You are your customer’s favorite Advertising agency because you have original ideas, and you know the right ways to implement them. You are an agency driven by creativity and innovation; you customize your services for your clients according to their needs.
But is this enough to retain your clients for long?
It often happens that despite the best-in-class services and visible results, you are still not able to retain these customers and lose them after a project or two. Have you ever wondered why this happens and how you can resolve it?
To find a solution to this, you first need to understand what your customers need apart from just your good services.
It’s not likely that you’ll always be as creative as you are; your level of creativity changes with time, situations, and types of projects. But that should not Lead to the loss of clients in any way, which is why relationship-maintenance plays a crucial role in defining your business’s success.
CRM is the most effective approach in maintaining and establishing relationships with customers.
In this article, you’ll find ways to make your business a success with the help of a CRM for Advertising Agencies.
Challenges faced by advertising agencies
It’s not an easy world for advertising agencies these days. With the increasing competition, advertising businesses are facing a hard time getting leads and converting them. So let’s have a look at some of the problems faced by agencies before we dive into the importance of choosing the right CRM.
1. Lead capturing
It’s not really a difficult task for advertising agencies to capture leads. However, they don’t have the right set of tools for better lead generation.
With the right CRM, companies can capture leads from the company contact page and directly add into their increasing list of prospects.
2. Lead management
With an overwhelming amount of inquiries that agencies receive everyday, it can get tedious to manage all of them. Some of these inquiries might be the best fit for the business, some might just get in use, and the others are completely useless.
For agencies to spend their time on the right leads, it’s necessary for them to manage the leads in a productive way, so that they don’t lose on time or right deals.
CRM helps you create sales pipelines to identify hot leads and cold leads, and align them according to their priority.
3. Lead nurturing
Now this is the crucial part. This is where you make your prospects aware of your brand and services, build a rapport with them and bring them to trust you.
You send out important content, schedule demos, send product emails, newsletters, eBooks, articles, basically anything that makes them understand your product better.
As an advertising agency, you can also share case studies of your previous clients to show your leads what difference your services make in someone’s business.
Since lead nurturing is all about maintaining relationships, you can use a CRM to your benefit, one that provides features like email sequences, or design campaigns. Also, you may use features like calling and texting so that you stay connected with your leads over more than one medium of communication.
Why do advertising agencies need CRM software?
The world is changing at a drastic pace, and with that customers’ needs are changing as well.
People don’t have long attention spans anymore, hence, there’s only a little time to get them interested in what the brands are offering.
This is where lies your role as an advertising agency.
Big brands these days have started building their in-house creative teams, and so the ad agencies are being pushed from long-term contracts to signing short-term project-wise contracts.
Your target brands are now looking for agencies that understand their niche the best and can help them come up with best-possible solutions to their marketing campaigns.
And so, this makes it difficult for you to make your unique place in an already saturated market.
But as we said earlier, advertising is a relationship-driven business and the way you serve your clients is as important as what you serve.
This is where CRM comes into play. Choosing a CRM for your aid can be the most important investment you make for your business. And this is why:
1. To get over creative blocks
Your creative team excels at their work, and there’s no doubt they can come up with mind-blowing strategies. But what if you ask them to take care of client data along with their creatives?
It’s obvious they won’t perform their best under such pressure.
A CRM can provide them with a good data management solution and can take an unnecessary load away from their shoulders. 25% of advertising agencies say their productivity has boosted since the implementation of a CRM platform.
Nothing will now stop them from winning over the audience!
2. To maintain perfect relationships
‘Relationship’ is a magic word in any business. Especially for advertising agencies.
There’s a lot of competition out there and your work alone cannot make you stand out. It is your relationship-management skills that will retain your clients for long.
Customer Relationship Management software are built especially for this purpose. With the help of a CRM you can not only manage your data, but also align your sales processes with your clients’ requirements, and help you help them better!
“Get closer than ever with your customers. So close that you tell them what they need before they realize it themselves.”- Steve Jobs
3. Automate a large part of your work so that creativity is not hindered
Point 1 states this fact already. More the manual work, lesser is the creativity.
But what if all that manual labor gets automated? Won’t your creative team thank you for that?
The best CRM platform for your business would be the one that allows you to automate all your processes and doesn’t let you break a sweat over it all!
4. Provide the best and personalized experience to each client
“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.”- Roy H. Williams
Personalization is how you make your clients feel special. And so it’s recommended that you provide them services that are tailored to their requirements.
This does two things for you- make your clients feel special, while bettering your relationship with them. CRM platforms help you keep a track of your clients’ requirements so that you don’t have to juggle for information of each project.
Benefits of using a CRM for your advertising business
There are challenges, but then there are ways in which you can grow your business better- with the help of a CRM!
1. Set context when engaging with your prospects
There are a number of ways you can generate leads for your business, be it through your network, through social media, referrals, events, webinars, marketing campaigns, sales campaigns, or simply from your own website.
But what do you do with all this data? You can store it in a CRM and use it whenever necessary. Besides, CRM platforms also have an ability to automatically capture lead data by accessing their social profiles, and the information that is available publicly.
In addition, it also comes with a web and app tracking feature that helps you track what pages your potential buyers have visited, blogs they read, research reports downloaded, or any webinars viewed, giving you a context to make your first contact with them.
2. Catch up from where you last left
A CRM gives you a 360-degree view of all the lead data on a single platform, so that you don’t have to think what stage each lead is at when you come back to them.
