The CRM. This static, massive, unchanging dungeon tower holding of your Data.
This is the image most still have about it. But if you do work with a CRM, you know how wrong this image is: your CRM is constantly changing.
A constantly changing tool
Just look back at what happened in the last 25 years:
- During the 90's, our modern CRM reached its mature form, centralizing and linking all the data of your customers in a global Single Customer View.
- During the years 2000, a new channel, the Email, was successfully assimilated, bringing the prospects(subscribers to the newsletter) into the Single Customer View, and transforming our good old CRM into aneCRM.
- In a similar way, the years 2010 are seeing the appropriation of a new channel, the Social Media. We are progressively bringing the fans into the global view, making our eCRM evolving again, this time to becomeSocial CRM.
And it's not finished: there are plenty of new channels out there, and their turn will come eventually: mobile, local, wearable, connected objects...
But stop for a moment. Have you ever asked yourself why these integrations and evolutions?
After all, if you ask the Social Media Manager, he is not directly in need of this. His objectives are defined in terms of likes, shares & fans. Plugging his channel to the CRM is not a priority to reach them.
One step higher in the hierarchy, the Marketing Manager is usually not demanding either. He often asks his Social Marketing to be better than the one of the competition: "They have 1 million fans? Let's try to have 2 by the end of the year!"
No, if one wants to understand why new channels are to be integrated in the Single Customer View, he needs to aim even higher: toward the CEO of the company.
The CEO and the budget attribution problem
The CEO is responsible for a very important task of the company: attributing the available budget between all the possible channels, actions, and campaigns.
And, regardless of the sector or the wealth of the company, he knows one thing for sure:
The budget of the company is not infinite.
This has an impact on the way he is going to spend his money:
- First, money goes to the core business of the company.
- Then, a small portion of the remaining budget is invested in Innovation, where ROI is not guaranteed and a loss an acceptable risk.
- Finally, the remaining budget is spread between all the possible options with one golden rule:
Winners will be funded, Losers won't.
Each channel must therefore justify his revenue, his gains, his ROI, in order to be funded.
Let's see how it goes for a new channel such as Social Media:
- As a new channel, it is experimented in the company, funded by the innovation budget. His results are measured by non-financial metrics.
- Then, as social media becomes routine and new channels appear, the innovation budget is switched elsewhere.
- In order to continue being funded, Social Media needs to prove that he is earning more than what it cost.
The ROI of Social Media
Here. The primordial question is asked:
How do I prove the ROI of my Social Campaigns in order to be funded?
We know how much our Social Media Strategy costs: it is the sum of all the human, machine and external costs related to the Social Media Campaigns.
But how much does it bring back? 2 million fans? Well, that's nice, but linking financial costs to non-financial outcomes is all but a true ROI relationships.
In order to mean anything, the financial costs must be linked to financial results: revenues, or cost reductions.
If you talk about revenue, you talk about sales, about orders, about clients.
And where is all this information? You guessed already. Inside our CRM.
This is why, in order to calculate a true ROI of the Social Media channel, with the final objective of continuing being funded, the Social Media needs to be integrated into the CRM, which needs to evolve into a Social CRM.
The 3 challenges of Social integration
Integrating the Social Media channel into the Social CRM won't be easy. Three major problems need to be addressed:
- The Link Problem
Linking has always been the core challenge of each version of the CRM: link between a customer and his orders or between a prospect and his email addresses. Here, the challenge is to link a Facebook ID, a Twitter handler or any other social handler to one individual of the CRM, most of the time using the email as an intermediary link.
This is not a trivial problem, as the link between the individuals and the social IDs can be a n-n link.
Sometimes it will be possible to automatize this link, via Facebook Login or other APIs. But sometimes you'll have to do it manually, on your own or with Community Managers and PR specialists.
- The Storage Problem
The data you're going to store in your social CRM is going to be quite different to the one you already have: friendship links, page liked, influence score, messages and sentiments...
You'll need to be sure to create the right structures to store this information, and to access it in an easy way. You'll also have to be prepared to constantly update this information in order to keep it relevant.
- The Real Time Reaction Problem
Email speeded up the marketing reaction time. Social Media makes it even more real-time. More than a storage point, the Social CRM becomes a real Data Hub. It needs to capture data, to process it and to immediately trigger a response. This is where Big Data comes into play. Not necessary to process more data, but to process it faster and avoid missing the right moments.
Solve these 3 problems, and your Social CRM will be a success.
Where do we go from here?
These were only the first steps of your Social Media CRM.
Once implemented, a new world of possibilities opens in front of your Marketing Strategy.