Marketing Blog Post #4 – Social Media Marketing: Social CRM

Social Customer Relationship Management (Social CRM). This term is becoming more and more popular among businesses worldwide. Online strategies and Social Media posts are quickly becoming the most popular way that companies engage with their consumers. By having an effective and relatable Social SRM strategy, companies are engaging and providing the best customer service they can in the most popular way.

Get Started

Social CRM begins by focusing on answering the question Adams poses of “how do you add Social CRM to your business strategy?” (2018). This small questions lead Adams to provide detailed insight into Social CRM and how it can benefit or hinder a company’s relationship with its consumers.

She explains that Social CRM is a process that requires not only leadership support, strategy alignment and changes in processes, but it is very heavy in analytics and data interpretation in order to be successful (2018). The eventual benefits of a Social CRM would be boosted sales, streamlined marketing and outstanding customer service (Adams, 2018). Clearly, the companies that are already using a Social CRM and have developed online relationships with their customers are already leaps and bounds ahead of those companies that are not.

This social engagement and relationship development comes from interacting on Social Media platforms. This interaction between provider and consumer quickly becomes personal (as most things do on Social Media) and can completely affect the relationship that consumers have with the brand, company and/or merchandise.

Develop Your Strategy

Developing a strategy for a successful use of Social CRM’s is crucial. It comes from building a quality Social CRM team that can humanize and personalize their marketing, strategy and interactions whilst using Social Media (Adams, 2018).

Now, what is humanizing and personalizing, couldn’t they be perceived as the same thing? Well, Adams in 2018 explains that if companies are able to humanize (create brand/company personality) and develop conversations as well as personalize (customize each customer interaction) then these companies are acknowledging the Social Media keys to success.

People do not like feeling that they are ‘one-in-a-million’, they like to imagine that they they are the ‘only-one-in-a-million’. Companies that create a personal and humanized interaction with all of their customers via Social Media are paving their way to creating successful relationships with their customers.

Managing Social CRM

One of the most effective ways to have an effective Social Media presence and progressive CRM is to have active and respected influencers (Adams, 2018). By doing this you create an audience that is relevant to your brand and enhances customer engagement (Adams, 2018).

Influencers assist in Social CRM by providing companies with a way to understand their customers and needs expressed by them. It provides much needed analytics to measure, interpret and possibly change.

One industry that has particularly benefited from having effective and trusted influencers is the Beauty Industry. Beauty influencers have such an expansive and dedicated reach of followers that using them drives action from consumers. These consumers usually were with the influencer before they became an influencer. This trusted relationship evolves and provides companies with an opportunity to ‘test’ products and methods to receive honest and valued feedback.

An example of this is the Beauty influencer Shaaanxo. Personally, I began viewing her YouTube videos in 2014 when she was a young adult just doing make-up tutorials. Now, Shaaanxo is a respected beauty brand with Shannon having her own products, make-up line and massive following for providing information on other beauty products marketed internationally. Below on the left is the first video I ever watched of hers, which had around 90,000 views and 1,300 likes. Now, head to a video posted in January, her following has not only increased in 8 years, but so has the interaction that followers have; 135,000 views and 5,800 likes.

Her opinion, view and values all are evident when product testing or referrals. Her influence on her followers is tremendous and is used by many Beauty Industry companies to date. Key Social Influencers are crucial in driving online and social media sales.

Your Toolkit

In order to be successful with Social Media CRM, companies must ways to document processes and determine success criteria (Adams, 2018). To do this, businesses need to focus on metrics, interfaces, documentation and, again, alignment with business strategies (Adams, 2018). Adams also encourages companies to specifically focus on unique frameworks and goals for their organization (2018).

One important tool that Adams continually addresses throughout the videos is the opportunity Social CRM provides companies to develop direct relationships with consumers (2018). Social CRM is an immediate feedback process that allows employers to be ‘on-top-of’ feedback, concerns, complaints and recommendations. The generations using Social Media are used to instantaneous feedback and my companies recognizing this it allows for a unique and manageable relationship.

Conclusion

By being available online, organizations have set up to be accessed instantaneously. This can be through Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messages, Chat windows on company websites, etc. By doing this, customer relationships are managed quickly and, usually, effectively.

Anyone who uses the internet and social media has experienced the weird coincidence of researching a product, maybe on Amazon, and then later that day, seeing advertisements for that same product on your social media feeds. This is from companies having specific customer profiles that allow for the most effective advertising and interactions between companies and consumers.

Although I understand that for companies, this unique tracking tool takes the guess-work out of advertising to certain people, it also feels very much like an invasion of privacy. I think that effective Social Media CRM should work to improve this perception to allow for an even more effective Social CRM framework.

References

Adams, M. (2018, April). Social media marketing: Social CRM, video recording, LinkedIn Learning.  

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash