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CRM and Data Insights

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is a CRM?

You can use a customer relationship manager (CRM) application tool to manage all your business relationships with existing and potential customers.

In essence, a CRM is a database. You can use it to store contact information, such as the names, email addresses, and phone numbers of past customers, existing prospects and leads, and other business contacts. As you record most of your sales and commercial activities in a CRM system, it’s often the single source of truth for the sales and marketing functions of a business.

When combined with campaign and website traffic data, a CRM provides a clear picture of the full digital sales cycle of a business, with all its customer touchpoints. It helps digital marketers come to better conclusions, decide on effective courses of action, and optimize performance overall.

For the most part, the data contained in a CRM is collected online – on your website, social media channels, or campaign lead forms. CRM systems are useful for e-commerce businesses as they help online sellers manage and segment their customer data and email lists. They’re also useful for businesses who generate contact requests or collect leads to sell to over the phone. As with all data collection, the accuracy of the data you collect will impact the types of insights you can draw from it.

Better decision-making

By tracking interactions and creating reports, a CRM system helps you make better, more informed decisions.

CRMs often bridge the gap between online lead generation activities and offline sales conversations on the phone or in person. At scale, the data in your CRM can provide insights into different pathways to conversion and identify sales patterns. All customer interaction points – from the initial interest expressed by a lead to the final sale made by a customer – are tracked and can be reported on over time. This can help pinpoint customer trends and unearth valuable insights.

In modern CRMs, channel source data is recorded and associated with contact details. So, you can see which channels and campaigns drive leads, as well as how many of those leads become sales. This is useful information that can help you make decisions in relation to channel planning, budgeting, time, effort, and resource prioritization. You can focus your efforts on the channels that drive most leads and sales.

Social CRM

Social CRM is a collaborative, tool-based strategy that focuses on customer engagement and interactions.

Often, digital marketers will combine and compare CRM data with platform and website analytics data to create a holistic view of all customer interactions. You can do this by importing analytics and platform data into your CRM and combining the data streams in a business intelligence tool or spreadsheet. The goal is to create a complete picture of all channels and touchpoints that drive the sales and revenue recorded in your CRM.

Moving from the marketing side to the sales side, it's important to acknowledge that there can be multiple stakeholders involved in any purchase decision. With a social CRM process, you identify the people ‘around’ your target buyer who interact in the decision. By creating relationships and associations between the data and contacts in your CRM, you’re able to report on and engage your leads based on their relationships with other stakeholders.

Stakeholders might include the people who report to your target buyer (such as their team members) and the person who your target buyer reports to (such as their boss). By identifying associations between the data in your CRM, you can match customer touchpoints to stakeholders and make decisions that streamline the sales process.

Value of social collaboration

You can use social media channels to create and test relationships and associations between the various data points in your CRM system. This a great starting point for building a solid social CRM framework.

By connecting with professional social platforms such as LinkedIn and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can:

  • View external social networking data and associations within your CRM that relate to leads and sales pipelines.
  • Gain real-time insights when contacts take an action on a website, in email, or on social channels by setting rules within the CRM that send you new information about customers and events.
  • Acquire new data from social networks, chatbots, instant messaging, and public and group sites.

Because professional social networks such as LinkedIn tend to be updated regularly by the target buyer, they provide the CRM with a feed of fresh data which can lead to better decision-making, campaign planning, sales, and reporting.

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Christopher Coomer

Chris is a results-driven VP of data, analytics, and business intelligence driving data management, analytics strategies, and technical architecture to scale optimized enterprise operations. As a trusted advisor and strategic business partner, Chris develops meaningful data insights and infrastructures through business intelligence and data analytics strategies to optimize business functions and drive impactful ROIs. Chris is also an enthusiastic and passionate educator in the field of data and analytics and marketing at The University of Tampa.

Christopher Coomer
Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.

Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.

Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.

Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.

He can be reached on LinkedIn here.

Cathal Melinn
Clark Boyd

Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.

Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing. 

Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.

Clark Boyd

ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Data and Data Visualization
Christopher Coomer Christopher Coomer
Presenter
Cathal Melinn Cathal Melinn
Presenter
Clark Boyd Clark Boyd
Presenter

The Data and Data Visualization module opens by discussing the fundamentals of data, how CRM data enables informed business decisions, and how to link CRM data with channel sources to more accurately attribute search performance. It covers the importance of testing hypotheses to ensure their validity, applying in-flight optimization to enterprise-level omnichannel campaigns, and using comparative data to forecast future search campaign performance. You’ll also learn about the benefits of good data visualization and the difference between reporting dashboards and data visualization tools. The module concludes with a practical focus on using Excel formulas, charts, Pivot Tables, and Calculated Fields to present and visualize campaign data.