Digital Marketing has now become the norm for companies to reach out to their customers. While some may debate that, any company dealing with new age audience has taken to Digital Marketing like a duck to water. The catch here is, then why are not all companies successful? Well, Data is both the means and ends to problems for businesses. The amount of data on offer for businesses to deal with their customers is in abundance but how well are they put to use has become the million dollar question.

Evolution of Marketing

Gone are the days when marketing was all about numbers and reach, with growing competition, marketing has now taken an all new form and Digital Marketing has been the de-facto standard of most of the businesses, primarily in B2C segment. Retailers and other businesses have increasingly adopted non-linear marketing approach which has now facilitated benefit sharing between provider and consumer. Digital Marketing has covered substantial ground from where it started as a means of marketing products and services to the present times where it caters to the customer support thereby making the consumer feel supported and valued.

CRM solutions amplifying the impact of Digital Marketing

As mentioned earlier in the post, businesses struggle with the volumes of data at their disposal. With social media channels emerging as the front runners for marketing campaigns and customer engagement, the need to have support systems in place to amplify the effect of Digital Marketing has founds an all time high. Digital solutions from software giants such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and SalesForce have now come to the rescue of businesses to better structure their marketing approach.

How Does CRM solutions work? A sneak peak:

Modern day CRM solutions have the ability to pull customer data from any channel and offer a single unified customer view. Real time insights helps businesses to quickly develop custom omni-channel experiences that treat customers as individuals. This enables businesses to identify profitable audiences and thereby channelize their marketing efforts efficiently. CRM solutions inbuilt with powerful visualizations tools enables businesses to better understand their customers and draw interesting insights based on their interests, sentiments and behavior. With dedicated access to customer journey, profile dashboard and sentiment engagement tools, businesses will now have all details covered to structure their marketing campaigns.

High volume segmentation, i.e., using real time data to identify specific target groups is of utmost use to businesses to create multi-channel campaigns across email, social media, sms and more which can even be set to run automatically in response to customer interaction. Such sophistication not only makes the life of a CMO easier but also enables him/her to act quickly to marketing opportunities. Not just that, CRM tools can now help in easy assessment of marketing campaigns, budgeting plans by consolidating them over a period of time.

CRM: Data Management advantage?

Businesses small, medium or large can now use their customer data to gain competitive edge. Let us choose an example of a coffee selling company that would want to improve their marketing strategy using the data it has at it’s disposal. By tapping the contact data from across channels such as customer emails, web forms and social media channels, the company would be able to generate a consolidated word cloud of all the topics that it’s contacts are discussing about the brand and it’s products. Once this is done, the business can now configure the audience into meaningful segments such as qualified, self identified, anonymous or even customers.

So even if the company is dealing with a contact list in the tune of millions, by leveraging on the CRM solution, the business now has segregated the huge pile of data into workable silos each with different agendas. So now if the company decides to work on the contact segment say ‘self identified’, they can now drill down on the data to their expressed interests, country etc. Now the business could further drill down to the contacts who have expressed interest on say for instance, Espresso, this would position the business to plan a targeted campaign to this group of it’s contacts with personalized offers. The business could monitor their responses to understand them better.

While some might argue that CRM is dead and it is the customer who manages the relationship, CRM is here to stay and so is digital marketing.

The post Digital Marketing and it’s allies appeared first on IntelliAssist.