Considering a move to modern marketing? Before jumping in there are a few fundamentals that you will want to have in place in order to optimize the experience. As I mentioned in my post Digital Marketing Technology, today's technology enables extremely effective marketing capabilities. As a marketer the core element is your Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). That investment could be dollars or time. Let us not forget the argument of ROI on Social Media. Is it worth the time? Can you afford to hire someone devoted solely to social and social marketing? If you lay the proper groundwork for modern marketing, obtaining answers to these questions becomes easy.
There are three pieces of technology that you must have in order to execute modern marketing. Consider it the plumbing for which everything you do moving forward is built from.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - A good CRM solution would always be my first step. CRM enables you to do many things, most importantly build a relationship with your customers. It provides visibility into the interactions with prospective customers and tracks the lifetime value of those who do business with you. Another important aspect of CRM is customer service. If your customers have issues with your product, the history and resolution can be logged and assigned to people within the organization who can help them. Lastly all marketing touches with your customers are maintained in CRM. From emails, direct mail, walk-in traffic, or phone calls each marketing or lead source is managed and tracked.In terms of which CRM product is right for you, there are many solutions on the market. Salesforce.com is where I would start.
- Email Management | Customer Database - When you make the transition to modern marketing the first thing you are going to regret is not having kept an active marketing database to communicate with. The second regret may be that you did not segment this list. Today, products like Eloqua from Oracle or Marketo provide powerful marketing automation, email management, and segmentation capabilities. These solutions connect to popular CRM solutions like Salesforce.com and starts the flow of information gathered from a marketing campaign into your CRM for lead generation. These solutions are also the delivery mechanism for your marketing campaigns, lead nurturing, and content marketing for lead generation.
- Social Relationship Management (SRM) - Modern Marketing would not be all that modern without social. Like Eloqua or Marketo, a good SRM does much more than what is covered here, however the basic point is SRM drives the ROI on social. SRM makes listening to conversations about your brand or products easier. Provides the ability to launch social campaigns, pull social data into your marketing database, and assign social comments or customer service follow up to the right people. These tasks become incredibly manageable with a good SRM tool. Lastly, social analytics and reporting is all at your fingertips making it easy to report on how effective your social efforts are.Good tools to look at for SRM include Oracle Social Cloud, Socialware, and Sprinklr to name a few.
Regardless of the size of your business, each of these tools are scalable and affordable. Each provide the next layer to help you market your business and most importantly build a relationship with your customers. So whether you are just starting a business or looking to make the transition into modern marketing, these three foundational products will take your marketing capabilities to a new level.
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