How to be a smarter marketer?

Being a marketing professional at a consultancy or professional services firm is not always an easy job. People working within that industry sector tend to be project managers, process hounds, methodology whizzes  – in their work life, they are faced with problems, come up with a solution and they get the required result. It’s measurable, scientific, straightforward. Many are flummoxed by marketing – the fact that you can’t necessarily get a predictable result for a certain investment confounds them.

You might hold an event but not get any leads out of it. You might run a big advertising campaign, but the uptake in services bought doesn’t meet expectations. There is rarely a ‘sure thing’ in marketing and this makes the spend a bitter pill to swallow.

So a solution which can help the marketing team become more efficient and sales orientated and can help their own internal reputation has to be a win. CRM does just that. How?

For a start, data. Good, clean data helps you to get a clearer idea of your prospect – or your existing client – and will help you refine your message when you speak to them. You can segment the client or prospective client list based on similarities and target them appropriately. CIOs in the financial services sector, based within 100 miles of London, for example. This means the right message can be delivered to the right people at the right time – so much more effective than pushing out generic messages to everyone, or content that will be irrelevant to 80% of recipients.

Next? Try the co-ordination of the marketing team. “How can CRM do that?” I hear you ask. Well, if all activities are recorded on the CRM platform, you can get an eagle’s eye view of the different campaigns that are running and workloads associated with them, allowing you to plan resource more effectively. Your CRM should have a task manager element, allowing you to see the tasks needed to run a campaign and how they are split, so you can see at a glance what everyone is working on. If there are problem areas – such as someone being overloaded – it can help you identify the issue, ensuring no tasks are left undone. It also allows the team to coordinate and time activities easily – the telemarketing team knows if an email campaign has gone out and when to conduct follow ups. There doesn’t need to be an extra process to help them do this.

CRM can also help out by automating a LOT of the really boring, administrative tasks that are so important for the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. For a start, something like integrating your CRM with your marketing automation tool helps you track leads from the website, gives you intel into opening and click through rates in your email campaigns and enables you to set up workflows. For example, if someone downloads a white paper from the website, you can programme the CRM to send an email to the prospect and then schedule a follow up activity.

We could go on about the benefits a marketing team in the services industry can reap from CRM. Aligning your sales and marketing activity? Tick. Helping you track marketing performance? Tick again. On dashboards you can see at a glance which campaigns have worked well and others that haven’t. It helps to inform your marketing strategy and justify to the business why you need budget for certain activities. CRM helps you to be a smarter marketer – and what’s not to love about that?

To read more about how CRM can help you run your marketing more efficiently at your consultancy or professional services firm, please read our white paper Smart Marketing for the Services Industry