Every business owner would agree that customers are the most important aspect of their business and they would claim that they deeply care about the customers and their experience with the company. However, most of these business owners overlook the part that social media plays in Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

A CRM strategy is essentially a collective effort made by the marketing, sales and customer service departments of a company to effectively engage with prospective and existing customers to increase brand awareness.

In a world where social media has become an integral part of people’s personal and professional lives, it has become fundamental to include social media in your CRM strategy. Customers nowadays would mostly air their concerns or complaints on social media platforms that can result in great repercussions if overlooked.

Excellent experience with your brand is what will lead the customer to return and make recommendations to others. However, if they feel unheard and uncared for, it will lead to the end of your organization eventually.

Therefore, it is important to understand how to use social media to upgrade your regular CRM strategy into a killer CRM strategy that would boost your brand awareness and lead to sustained growth.

Break the Silo

It is crucial that your social media, customer service, marketing, and sales teams work together for you to have an effective and efficient social media CRM strategy. Having everyone in the organization on the same page is key to an organization’s journey towards improving its social media presence and providing customers with proper guidance on their concerns.

Most of the millennials prefer to use social media instead of e-mail or phone to interact with everyone including businesses. Normally, these prospective customers will not bother doing business with a brand that’s unresponsive over social media platforms or worse yet, they do not have the relevant people answering queries resulting in improper guidance.

Once you’ve lost face and have been perceived incompetent, it is impossible to re-gain the customer’s trust. A comprehensive social media CRM tool will help you avoid such bad customer experiences and help you assign conversations to the relevant people who can provide the best solutions. All your teams should work together towards the betterment of the organization instead of competing against each other.

Customer Journey

A business must track its customer journeys, so it is necessary to incorporate this aspect into your CRM strategy. When using social media platforms this becomes much easier because you can easily track your customer’s likes, previous conversations, other engagements, etc.

Social media does not only help you attract new customers but also helps retain existing ones by continually strengthening your relationship by providing them value and being on top of their behavior towards your industry.

A CRM tool that allows you to track previous interactions with your customers and make automated sales allows you to personalize every interaction to make the customer feel special and appreciated. Hence improving their entire experience with the company and strengthening their loyalty towards the organization.

Customer Complaints

Social media has made it possible to communicate in real-time without the need for a phone or physical availability. Just as social media has allowed long lost friends and family to come closer, it has allowed business owners and customers to come close too. Gone are the days of writing letters or e-mails and then waiting days for a response. Customers need rapid responses and solutions now.

Every industry these days needs to understand the effect social media can have on their business. It doesn’t matter if you’re a grocery store or an internet service provider, most of the modern world customers choose to use a social media platform like your official Facebook page to air a concern, complaint or even appreciate your efforts.

For example, a couple of weeks ago my friend’s internet (that we both share) stopped working so she called up the Spectrum phone number to seek help. The customer support representative was a very polite and helpful girl who quickly offered us the solution. My friend was so happy to have everything sorted in a matter of minutes that she opened up the Spectrum Facebook page to leave a five-star review. This one review could be the deal maker for someone who is researching internet providers.

Therefore, the simplest way to maintain high sales and customer retention is to increase your response time to customers over social media. If it’s appreciation, be grateful and if it’s a complaint, resolve it as soon as possible. Social media makes you much more accountable to your customers; it’s about time you take it seriously.

Keywords and Hashtags

This is the age of keywords and hashtags. An analysis run on the keywords and hashtags used by prospective customers is the best way to find out opportunities that would go undiscovered through traditional marketing strategies. Hashtags and keywords allow you to categorize the content hence making it easier to identify forecasts.

There is a possibility to overlook sales opportunities due to people misspelling your company’s name that would leave a sour impression on them unintentionally. Analyzing the hashtags and keywords related to your company will allow you to pinpoint these prospective customers as well. Searching for all possible misspellings of your organization’s name will help you respond to all those prospective customers trying to get your attention.

An analysis of the most common industry keywords used by customers to search for the products or services you provide will help you tap into those potential sales opportunities that you didn’t even know existed. Likewise, check out the keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their business to improve your social media CRM strategy.

Bottom Line

Reading through the article it may have seemed that all those things are so obvious, why bother writing them up. Trust me it may seem that way but for most of the business owners just starting up, these things are not so obvious. It takes years of trial and error to learn all this. So in an attempt to help the start-ups of today I have put my two cents in the jar.

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