Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach out to new leads. That said, it’s also an excellent tool to strengthen your connection with existing customers.
It involves creating blog posts, video content, social media posts, and other forms of consumable content for your customers online.
There are a lot of tools that can help you create more effective content marketing strategies. One that’s an unlikely ally for your marketing campaigns has to be customer relationship management software, better known as CRM.
What Is CRM?
To put it simply, CRM software is a simple and secure database of client details, company records, and account information. This is just a gist of what it does, though. In reality, the best CRM software for business also involves a wide selection of tools and features that do a lot more.
It helps you build better and stronger relationships with your customers by making crucial data readily available. Its main purpose might be to establish rapport, but it can also help create personalized and effective marketing strategies.
Content marketing is all about creating content that people want to see. Having a deeper knowledge of who your customers are really matters.
With that, let’s dive deeper into how CRM software helps you create effective content marketing strategies.
1. Understand your target audience more
The most important purpose of CRM software for content marketing is its ability to help you understand your audience better. This, on its own, is a good enough reason to invest in CRM software. What good is a content marketing strategy if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach out to?
Data such as buying and browsing habits, age, gender, location, and more are all crucial. These allow you to create marketing campaigns that are effective.
For instance, through CRM, you’ll know which platforms your audience use for brand discovery and shopping. With this knowledge, you’ll have a better idea of what your approach would be. Additionally, you’ll also know which outlets to focus your content on.
2. Keep better track of content marketing results
One of the advantages of content marketing is that the results are easy to track. Some of those crucial metrics include:
- Mobile traffic
- Leads
- Conversion rates
- CPL (cost per lead)
- SQL (sales qualified leads)
- MQL (marketing qualified leads)
- Sales revenue
- And more…
There are CRM features that let you keep track of these results too. Aside from that, you’ll also have access to a set of analysis tools that let you do more with the data that you have.
Say the results reveal that you’ve made more customers through the content on Facebook. What this means on your end is that you should put more effort into that platform because that’s where your business is most visible.
Analyzing results is crucial as it helps you adjust your content marketing strategy to where it matters.
Such features also help you see which marketing campaigns are more effective. Eventually, you’ll find the perfect template for your future content marketing campaigns. That means you’ll be putting less effort into making effective strategies.
3. Personalized content at your whim
With the data that you get from CRM software, you have the capacity to create more personalized content for your customers. People love personalized content as it makes them feel like companies care about their needs and want – not just their money.
Another reason is that people online tend to avoid information overload. Instead of reading through texts upon texts on a website, they prefer to choose to read the information they already need. Personalization means reaching out to your audience by answering their questions.
CRM software helps out with this by understanding your customer’s browsing habits.
- What questions are they asking online?
- What are they searching for?
- What time do they mostly browse?
By basing your content on these criteria, you have a better chance at making successful conversions out of those website visits.
Of course, personalization means also reaching out to people directly. Why wait for them to search for your content when you can bring the content to them? This is why content marketing goes so well with CRM software and email marketing.
The best CRM software for business includes trackers that are helpful for email and content marketing. With it, you can:
- Check when a target opens your email
- See what links or content are clicked on your email
- Constantly engage with existing and possible customers
- Encourage conversions through messages that show your products and services
Personalization is the heart and soul of any effective marketing campaign. People hate spam, and the only way for them to avoid seeing your content as such is through personalization.
4. Streamline your marketing process
CRM software involves automation. This is the process in which some of your tasks are done automatically based on set standards. Automation is important for growing businesses as it helps take a huge load off of the various processes, thereby allowing you to focus on other tasks instead.
Automation also helps you guide your customers through the entire purchasing journey. That process involves:
- Finding leads and converting them
- Nurturing target with constant engagement and quality content
- Turning target into buying customers
Like other marketing strategies, content marketing involves numerous steps. Those include analyzing your audience and their browsing habits, as well as studying the results of previous campaigns.
CRM software can help automate a majority of these processes. This helps you focus more on doing the most important task – creating the content itself.
5. Start spending less on campaigns
Marketing campaigns can be costly. As such, you should always aim for doing more with the budget that you have. Without the right data and tools as a guide, your content marketing strategy could be inefficient. You might be targeting the wrong people without the right information.
What happens to your leads then?
CRM software brings you closer to your customers. Understanding their demographics and habits lets you create campaigns that are more effective. Efficiency is key, after all.
Why spend thousands of dollars on a campaign when you can spend a lot less reaching out to people who are more valuable to your business?
6. Reach new markets
Lastly, CRM software doesn’t just help you retain customers. It can also help you find new ones as well.
Increasing your customer base is hard without the right set of tools. Even if you do manage to find them, the next hurdle would be to capitalize on those leads.
With great content, of course.
Most businesses are content with their current customer base. It would always be better to start reaching out to more people. There are opportunities that you can be missing out on after all. Thanks to CRM software’s suite of features, that process becomes a lot easier to do.
Content marketing and CRM software go just as well as bread and butter. For business owners like you, this is an opportunity to start creating effective content marketing strategies easily.
Understandably, investing in a new campaign and CRM software seems like a tall order. However, factor in the potential ROI and the long-term effect it has on your customer relationship, and you’ll see that it’s a step worth taking.