Customer relationship management (CRM) software has become a vital tool for all types of businesses. Customers make businesses thrive, so a company must manage its customer database well to achieve success. 

According to statistics by Findstack, 74% of business owners and marketers say that CRM technology gives them better access to customer data, improving their customer service. Moreover, 65% of companies have already adopted CRM technology within the first 5 years of their business launch. 

CRM software is especially helpful for your content marketing strategy. Aside from providing various content marketing tools and tactics, it also comes with many helpful integrations. In this article, you’ll delve into the world of CRM software and how it can help develop and maintain your content marketing strategy. 

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What is CRM software?

CRM or customer relationship management software is a tool for managing a business’ relationships with potential and existing customers. It helps companies streamline processes, stay connected with their customers, and increase sales and profitability. The goal of CRM is simple—to improve all kinds of business relationships and content marketing strategies.

A CRM solution helps you increase customer satisfaction, facilitate collaboration, and boost team productivity. It’s available in various sizes and can cater to the needs of all business sizes—small, medium, and large enterprises. 

As per the report by Grand View Research, 91% of business organisations with more than 10 employees use CRM software. Moreover, 82% of companies utilise CRM for sales reporting. These facts and figures only prove the importance of CRM solutions and developing a good CRM marketing strategy to grow your business. 

What is the link between CRM and content marketing?

Content marketing is about creating content to attract customers to your brand. You can create an ebook, webinar, whitepaper, infographic, or any type of marketing content to sell your products and services.

CRM, on the other hand, focuses on lead generation and taking care of your customer relationships. Access to CRM software gives you insights on what campaigns worked and didn’t work for specific customers. 

In this regard, content marketing and CRM can go hand-in-hand to help you achieve business success. You can utilise various CRM software tools to promote your content to clients. Just like treating social media as a platform to engage, you need to treat CRM as another platform to engage with your customers about your content marketing. 

Best ways CRM aolutions can improve your content marketing strategy

CRM software can be used in different ways to provide several benefits to your business’ content marketing strategy. Here are five key benefits that CRM technology could provide.

1. Get a better sense of your target audience

The best CRM for marketing can help you understand your audience better. You can identify different audiences’ trends, likes, and preferences based on different locations and generations. You’ll also have a bigger picture of how your target customers interact on social media and what platform they mostly use for brand discovery and online shopping. 

Overall, CRM software centralises customer information, allowing you to segment your audience for different marketing campaigns and track any changes. You can also focus your marketing efforts on clients who would be willing to learn about your products and services, thus expanding your target audience effectively. 

2. Determine what kind of metrics to use

Aside from determining the right channel that you’ll use to promote your content marketing, CRM also helps you identify the kind of metrics to utilise to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. With this, you can better comprehend the impact of your content marketing strategy. 

Some of the metrics you can use include:

  • CPL or cost per lead
  • MQLs or marketing qualified leads
  • SQLs or sales qualified leads
  • Customer retention
  • Cost per customer acquisition
  • Marketing ROI
  • Sales revenue
  • Opportunity-to-win ratio
  • Traffic-to-lead ratio
  • Organic traffic
  • Mobile traffic, leads, and conversion rates
  • Social media traffic and conversion rates

Ultimately, CRM software gives you an idea of what to do with your leads and keeps track of your existing customer relationships. 

3. Send personalised and targeted messages

CRM software with an automated email marketing tool integration can leverage the way you interact with customers. Aside from having access to your customers’ contact information, you can easily create personalised and targeted email messages based on your customers’ behaviours, preferences, and social activities.

Moreover, your sales and marketing team can work together to run more engaging marketing campaigns, build stronger customer relationships, boost sales, and lead your business to success. 

Basically, having good CRM and email marketing in place enables businesses to:

  • Monitor when a customer opens or rejects your email
  • Identify the links they clicked on your message
  • Automate follow-ups
  • Stay in touch with existing and prospective customers
  • Send personalised emails based on specific audience segments
  • Nurture prospects by educating them via email about how your products and services can address their needs

4. Process automation

CRM tools help companies and marketers manage all their customer interactions and business processes, including customer service, sales, and marketing. Knowing the different CRM marketing automation examples also allow you to guide your prospects through their purchasing journeys. 

The stages of CRM process automation involves:

  • Lead generation
  • Converting visitors into leads
  • Nurturing customers with engaging conversations and marketing campaigns
  • Converting leads into buying customers

All these processes are recorded in the CRM system, making it convenient for you to track all your customer interactions. Remember, using CRM isn’t just about acquiring new customers but also retaining them. Through process automation, you can make your customers feel valued and more likely increase your customer retention rate.  

5. Optimise and leverage your marketing campaigns

One of the best things about CRM software is that it helps with effective decision-making. Instead of taking hours guessing about your marketing campaign performance, CRM can provide accurate data to help streamline your campaigns. 

With the data, you can get information on customer forecasts and opportunities. You can also identify products and marketing strategies that bring more sales and profit. 

After all, content marketing improvement starts with good analysis. And when you can analyse your campaigns well, you can work on better-targeted content, track inefficiencies, and optimise your marketing strategies for improved results. 

Are you ready to boost your content marketing strategy with CRM software?

Customer expectations continue to grow. In fact, a survey from Salesforce Research revealed that 63% of customers expect businesses to know their expectations and unique needs. Moreover, 59% of customers also believe that companies should provide a cutting-edge digital experience. With this, businesses need to work hard to meet customers’ demands.

Using CRM software can help you meet these needs and expectations by helping you understand your clients better, nurturing them with targeted content, optimising your content marketing strategies, and offering valuable experience. It is essential to help you realize your innovative ideas for marketing and bring them to life.

In return, your leads will be converted into buying customers, boosting your sales and revenue. It would make it easier for you to find new customers when you already have detailed target audience specifications in place.  

Ready to leverage your business and marketing campaigns? Invest in CRM software now.