CRM more than failing to maintain clean and serviceable data.
As you bring leads into your pipeline and build up large, complex datasets, it becomes more and more likely that common errors will come up over time. It’s important to set periodical “cleaning” sessions to check for these errors and ensure your data stays clear and easy to interpret.
Some common issues you should be checking for when cleaning your social media CRM data include:
- Duplicate data, which can arise when a lead interacts with your brand on different platforms using slightly different platforms.
- Inconsistent data, which can arise when migrating data from general CRMs and other databases into your social media CRM.
- Missing data in important areas, such as the platforms your leads are using or their engagement rate with your content.
Routine reviews of your sales strategies and data hygiene checks will ensure your social media data is kept clear and usable for anyone using your social CRM.
5. Streamline with Automation
One of the core benefits of using a social media CRM is its capacity to streamline the lead generation process and reduce work for you and your team. However, the degree to which your CRM does this for you often depends on your ability to leverage automation and find efficient solutions to challenges.
To make your CRM not only easier to understand, but significantly more effective, it’s essential that you proactively look for automation opportunities and implement them wherever possible.
The best way to bring automation into the fold for your CRM goes as follows:
- Identify repetitive tasks that are taking up the most time, for example data entry and organization, sending follow-ups, and fine-tuning reports.
- Develop clear, streamlined workflows that any member of your sales and marketing team will be able to pick up with ease. Your workflows should cover a range of routine tasks and scenarios so that the steps for completion and the risk of uncertainty are minimized.
- Implement automation solutions, whether through the social media CRM itself or third-party integrations, that target the repetitive time-draining tasks you identified in the first step. For example, you can use message templates for different campaigns based on the correspondence from successful sales, or use tools like our AI-powered product email generator to reduce the time spent on writing messages that move leads down the pipeline.
- Like any process in your sales strategy, it’s important to periodically come back to the tasks and workflows that are a part of your automation drive, and review how well your approach to automation is performing. Use your social media CRM analytics, data on the time spent on different tasks, and discussions with your team to find areas for improvement to adjust your workflows.
Making Sense of Your Social Media CRM
Though getting to grips with a new social media CRM can feel like a daunting task, following these five best practices will help you crunch the numbers, navigate the platform, and mold your CRM into an asset tailored to your goals.
To get started with an intuitive, AI-powered social media CRM, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