Every email you send, or every appointment you get fixed with a prospect is an essential part of the sales process, and you don’t want to get lost in the process. With all this data stored in a single place, you can track every lead’s journey, without letting any of them slip through your fingers.
Also, since most CRMs are customizable, you can tailor them according to your industry needs and make better use of it for closing deals.
3. Track every step of the sales process
As an advertising agency, you might have several processes in work simultaneously, one to track progress of potential clients, the other to track project status of existing clients. Even though you might have a team of executives to take care of it all, it still means alot of manual labor.
With a CRM for advertising, you can create multiple deal pipelines, and track all of them with ease. You can easily drag and drop clients as they pace through the sales steps, generate revenue estimates, see how many clients are present at each stage, and track the overall progress of your business.
Say, for example, you see the same clients stuck in the ‘contacted’ stage, so you can ask your development team to clear the bottleneck. This would also give you an insight into why your clients are not moving through the pipeline, and help you reevaluate your sales strategies for each of them.
4. Automate to save time
Ad agencies are always running between several projects and the run doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon. Coordinating client requirements and meeting project deadlines always takes a toll.
Since advertising businesses are being pushed towards short-term projects, it means more work and less time. And then all the manual labor of data entry just adds to the hustle.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a platform that took away the burden of tedious tasks and let you work efficiently on the projects?
Well, what luck! CRM platform can do it for you!
Advertising CRMs automate a large chunk of this manual labor, and allows you to breathe while concentrating on your creative side rather than mundane daily tasks like raising invoices, setting reminders, follow-up emails, or even thank you notes!
5. Better team collaboration
Some advertising agencies have one-man army who handle end-to-end client relationships. In some other cases, however, agencies have several teams like those of development, accounts and production, which take care of each stage of the sales process.
So how do these teams work together to be on the same page?
You are smart, aren’t you! Yes, CRM helps them with coordination.
Some CRM platforms make sure that teams don’t have to fiddle with multiple apps and platforms to share information with each other. They can all put their pieces over the CRM and complete the puzzle together.
6. Better client engagement
Since we talk a lot about customer engagement and relationship management, this becomes one of the most important benefits of an advertising CRM.
As an advertising agency, you need to keep your clients engaged with you literally all the time. This ensures that you retain them for longer periods of time, and for that to happen, you need to be on the top of their minds day and night.
CRM tends to improve customer retention rates. For 45% of businesses, implementing a CRM grew their revenue, and 39% of them said it helped them upsell and cross-sell as well.
To be the advertising agency of their choice, you need to engage your customers by adding them to your ‘nurture club’. Learn about their interests, share articles based on it, send emails and product updates, wish them on their birthday; become their best friend.
7. Increase your work mobility
Being on your system all the time is not feasible. Hence, you need a platform that allows you to work anywhere. With a Mobile CRM, you can access client data, respond to emails, and take calls, all of it while you are away!
What makes a CRM best for your Advertising agency?
Every business has its own unique requirements, and so each of them needs a different solution to grow themselves.
There is a plethora of CRM software available for advertising agencies, however, you have to make sure that you choose the one that fits your needs.
When it comes to CRMs, one size doesn’t fit all!
Here’s a checklist of things you need to keep in mind while choosing a CRM platform for your ad agency:
1. It helps you spot interested prospects
Your sales team might be sending hundreds of emails to prospects every single day. But how do you recognize interested prospects out of that infinite pool?
You got it! Your CRM must help you with that. With a CRM, you can spot which prospects opened and read your emails and that’s how you can generate leads and convert them into clients.
2. Helps you build stronger relationships
We just can’t stress enough on how important relationship-management is for your business. And so, it must be your priority to tick this checkpoint first while choosing the right CRM.
Stronger relationships will build a stronger business.
3. Helps you retain clients
An advertising agency is a relationship-centric business that requires you to build and maintain close relationships with your customers. The depth of your relationship with customers will ultimately determine how long they stay with you.
Of course, not every customer can stay with you forever, but it’s not like it’s an impossible scenario for you to hope that they choose you over your contemporaries!
Choose a CRM that helps you retain your clients and manage all their contacts on a single platform. Afterall, studies suggest that 74% of businesses say that their contact data management has improved with the help of CRM.
4. It integrates with all the necessary applications
Maximum efficiency is assured when you don’t have to juggle between different apps to find data, or manage your projects.
A good CRM would be the one that integrates with all the necessary apps and more, so that all your processes are taken care of from a single platform.
5. Provides you reports on your projects
Getting timely reports on how your team is performing, and how the overall performance of the agency has been can improve your productivity manyfold.
Get yourself a CRM that reports you with everything going on inside the firm and keeps you aware of every little detail of all the projects.
6. Creates multiple sales pipelines
Alright, now this is crucial. It’s not like your team is only going to work on a single project at a time. Sometimes, in fact, your team could be all pressed between multiple projects, that too each of them from a different industry.
So how do you keep track of all the projects at the same time?
With a CRM you must be able to create multiple sales pipelines, so that it becomes easy to handle several projects simultaneously without creating a mess.
Is your advertising agency ready to take the world by storm?
An advertising agency faces many challenges when it comes to keeping it’s clients happy and delivering the best service possible. However, you don’t have to do it all by yourself.
With the help of Salesmate’s CRM for Advertising agencies, you can minimize your efforts and concentrate on creating the best solutions and maintaining good relationships with your clients.
The post How to grow with a CRM for your advertising business? appeared first on Salesmate.
