Your company and brand might have the most powerful sales and marketing strategy in place. Still, if it is not integrated correctly and used in isolation from various other touchpoints, it’s bound to leave an adverse impression on your audience.
In a world where the focus has drastically shifted towards social media marketing strategies and where omnichannel customer experiences are becoming the projected standard and norm, one can simply not afford to detach their social media from other departments and touchpoints.
This is why social customer relationship management (SCRM) has become crucial for companies that want to unify and streamline the customer experience.
What Is Social CRM?
It is a must for the valuable insights gathered from social interactions to be available and accessible to various departments since customer data from other departments can prove to be invaluable to your social media team.
Social CRM plays a vital role in linking multiple social media platforms with your CRM system, providing all team members a comprehensive record of all interactions with prospects or existing customers, including those on social media channels. This indicates that all your social connections can turn into actual leads.
Your initial contact with a potential social media lead is not the ideal time to pursue a hard and impactful sale. Still, if you don’t have ab effective way of tracking your prospects, it’s hard to foster a relationship of some kind and work towards a sale in the long term.
Integrating social media within your CRM can give you a more comprehensive picture of your social marketing strategy’s success. Customer interactions on social media channels can be well associated with profitable business outcomes such as a subscription or a purchase.
In addition, Social CRM data allows you to form a highly targeted custom audience for social ads. Your current customers’ characteristics are ideal for looking for similar audiences.
While it might often be challenging to differentiate the hype around the different social media channels and the genuine value it brings with them, you must remember that social CRM does not ask you to reinvent your business or forget everything you already know.
It merely adds a social dimension to how you perceive your audience and your relationship with them. Until recently, the social media activity of prospects and customers has been a closed book to some extent, simply being a mode of communication that is hard to measure, track, improve, or plan.
However, social CRM has changed the way things work. By adding the key social media channels and integrating them with your current CRM system, you can merge everything you already know about your customer, lead, and prospect with new data regarding their activity.
Moreover, when someone contacts you via social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, you can manage and keep track of the conversation in as much detail as possible. This way, you can respond more effectively, act faster, and project your customers’ needs.
Traditional CRM vs Social CRM: Clarification of the Concepts
First and foremost, it’s essential to differentiate the concept between social and traditional CRMs. This awareness will provide you an excellent basis for further comparison. Traditional CRM is a business strategy that appeared in a set of apps.
The software automates marketing and sales processes, boosts data management, and aids in observing customers’ communication histories and behavior patterns. The core of the traditional CRM model is stated in the standardized performance that utilizes input information as a basis.
On the other hand, Social CRM is a more novel approach to fostering trustworthy relationships with prospects and existing customers and fulfilling the strategy of business process facilitation.
Its unique point comprises modifying the content into a meaningful and complete conversation with prospects that occurs over digital networks and social media channels. Hence, instead of uninvolved messages and cold calling, the dynamic interaction with prospects and leads makes social CRM stand out.
How Does A Traditional CRM Differ From A Social CRM?
Traditional CRM differs from Social CRM in many different ways. Still, the two most prominent ways in which it differs are the central strategy and the difference in customer interaction.
| Traditional CRM | Social CRM | |
| The Central Strategy | This refers to gathering, managing, and acting on customer information. In a traditional CRM, the communications that take place with consumers are mainly transactions, whether it is a sales representative trying to finalize a deal or a customer support agent aiding customers in resolving their queries or complaints. | This refers to brand exposure and customer engagement without hard selling. Most of these interactions ignite an interest in your company, brand, and product offerings or services. As a result, the conversation regarding the trending social issues or customer interests is initiated. |
| The Difference in Customer Interaction | In a traditional CRM, businesses regulate the flow of conversations via standard communication mediums and pre-set time slots, which are mostly confined to their working hours. | In social CRM, social media has complete control and power over businesses and places it in the customers’ hands. You allow them to start a conversation or discussion and interact with your business at their convenience and leisure. |
Overall Sales Strategy Trends in the Current Market
Before seeing which of the two customer relationship management strategies works best for you, it’s essential to understand the overall sales strategy trends in the current market.
A key to doing this is to know what lies in the future for technology and what’s coming in economics, demographics, and regulations, and how this impacts sales in the present day and future.
There are numerous ways in which the sales world is transforming. Having said this, here are some of the sales strategy trends that can be observed in the current market.
Trend 1: Finding the Growth in Micro Markets
Using a geographical hammer to all their customer and market data, sales leaders section more significant markets into smaller ones, where opportunities can be explored in detail through microsegments, prospects, and new customer segments.
Trend 2: Capturing Value from Big Data and Advanced Analytics
Indeed, the majority of sales forces boast a significant amount of information at their fingertips now compared to a couple of years back. However, acquiring in-depth insights from this data and making them realistic and actionable is a lot more challenging.
