The benefits of using your CRM to power your marketing

CRM is the cost of entry into a modern market: try running a business without one. But a CRM is more than just a digital filing cabinet. It’s a way for you to access, understand and monetize a goldmine already at your fingertips: customer data.

Data on its own is useless. For data to be effective, it needs to be collected, stored and harnessed in such a way it becomes valuable with minimal maintenance.

For example, having all the names of anybody showing interest in your business over the last eighteen months can be helpful. But how about knowing who was just browsing, who is ready to buy, or even who is ready to buy AND checked two or three other boxes critical for making a sale?

By better understanding your data and working smart, you can ensure the right messaging gets to the right people at the right time without labour-intensive or prospect-annoying processes. Targeting has also become more sophisticated, meaning that ads are now less interruptive and more informative — so sophisticated, in fact, that we now take for granted the quality of the ads we get served in our Instagram feeds and YouTube videos.

Contemporary digital marketing has changed from its first inception 20 years ago. GDPR, privacy, savvy prospects, and even huge corporations like Apple redefining data mining have all had a profound impact.

Sound familiar?

– Buying data lists
– Mass email sends with misspelt names
– Cold calls without consent
– Spam SMS messages from random numbers

You probably even still see some of them. And we’re not talking about the occasional ‘Hi {first name}’ greeting mistake every marketer dreads sending. We’re talking about the data-scraping, privacy-invading, industry-shaming practices that gave us all a bad name.

Any company relying on these practices today would seem ancient by comparison. But the uncomfortable truth is many businesses STILL market like this. We bet you’ve even had one this week.

But why?

Malicious intent? Avarice? Lack of caring?

In most cases, it’s none of the above. It’s the opposite. Many companies are so excited to get their message out there, they forget the blend of science and craft that comes together to create great marketing. They forget they sit on a goldmine of prospect data offering powerful insights into behaviour, predilections and desire.

Say hello to the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A CRM is a system that holds the data of your customer.
It can be as simple as a spreadsheet or as powerful as a constantly evolving AI single source of truth. And when used correctly, a CRM has the power to drive more revenue and delight prospects at every stage of the buying journey.

The marketers who get ahead today are hyper-focused on the customer experience. Experience-driven marketing puts your customers at the center of everything you do as a marketer.

It’s a major reason why HubSpot has adopted the flywheel. When focused on the customer experience, marketing attracts and feeds into sales. Sales engages and feeds into service. Service delights and feeds back into marketing. And all of this is only possible when the customer is at the center, managed by a CRM.

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Leveraging your CRM is the secret to experience-driven marketing. Experience driven marketing isn’t just a buzzword — it’s your secret to growth. Forrester research found that companies who said they were focused on experience grew 40% faster and increased customer lifetime value by more than 60% versus those who weren’t.

Very few marketers have all of their tools and tactics tightly integrated into a CRM — which often leads to disjointed customer experiences, siloed data, and an inability to know what’s working.

This is why we’re investing so much effort in tightly integrating HubSpot’s Marketing Hub with the CRM — to give your team a unified view of the customer experience, which allows you to create truly personalized experiences across all channels, and to help you properly measure your success as a marketer.

Rooting your marketing in a CRM also lets you create personalized experiences across every channel. Personalization continues to be the holy grail for delivering a great experience. In this hyper-competitive environment, it’s harder than ever to win attention — and we all know that the more you personalize, the greater your chances are of being noticed.

What does real personalization look like to me? Real personalization is when the content on your site changes, recommending content that your visitor hasn’t read yet. Or when that visitor has shown interest in one topic, so you show them an offer that’s related. Or when you have CTAs for customers and different ones for prospects. Or when the chat bot on your site remembers not only their name, but who their sales rep is. All of this is possible through CRM-driven marketing.

The three paths to CRM success:

– Segment: ensure prospects hear a message suited to their needs Contextualise
– Explain in clear terms why it’s useful Personalise
– Make them feel valued and loved

Yes, you can use HubSpot to personalise sales messaging on any standard or custom properties (the various data points you collect on contacts). But effective personalisation doesn’t just mean greeting somebody through email by name. It may have been disruptive fifteen years ago, but the modern consumer is both tech and data-savvy.

Modern personalisation means sending relevant messaging in a timely fashion using the right language, tone and subject matter. Imagine this: receiving an email greeting you by name. Nice, but you’ve already had four others doing the same that morning alone. You can spot an automated email by now.

But what about four weeks before the renewal for your company-wide HR software is up for review, you receive a timely message specific to your HR management problem? The power of personalisation can be shown by the following example: You’ve started a small business in the last 6 months and you receive a persuasive message from an invoice management software vendor on the perils of not completing your tax returns in time?

You want your prospects to feel a sense of serendipity. Ultimately we know it was effective CRM management because you created a HubSpot workflow to message either HR managers one month before their next renewal date or small business owners who’ve set up shop in the last year. But prospects will feel a connection with your brand because the message is aimed at their needs at the right time.