CRM for Marketing

The practice of marketing has never been so complex, so competitive, and so full of opportunity. New digital channels, allied to the opportunity of marketing automation, are enabling every marketer to create and deliver campaigns that were once only available to the very largest brands. Yet because so much can be done, so much now has to be done, just to stay in the game.

In order to cope with this complexity, to keep ahead of the competition, and to take full advantage of the opportunities available, a growing number of marketers are looking for support from CRM platforms. Typically thought of as a sales tool, CRM is fast becoming an indispensable marketing tool as well.

It is helping in several ways. At the most basic level it provides a space for companies to gain a single, real-time view of their prospect universe. Moving to this from the chaos of spreadsheets is a major and rapid win for many organisations

Yet it is just the beginning. With that single view of your database in place you are able to start gathering information on your prospects, segmenting them, and so delivering more tailored marketing communications. As any marketer knows, the more specific you can be with your targeting and your messaging the better your response rates will be.

Then there are the operational efficiency benefits. A CRM platform provides you with an overview of what everyone on your team is doing so you can co-ordinate activities and manage workloads. It helps align sales and marketing functions, provides a location for document storage, and helps you manage your suppliers more effectively.

As you feed all this information into your CRM platform you gradually build up a fuller picture of your customer journey, you are able to automate more and more of your marketing activities, and you get invaluable information on the performance of specific campaigns and people.

In summary, a CRM platform simplifies complexity, offers visibility and control of data, and enables the sort of personalisation, process-mapping, and virtuous feedback loops that are the cornerstones of marketing success.

Our new white paper – “CRM for Marketing” offers more detail on these benefits as well as advice to marketers on how to get started on their CRM journey. With the world of marketing becoming more complex, competitive and opportunity-laden with every day that passes, there will never be a better time for marketers to take their first steps on that journey.