What if attracting new leads through your marketing could be as simple as spending a little time inside your customer relationship management (CRM) tool?
We believe it can be.
Your CRM is rich with data. It’s overflowing with opportunities. But did you know, it’s also one of the best marketing tools you have at your disposal? It is, but only if you know what you’re looking for when creating your marketing plan.
Here are three ways to use your CRM to boost your content marketing.
- Listen Up!
It’s no secret that you should be listening to your customers. With your ear to the ground, you’ll learn about their current challenges, which is the key to answering objections and beating the competition to the sale.
Your content marketing is the way to do that. It’s a way to answer questions before they’re asked. It’s a way to answer objections before you hear the word “no.”
If you’re not listening to your customers, how do you know what to write to address your customer’s concerns?
With your CRM, you have the ability to take notes, view email history, and track your customer’s communications at every stage in the sales cycle. By digging into your data, you can create a strong editorial calendar. Pay attention to:
- The reason they reached out to you
- Their reasons for saying no to you
- Their hesitations when adopting your product or service into their life or business
- Their reasons for loving what you have to offer
- And so much more
By listening, you find the answer to the burning question of what’s keeping your customer up at 3 a.m. More importantly, you discover how you can help your prospects and leads sleep a little bit better by addressing those festering 3 a.m. thoughts through your content marketing.
- Peer Into Their Social Life
Your CRM isn’t just a central hub for storing your company’s communications with the customer. It’s a place where you can get to know your customers on a more intimate level.
One of the key ways to do this: Peer into their social media world.
Social CRM allows you to detect every social media profile related to your customer’s email address. In doing this, you can spend some time getting to know what your customer likes, his political views, what he posts about most often, and more. This information does not need to be related to your business to strengthen your content marketing.
Content is most effectively used as a marketing tool when it speaks to a person. There is a lot of content floating around the Internet these days. To make yours stand out, you have to make it sound like it was written exclusively for your customer.
Digging into the social media profiles of your customer will expose his likes, dislikes and top interests. Use these in your content to relate with your reader.
For example, if you find your ideal buyer loves golf and you are an event management company, write about ways to get your clients on the green with various golf-inspired events. Get creative and think beyond golf tournaments. Talk about events that can be thrown on the golf course and ways to bring a golf theme to life.
The goal is to discover your customer’s interest and talk to him as if you were sitting across the table from him chatting about what you sell.
- Monitor Your Metrics
If digging into phone conversations, email threads, and social media newsfeeds is too daunting, turn to your CRM’s data to strengthen your content marketing.
In Insightly’s platform, we show you activity sets and reports about your business. In these reports, you can break down what’s happening in various categories, why you lost sales, value of incoming opportunities, values of what you won and lost, the responsible users, etc.
Much of this information can be used to put together an audience profile, allowing you to get to know more about your reader. The more you know about your reader, the easier it is to speak to him in a way that will resonate and help you land more leads.
Data reports will also help you identify key objections to using your business. Address those head on in your content marketing to strengthen your sales pitches and nurture your prospects before they ever talk to a sales representative.
How Much Does Your Content Marketing Support Your Sales Process?
Content marketing is an effective way of communicating with your audience away from sales calls and presentations. It lets you answer objections without being pushy. When done right, with the help of your CRM, you can create content that feels as if you’re speaking directly to your customer, which will strengthen your marketing message and help you land more leads.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
