As your business grows, so too does the importance of marketing analytics. An effective marketing...
Any business owner that's looking to grow their customer base knows that marketing is key to achieving that goal. However, if you're running marketing campaigns without first implementing a CRM, you may end up wasting a significant amount of money on campaigns you can't effectively attribute to revenue - especially if you're offering B2B products or services with a longer sales cycle.
Here are some ways a marketing CRM helps you get the most out of your marketing efforts and run more effective marketing campaigns:
Customer data storage
If you don't have a CRM, where are you storing your customer data? A paper ledger like it's 1923 instead of 2023? A spreadsheet? Even if it's stored inside an email marketing system like Mailchimp, you're not going to be able to get your customer data to work hard for you without a system dedicated to keeping track of where your customers and prospects are in their buying process - and what kind of relationship they have with your business.
Marketing automation
If a person fills out a form on your website and nobody knows it happened, are they still a lead? Marketing automation solves this problem by making sure that your marketing team knows a conversion happened, what kind of conversion it was, and where the contact needs to go next.
A CRM makes it easy to automate marketing tasks such as lead processing and qualification. Additionally, many CRM platforms (such as HubSpot and Keap) include marketing automation functions natively and don't require the addition of separate marketing automation software to the technology stack.
Email marketing
Without a CRM, you have no way of storing customer contact information in a way that can be used for email marketing, which is one of the most effective strategies for converting top-of-funnel prospects into customers and increasing existing customer accounts. While it is possible to upload a contact list into a stand-alone email marketing platform, it is challenging to segment them in a way that enables effective email marketing campaigns. Additionally, that database will not always be up to date and your ability to automate email campaigns will be limited, so you could end up sending irrelevant offers to existing customers or prospects that are already deep down the funnel.
Revenue attribution
Do you know how much revenue your marketing campaigns are generating? If the answer is "no," you may not be spending as efficiently. While large-scale brand campaigns without a direct ROI tie-in are not a challenge for large companies with huge budgets (and those campaigns are simply measured against different KPIs), smaller companies need every marketing dollar to go as far as possible.
A CRM makes it easy to see which channels and campaigns are generating opportunities and customers, which is particularly important when running paid advertising campaigns. It also gives sales teams a place to keep track of the leads and deals their working on and enables standardization of the sales process, but the benefits of a CRM for sales teams are a topic for another post.
Which Marketing CRM Should You Choose?
For these and other reasons, a CRM is one of the most important marketing tools to have. Above is just a quick look at the many reasons why you shouldn't be marketing without a CRM. However, choosing the right CRM solution for your business may be challenging given the wide variety of options available on the market today - each with their benefits and limitations.
I'm partial to HubSpot because of its modern UI and affordable entry point, but the jump from the starter package to their pro package is significant. Other good potential options include Keap and Monday (if you're not an enterprise-level company, you'd do well to stay away from Salesforce).
Need help picking a CRM or implementing the platform of your choice? Get in touch today for a quick consultation about your needs and challenges.
