Years ago, when brands got started on social media, the concept seemed simple: Set up a presence for marketers to easily reach masses of people. What became evident at the outset was that “no two snowflakes are alike,” and a customer audience consists of individuals, each with their own unique needs.
2015 is the year of “people centric marketing.” Explained to us by some of our largest customers, the marketing approach is two fold:
- Build more one-to-one relationships
- Engage with customer audiences
TWEET THIS:
Brands with the largest presence online make audience engagement the centerpiece of their social media marketing strategy
It’s no secret that the brands with the largest presence online aren’t just the biggest brands, but they are also the ones who focus on creating lasting, organic, relationships with the influencers in their space, and they continue to make audience engagement the centerpiece of their social strategy.
Many companies attempting to build customer centricity invest in a CRM system to help track customers and sales relationships, but the use of CRM does not provide all the tools necessary to build engagement.
And there probably is a longer laundry list of what a CRM can do that I missed (disclosure: I’ve worked in sales my entire career). The bottom line is that CRMs were built for sales professionals. While marketing teams utilize them, and they are directly related to sales efforts, the fact is that the primary functionality of CRMs will always be driven with the sales professional as the end user in mind.
The relationship marketers I speak to everyday explain to me why they manage important influencer relationships in their company’s CRM tool:
- The simplest need is for a central place to store contact information
- Need for a place to log the various channels where they have a presence online
- For tagging or other organizational tracking requirements
- To maintain a view of the influencer’s relationship history
These all make perfect sense and overlap with sales needs. It’s logical for a fellow colleague in marketing to want to come in and see what a relationship looks like with a certain influencer, how to contact that person, etc.
The missing marketing link in CRMs
My favorite question to ask any marketer using a traditional CRM is what data do they think is missing? The answer is usually the same--live social content and when probed, advanced marketers dive deeper to explain how they’d ideally be able to sort/search their content.
At Traackr some of our customers have begun to refer to our platform as the “Marketers CRM,” which is the ultimate compliment to us! Reason being is that the profiles of individuals on our platform provide all the traditional CRM data marketers require, while also providing live, searchable, content streams of anyone’s social footprint. This allows marketers to hone in on the content they care about and engage at the right time.
The other missing function addressed by Traackr allows a brand to search their entire network of influencer relationships to find the right people for new projects. I recently heard a story from a large B2C retail prospect that explained how much of nightmare it is to find the right influencer for new projects. When a new initiative arises - do you immediately know who are the right influencers to involve? Unless you have an incredible memory, you need to be able to sort and filter your influencer relationships beyond just tags you’ve created. This is achieved by having the ability to search your network of influencers by the content they create.
The Marketers’ CRM
To hammer home my point, Traackr has changed the way an influence marketer does their job in the same way CRMs changed how salespeople operated. Our platform allows marketing teams to scale their influencer relationships by creating one succinct place for you to discover, manage, listen, engage and measure results of your influencer program.