Summary of “Social Media Marketing: Social CRM”

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In her video, Megan Adams how Social CRM helps businesses to better understand customers and conduct a better performance in marketing and sales.

Adams indicates that many organizations will utilize customer relationship management software to grow and scale the business. In this case, choosing a suitable CRM platform is an essential step. The first consideration of determining a CRM platform is purpose. What is the purpose of choosing a specific CRM platform: marketing or sales? The second point is the size of the platform. What kinds of service on this platform can provide?  Last, the compatibility of the platform. Can this platform integrate other services? Adams also brings in several platforms that can provide various services to businesses.

Social CRM as new technology can initiate opportunities and challenges at the same time. Adams provides some suggestions about the allocation of resources to ensure success:

1. Form a social CRM team with experiential staff.
2. Understand the decided CRM platform and design a reasonable budget.
3. Form a social CRM team with experiential staff.

Develop Your Strategy

Under this section, Adams discusses the way to develop the Social CRM strategy. For the organization, a brand is a powerful tool that can differentiate it from other competitors. Based on this function, when business is adopting Social CRM, it needs to develop the brand from two perspectives: humanization and personalization. The organization can involve in the communication within customers to enhance humanization and allow customers to build their own expertise to increase personalization.

After the discussion of the brand, Adams introduces how to set the rule of engagement. The rule of engagement is the foundation of social CRM’s management, execution, and handling. The standers are dependent on the organization, including the style of responding customers, guidelines for announcing company-wide issues, and the process of brand monitoring. Gathering information from these methods can be helpful to establish a transparent and engaged community with customers.

Social CRM changes the style marketers operate campaigns, especially in segmentation. Marketers are able to segment their target market by social CRM, such as job and age. Then, marketers can personalize campaigns based on various data. The campaigns are more effective and targeted. The result is the decrease in marketing costs and the increase in attention.

Manage Social CRM

When the organization has set up all the preparation of social CRM, it is time to manage it. The very first step is finding out the influencers and utilize their influence. She offers some tips about social media monitoring:

1. Ensure the audience and advocacy-how many people the influencer can reach.
2. Track the target hashtag-understand the posting style of the influencer.
3. Encourage the influencer to create content with the product- form an authentic relationship with the influencer.

Since social CRM is widely applied by the organization, there are more for it to engage and communicate with prospects. To approach the potential prospects, the organization should be able to display blueprint as complete of a picture of the prospect as possible. Compare to hard sales, allowing the prospects to understand the organization through social media. Monitoring the trending topics of the prospects to find out their pain. In the end, send a message to the prospects during a suitable timing for starting communication. All the effort is building a strong with the prospects.

Adams believes that social CRM is about customer retention in an environment that the customer feels comfortable interacting. The operation of social CRM includes many factors of customer service. In order to provide better customer service, the organization can monitor and understand the brand. Then, identify the customer’s problem and take action to solve it. Acknowledge the loyal customers and get a return (recognition).   Last, resolving the issues (negative feedback) through social media.

Your Toolkit

In this topic, Adams first emphasize the importance of process documentation and introduce how to do it. In order to prepare effective process documentation, the organization needs to ensure the issues of the business process. Next, establishing a connection with customers through new technology. The last step is providing more personal communication via various media. The organization should pay more attention to the process and based on this to choose a suitable tool.

After all the data are well organized, it is time to analyze them.  Adams provides some recommendation about how to analyze the data from social CRM:

1. Always focus on customer feedback from different channels to track the engagement.
2. Evaluate customer lifetime value and gain insights into the real value of a customer relationship.

Conclusion

From this lecture, the thing that most impressed me is the rule of engagement. As mentioned in the video, more and more customer service is provided via social media. In this case, the performance in responding is essential. In my Pubic Relation course, I have a social media audit assignment require me to track two companies’ social account in seven days. My choices are Starbucks and Tim Hortons and I find that the performance on responding can affect the engagement significantly. An active social account of an organization can builds a positive brand image and create add-on benefits on the brand. One of the significant effects is the followers of Starbucks are much more than Tim Hortons. The result is Starbucks has more interaction with current/potential customers and uses this interaction to improve the organization. “The most crucial aspect of Social CRM is ensuring swift, relevant responses to customer queries” (Act! Blog, 2017). For organizations, setting an effective rule of engagement is to create a more approachable first impression to customers.

Reference

LinkedIn Learning. (2018, April 11). Social Media Marketing: Social CRM. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-social-crm/welcome?u=2109516

Act! Blog. (2017). Social CRM: How customer support can benefit from social media. Retrieved from https://www.act.com/act-blog/post/blog/2017/05/26/social-crm-how-customer-support-can-benefit-from-social-media