CRM and Ad Goals: Connecting the Sales Funnel
The importance of long-term relationships with customers is not fully appreciated by most businesses and their leaders. Having new customers sounds more attractive than having old ones. I would rather use Tinder than eHarmony on a lighter note.
Your current bills are paid by your old customers. Hopefully, as your business grows, you will be able to collect payments from new customers.
The journey to purchase is the same for every prospective customer. So, you must meet the customer where they are once you’ve established your market segment and target market. In 1898, American Advertising Advocate E.St. Elmo Lewis introduced the Purchase Funnel, also known as the AIDA model.
Personal selling and traditional advertising used the Sales Funnel in the 19th and early 20th century. Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, for example, are all forms of digital advertising that are still evolving.
The B2B marketing community laments the “long” sales cycle, and the B2C industry constantly reinvents product, price, place, and promotion in an effort to outperform their competition. Keeping a business running requires a paying customer.
All paying customers are entered into a business’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Using the history of these customers’ transactions, we will examine Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value (RFM).
This post explains how Customer Journey, CRM, and Advertising Goals are connected because businesses should care deeply about their existing customer data.
Google Ads certification training typically illustrates the three advertising goals using a three-stage customer journey. The last step is to link the types of data a CRM can collect from first parties.
Advertising Goals map to Informing, but CRM can’t capture it
In order to build brand awareness, the Marketer must identify the most appropriate segment of the market to target. The brand doesn’t work if the target market doesn’t know about it. The first goal of advertising is to reach your target audience.
Cold databases are discouraged by CAN-SPAM, unless you are contacting members of a publically accessible group and are also a member. Usually, small businesses can contact other members using the membership directory of a Chamber of Commerce.
It is important to track the open and click rates on your emails in cases like this in order to measure the success of your Awareness/Inform goals. The contact details of those who saw your display and video ads are not available in both Google and Facebook advertising.
In summary, you cannot track individual brand awareness except through email marketing. As a result, it is difficult to populate your CRM with awareness data.
Typically captured in CRM is the consideration of advertising goals in the Sales Funnel map
Having become aware of your brand can lead to a potential customer entering the consideration stage. Hence, reminding customers is so crucial to moving them along the purchase journey. Your CRM can be populated with the names of customers who fill out a contact form or sign up for your newsletter online.
If you work off a cold email list (especially in B2B), you should schedule a meeting with the person if the open and click rates are high. When presenting in a B2B sales meeting, remember that the sales pipeline or consideration stage is still in place.
It’s not easy to find the contact information of people who liked your post on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn. That is, unless you are directly related to them. The majority of people don’t seem to have their contact information on Facebook or LinkedIn, no matter what they do. Yes, you can advertise to those who “like” your brand on Facebook (and pay!) and receive their contact details.
Connecting your brand with your customers
There are two ways to connect with your brand. Contact forms and social media:
The use of social media for connecting
In the consideration stage of the funnel, the customer has not yet purchased your brand. Likes on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media sites could indicate that she is your public supporter.
Potential customers acknowledge your brand publicly by sharing it with their own online social networks. We will explain in a later post how to connect with all these supporters through a CRM system.
Form-based communication
Use a web contact form or newsletter signup to add the potential customer to your CRM’s “Potential Customer” segment. Now these interested people can be contacted by email marketing campaigns.
In today’s data privacy environment, your data (also called first party data in CRMs) is one of your most valuable marketing “tangible” assets.
- You enjoy a greater share of the wallet of your existing loyal customers when you offer them a better experience.
- Additionally, you can deploy digital marketing more effectively by using your CRM data and a few simple analyses.
- Small and large companies alike must consider their “book of customers” when considering acquisitions and mergers.
CRM Benefits
Persuade in Advertising Goals corresponds to the Purchases in Sales Funnels, and MUST be captured in your CRM
The most valuable marketing asset you have is past customer transaction data. Your bottom line is affected directly by what the customer did. This program helps you build loyalty by allowing you to create customized loyalty programs for different types of customers.
Airlines, hotels, and stores often offer these loyalty rewards levels. Marketing analytic skills are in high demand because there is huge potential to improve these programs.
- Many software suppliers offer CRM systems.
- By integrating ERPs (Oracle, SAP) with B2B prospect lists, you can use them for email marketing.
- It is not the desire of marketing leaders to excel in customer service, but rather the desire to attract more new customers that leads to the outsourcing of certain services, like Call Centers.
- It appears that there are few software solutions that integrate all customer call data back into CRM systems.
- Customers who become Net Promoters spread the word (word of mouth) regarding their excellent experience.
- A social media world can turbocharge good words.
It turns out that
- The historical data of your customers’ purchases is available to you
- That data is not being used to find new customers who are similar to those that you already have.
CLVs, recency, frequency, and monetary (RFMs), as well as customer lifetime value (CLVs), can be analyzed using the customer database.
In future posts, we’ll discuss these topics in more detail.
The ultimate proof that a marketing campaign worked is when a customer pays and buys. Although you can never be 100% certain which specific marketing action moved your customers along the marketing journey, you can take some steps to help.
It’s precisely this aspect of marketing that makes it so intriguing!