The main direction I believe of this course is “the new way of marketing” (Adams, M. 2018). This involves the usage of social CRM, which helps to combine all the info from social media analytics to determine how an organization may use this information for their best interests. With the correct use of CRM, companies can discover secrets and techniques to correctly engage with their audience and maintain efficient forecasts for market trends; if organizations use these tools properly, they can also predict behaviors of an individual. “The integration of social CRM into your organization’s marketing strategy will enable you to create exceptional experiences, products, and services for your customers simply by listening to them and acting on that information so you can see that social CRM is the new way of marketing” (Adams, M. 2018). The best way to manage your social CRM is with a set of tools, and there is a bunch of tools designed for specific scenarios so choosing what goes best for your operations must be picked carefully, that way you can monitor your customers while also receiving the best benefits towards your companies mission statement. When you are ready to introduce a social CRM framework into your business you must have appropriate resources as well, new technology is rather tricky to implement so having adequate resources, organizational support, and being able to identify any outliers or problems within your company will help profoundly when adopting new systems into your organization’s culture.
Develop Your Strategy
To maintain proper branding and social CRM, your business needs two critical criteria; these are humanization and personalization. Often a brand representative is a faceless identity with no personality, how can you have a conversation with some you do not honestly know? It is hard to have a conversation with a brand. This is where humanizing your brand comes in handy; this will shape your business and allow it to grow, giving it a much-needed personality lift to help ensure your customers want to continue to communicate with your organization. Secondly, for personalization, this is having your customers creating impacting ways it can connect with your business; it allows them to play with the brand and specifically have an impact on what happens and how things get done. An excellent example of this would be ordering through any fast food service, which allows you to earn rewards, customize products, and even get employees to call you out by your name. Your brand is there to help you as an organization is distinct from competitors, so using humanization and personalization, you can create a lasting impression with your customers. Organizations have limitless opportunities to be a well-known due to impacts of social CRM and branding, and even unknown customers can be highly involved with your brand if you can create marketing campaigns with social CRM in mind.
Manage Social CRM
“True influence drives action, not just awareness” (Baer, J). To expose your brand, you need to find networks with influencers that have thousands of followers. An influencer is “a form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field” (Wikipedia, 2020). You have the potential to expose your brand with just a simple blog, tweet, or post to thousands of users, and, if done correctly, will drive potential followers to your brand. Influencer marketings are so useful as it is reliable and cheap. Engagement is just another way an organization can continue to evolve their social CRM. With tools, you can create engaging actions that will lead your organization to the ideal customer, listening to what your customers are saying about you, and what they want or need from your business is just one of the many ways to help create an engaging business. This is valuable because it can lead your company to find more targets exposing your brand, similar to what influencers will do. Be careful when trying to make your brand more engaging, though, as customers can misinterpret many things. To create a successful brand, the best rule to follow is to value your customer, you want to show why they should be involved with your organization, and how you value their purchases. Creating value is not as hard as it seems with the right customer service team. If your brand already has a more humanization outlook, the interaction between the customer and the company should help maintain a long-lasting relationship. Your business has many ways to communicate in the age of the internet; whether it be landline, email, text, or internet, you will always have some way to have an interaction with customers. Social CRM integration is key to customer service as it will allow your management to resolve issues quickly, and will allow your employees to identify and understand issues the customers have. “When your digital customer service channels are fully integrated, agents can work simultaneously on email, social, live chat, while providing seamless support and a great multi-channel experience for the customer” (Adams, M. 2018).
Your Tools
Social CRM strategies are imperative for long term success within your organization. A strategy is usually created when efforts between an organization’s marketing team, sales department, and customer service are using resources to better engage with customers and to create better overall brand awareness; it is not only about gathering data. Every business will run different strategies for what suites their business, but more often now, companies are implementing social tools to help their organization. Your first goal is to always identify the evident problems and to figure out what goals you have. With the use of tools, you can not only identify problems within your organization, but you can also create a strategy that will have analytics, monitoring, and engagement with your customers. With analytics, you can create measurements that will enhance the overall customer experience, and see what type of interactions your company has with its customers.
Conclusion
I believe that social CRM is significant. An excellent example of it is when either a business or even a customer create a fan page for your company, product, or art. If someone has an interest in your product or brand, this is basically creating free awareness just by having a great social CRM business. If you create a way for customers to receive value while also integrating proper elements for branding, you will have a unique following and gain an advantage over your competitors. This does not always happen though; I would say more often, it is easier for your business to have social CRM if you are a video game, movie, tv-show, or anime company. The more appealing your product is, the more others will find a deep connection, this will always be seen as a benefit towards your business and its goals. That is how I feel anyway, as whenever I grow a connection towards something I enjoy, I have a more significant impact towards it than say my bottle of shampoo, so each company has to make sure they are competitive enough and have a great product to have a strong following.
References
Wikipedia Contributors. (2020, March 6). Influencer marketing. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing
(2010). Linkedin.Com. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-social-crm/process-documentation?u=2109516
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