Sales leaders who get it right tend to make more efficient decisions, polish sales growth strategies, and get in-depth insights into deals and sales opportunities. The drastic shift that can be observed today comes from the historical data analysis to using data to be more extrapolative.
To begin, you must have intelligent data scientists who can help you mine the data and people with business proficiency to convert this into something salespeople can act upon. As a result, sales representatives will know exactly which customers to see, what to say, when, and what to offer them.
Trend 3: Outsourcing the Sales Function
Another trending sales strategy consists of outsourcing certain parts of the sales value chain. What’s relatively new nowadays is that thanks to automation, third-party vendors can now operate a firm’s whole end-to-end sales process, starting from demand generation to customer acquisition and order fulfillment.
These firms are aware of your target segments and take advantage of big data to identify leads. They market to various segments using various platforms and then match their sales representatives to customers based on the possibility of converting that individual.
Trend 4: Collaborating More Closely With Marketing
Sales and marketing might appear closely tied, but their relationship can often appear lopsided. For instance, sales mainly dominate in the B2B sectors while marketing rules in B2C.
According to research for Sales Growth, 61% of firms with both functions enjoy high profitability and deliver above-market revenue growth. It’s vital for your sales and marketing strategy to be properly aligned so that they both comprehend the buyers they’re targeting and their journey.
Both sales and marketing produce significant volumes of invaluable information on customer preferences and segments. Still, the flow of those insights tends to be from marketing to sales. In the worst-case scenario, failure to collaborate can be bad for your company’s performance.
Trend 5: Adopting Automation and Artificial Intelligence
In research with the McKinsey Global Institute, it was discovered that 40% of tasks within the conventional sales function are able to be automated. With the rapid growth in technology, this can well reach up to 50%. A terrific example of this is lead generation.
Despite having CRM systems in place, companies with more than 75% of leads can be observed not being followed up on. They’re potential leads that companies have already spent money and time on but then not approached further.
When a handful of these firms started using AI (artificial intelligence) for their lead generation, the results were brilliant, depicting a 100% touch rate. AI can keep these leads in tach and even make the first introduction.
This is merely one sales aspect that AI can assist you in. There are several other reasons why AI and automation can be used in the more complicated parts of the sales process.
Trend 6: Social Prospecting
Finally, an effective and efficient sales firm must check out every avenue in its expedition to comprehend prospects and customers. It’s vital for sellers to comprehend the individual customers, buyers, influencers, and decision-makers in their own unique ways, followed by who owns the budget and what they think about their organization.
A substantial chunk of this can be learned through what they share and express on different social media platforms and in various ways: general discussions, expressing opinions and concerns, and asking for help.
Various customer acquisition and advertising channels can be used to attract people to visit your website, engage, and turn into customers. With more than 4.89 billion active social media users worldwide projected in 2023, there are no overlooking social media’s possibilities for businesses.
There’s a significant number of potential customers they can reach. Social media is so popular as it connects you to an entire community of like-minded people.
However, there’s so much more to it than social media can do. One of the most important ways businesses can use it is to acquire more customers. Undoubtedly, traditional sales practices such as cold calling are no longer as effective as they used to be.
On the other hand, social media is constantly evolving as a primary source of prospects and lead generation, making it an effective and efficient way of nurturing them into becoming your customers. It does it through social prospecting, which is an easier and free way of connecting to a wider audience that your brand can help.
What Is Social Prospecting And How It Helps With Social Selling?
Social prospecting is a novel and more innovative practice of using social selling that uses social media platforms to research, find, engage, and interact with prospects. This includes practically all social media channels you can envision; chances are this is where you’ll come across prospective customers.
Due to the significant changes in the purchase process in recent years, sales teams are driven now more than ever to try to implement novel strategies to create more long-lasting and meaningful relationships. Social selling is the best way to achieve this.
Social selling is all about finding and engaging with your existing customers and prospects online. You are social selling every time you log in to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and any other social media channel to find new prospects, communicate with them, share relevant content, and add value by responding to their concerns and queries.
Suffice to say, social prospecting works better than ever, more than any other sales strategy trend that has been going on. When done right, social selling can quickly, easily, and effectively replace the exhausting practice of cold calling.
Here are a couple of reasons to implement the practice of social prospecting and use social selling strategies for prospecting on social media platforms.
- It speeds up the relationship-building process.
- It creates a sense of trust with prospects and existing customers.
- It helps salespeople in producing leads and prospecting.
If you fail to take advantage of social media in this age within your digital marketing strategy, you’re truly missing out on an inexpensive, fast, effective, and efficient way of reaching almost half of the world’s population.
There are also many ways to scale your business if you equip your sales team with it. First, the more prospects you find, identify, and interact with via social prospecting techniques, the higher the number of warm leads you can generate and, therefore, new business.
Moreover, with the help of social selling tools and strategies, it becomes easier to determine who to target, when, and with what message. The email content and timing of your outreach greatly impact the response rates. This ultimately allows you to reduce the cost of acquiring customers by over 50%.
