If you’re looking to make social media a core part of your sales strategy, you’ve probably heard that a social CRM is a great tool for identifying new opportunities, improving customer engagement, and efficiently moving social media leads down your pipeline.
Not all social CRM software is created equal though. While you’re shopping around, it’s important to be able to recognize a good CRM with social media integration and ensure you’re investing in a tool that’s truly going to serve your objectives.
In this post, we’ll look at five of the most important traits of great social CRM software.
1. Seamless Integration With Social Analytics
One of the most important traits of good social CRM software is making sure it provides seamless integration with your social media analytics tools.
Whether you’re using in-built free tools integrated with your business social media accounts, or a more advanced third-party tool that collates data across several different platforms, you’ll have to account for metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and how these reflect in your sales data.
When you choose a social CRM platform with integration in mind, you can build a more unified approach to data where information flows effortlessly from your social analytics to your CRM, automating away the need to compare separate datasets and bridge silos.
Make seamless analytics integration a priority, and you’ll eliminate the need for manual data entry, reduce the risk of human error corrupting your data, and give sales and marketing professionals a more complete view of the customer journey.
2. Robust Social Listening Features
The social media platforms you’re using are a rich source of data about your relationship with your target audience, how people view your brand when compared to your competitors, and other important insights.
If you don’t have the right tech to analyze these factors, you’ll only have a surface-level view of the social media landscape, and have to rely on guesswork to draw any kind of patterns or direction from it.
When you’re in the market for social CRM software, it’s a good idea to look for robust social listening features that help organize and simplify this data, then use your findings to inform a stronger marketing and sales strategy.
Some functionalities to prioritize when you’re comparing social CRM software include:
- Customer sentiment features, which are able to analyze conversations involving your brand or competitors to discern an emotional tone around a topic. This will help you amplify voices who are praising your product or service, and proactively address concerns your customers might have.
- The ability to pick up on patterns across different accounts and platforms, highlight recurring themes or complaints, and identify gaps to target.
- Features to pick up on emerging social media marketing trends that might be beneficial for your content calendar.
When your social CRM software integrates effective listening features, you’ll be able to tap into insights alongside your sales data within one centralized platform, and enjoy a more seamless workflow as you integrate organic social marketing to improve your sales.
3. Omnichannel Alignment
A couple of decades ago, the main communication channels between you and your leads would have been limited to emails and phone calls. Today, however, there are dozens of touchpoints your target audience will use to educate themselves on your product or service, weigh up their options, and arrive at a purchasing decision.
The preference for omnichannel customer journeys won’t disappear any time soon, and you need to ensure your social CRM software reflects this reality.
By choosing a social CRM with an emphasis on omnichannel customer journeys, you’ll be able to create a more detailed, unified customer profile, which allows you to understand your customer relationships no matter where they’re developing.
If, for example, there’s a feature of your product you’re pushing through your Instagram marketing, and someone in your target audience asks about it through a tweet, omnichannel social CRM software will be able to highlight the connection between these interactions and give you a picture of the user’s complete customer journey.
This will allow you to understand the hot spots for awareness, consideration, and conversion, and provide a more personalized and relevant sales experience to different market segments.
4. AI and Automation Features
AI and automation technologies are changing the face of sales and marketing.
If you want to ensure the synergy between your social media and sales pipeline stays aligned with rapidly evolving standards in the niche, it’s important to look for social CRM software that makes use of AI and automation. When it’s applied in the right way, this kind of tech will empower you to improve efficiencies, pick up on important trends, and help you towards a more informed sales and marketing strategy.
AI’s potential to optimize your social selling is constantly evolving, and the brands who embrace these capabilities stand to gain a major advantage in the near future.
Some of the key applications for AI and automation in a social CRM setting include:
- AI-powered trend analysis to see how well your social media marketing is hitting targets such as impressions and engagement.
- AI sentiment analysis to distinguish positive and negative feedback, potential complaints, and areas for improvement.
- AI-powered lead scoring that compares profiles to predefined parameters and quickly highlights the leads who have the highest potential value.
- Advanced engagement analysis showing the days and times when your audience is most likely to engage with you, then using this data to build a consistent schedule that’s more likely to bring in leads from social.
5. Features to Help With Retargeting
Social media is a hive of activity, and with the sheer volume of brands, content, and ads, it’s not uncommon for prospects to interact with your brand once or twice, then suddenly go cold.
While on some occasions this is unavoidable, equipping yourself with a social CRM that’s geared towards retargeting can help you understand where you made a mistake, adjust your strategy for the future, and retarget lapsed leads to turn negative outcomes into positives.
Some of the social CRM software features that can help you with retargeting include:
- Detailed audience segmentation that can help you retarget ads with more personalized and impactful messages.
- Integration with AI-powered advertising and content creation tools, allowing you to feed key data points about your target audience and create messaging that’s more likely to resonate.
- Cross-platform engagement tracking so you know where leads tend to drop off, and how you can bring them back into the pipeline by focusing on these stages.
- Granular analytics that help you attribute metrics to your retargeting and make adjustments.
By keeping retargeting in mind while you’re weighing your options for social CRM software, you can equip your sales and marketing teams with all the data they need to retarget the right segment on the right platforms at the right time. This, in turn, will help you minimize the number of leads who slip through the net.
Finding Your Ideal Social CRM Software
A good social CRM software platform can make all the difference to the way you funnel contacts from simple social media interactions towards genuine engagement and conversion.
If you want to discover an intuitive social CRM software suite that exhibits all these traits and empowers your sales goals, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