Why Social CRM Works Better Than Traditional CRM for Some Companies
Social CRM offers an entirely different set of benefits than traditional CRM in the sense it targets prospects via social media channels and gives them a more accessible and convenient customer service, along with a more tailored marketing strategy. Social has brought about a new element in customer relationship management.
Businesses now have to deal with relationships and conversations instead of just information and data, as in traditional CRM. These relationships and conversations take place from consumer to consumer and company to consumer. For instance, suppose you own a large brand on Twitter or Facebook.
Using social CRM, you’re building relationships with your followers while also having the ability to establish a solid, meaningful, and lasting relationship with them and listening to customers that are discussing your brand.
Besides this, it’s vital to note that traditional CRM focuses on gathering and managing existing customer data. It uses direct advertising to gather customer information to target campaigns at specific consumers, improve sales, and aims to retain customers.
Additionally, it has automated customer service, and customers usually share their experiences and feedback with a brand via word-of-mouth.
Social CRM, on the other hand, works better for most companies because it’s more of a strategy for customer engagement. It tracks sales communication between a company and its customers and interactions via social media and review platforms.
It creates a pathway to prospects, allows customers to share their feedback and experiences with millions of other people, and provides expedited customer service via a consumer’s most preferred social media platform.
In addition, Social CRM tools utilize several metrics such as engagement, traffic, brand mentions, and level of followers to gauge the level of successful customer engagement.
Examples and Benefits of Social CRM
Firms depend on social CRM to gather information on customers, interact with prospects and new customers, and establish customer loyalty.
It also helps them categorize customers based on their purchase history, buying patterns and needs, habits, and feedback on your offerings, which allows you to design and deliver a more personalized customer service and experience.
Here’s how Social CRM can be viewed in action:
- Businesses can quickly get data out to anyone interested in their company or its products/services.
- A business or even a customer creates a fan page for your product or company on Facebook. People who come across your page and like your brand and the way you do business will generate more followers, creating a platform for marketing, communication, and networking.
- Customers can easily tell about their experience(s) with the company, be it positive or negative, and share it with everyone.
- Businesses can keep track of conversations about their brand for real-time market data and feedback.
- Customers can use social networking sites to share ideas for upcoming products or modifications to existing ones.
- Businesses can instantly respond to negative feedback, maintain, rebuild, or regain customer audiences, and attend to customer concerns using social media monitoring tools.
In order to benefit from unexpected gains, companies must try using both traditional and social CRM as a combination if CRM is absolutely essential for them.
Social CRM Tools
Social media is now a terrific medium for brands and businesses to connect with the public. At present, there are various social media management tools that slide into more significant CRM platforms. Regarding the best social CRM tools and software, there are endless choices.
Here at SocialEpoch, we take great pride in providing the best social selling solutions for businesses with sales teams, high average order value, and long customer journeys. That said, here are two social CRM tools we will explore in detail and how they can help you in social selling.
1. Whatsapp SCRM
WhatsApp SCRM is an innovative and fast-evolving software solution that can be deployed both on-premise and online and can be accessed from various platforms.
Here at SocialEpoch, our WhatsApp SCRM tool comprises an all-inclusive marketing and sales technology from which all Businesses with sales teams can significantly benefit. Its core features include:
- Multi Login
- Auto-Translate And Auto Reply
- User Persona
- Smart Group Chatbot
- Bulk Sender
- Ai Data Mining
- Task Assigning And Collab Follow-Ups
- Group And Contact Management
- One-Click Data Transfer
- Chats History And Stats
2. Facebook SCRM
Integrating your CRM or another customer system with Facebook can aid businesses in making sure the leads you generate via your Facebook lead ad campaigns are followed up orderly and might produce a higher conversion rate.
Here at SocialEpoch, our Facebook SCRM, a.k.a. Facebook Marketing Automation Tool, is a one-stop social media publicity platform from which all businesses with sales teams can profoundly benefit. It offers numerous features that enable you to generate leads and prospects on Facebook. Its core features include:
● Multi-login
- Run hundreds of accounts on a single device
- Virtual machine supported, create a completely separate browser environment
● Content Spread
- Auto mass
- Sharing
- Posting
- Listing on marketplace
- Deleting/joining groups
- Direct messaging
- Commenting
● Data Collection
- Automatically gather marketplace sellers, groups, pages, ad pages, and users who post and like/comment on posts on specific pages and within groups.
● Auto Reply
- Significantly boost work efficiency.
- Reply with corresponding content against the set keywords automatically.
● Smart Lead Generation
- Automatically get prospects from competitors’ pages.
- Gather users who comment/post with specific keywords on pages.
● Stats and Insights
- Stats of all posts, comments, links, pages, groups, etc.
- Estimated traffic and exposure
By connecting, converting, and closing with SocialEpoch Social Selling Solutions, you can rest assured to see a significant and positive impact on the line of your company.
