Social CRM: How Marketing Can Benefit From Social Media and CRM

Do you want to know more about your customers and prospects so you can serve them better?

Are you wondering what social CRM is and how your business can benefit from it?

To learn how social CRM can help marketers, I interview Kyle Lacy for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Kyle Lacy, director of global content marketing and research at Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. He's authored numerous books, including Twitter Marketing for Dummies and Social CRM for Dummies.

Kyle shares why social CRM is important for marketers.

You'll discover some of the best CRM solutions available, what their basic functions are and how social CRM can help with social media ROI.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
Listen Now
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Social CRM
The difference between customer relationship management (CRM) and social CRM

Kyle states that customer relationship management (CRM) and social CRM are combining. CRM manages all of your customers' data, and when you add the word social, it takes in all of the social data too.

Whether you want to sell to customers or retain them, social CRM just adds those social data points. This can be a Facebook profile, Twitter account, etc.—basically anything that has to do with social media.

It's the ability to manage all of your data points around the customer within a single software source.

Listen to the show to find out why Kyle doesn't distinguish between the two.

The definition of CRM systems

Kyle explains that a CRM system is software that allows you to manage every single touchpoint you have with your customers. For example, their email address, what they bought previously from you, their Twitter handle, and so forth. It's really based on what level of business you have.

So if you're an enterprise company, then the CRM solution would be Salesforce. However, if you're a smaller company, Nimble would be a great alternative.

CRM systems are anything to do with a customer interaction. This can be either in a store or online.

Listen to the show to discover why these people aren't just customers, but prospects too.

Why social CRM is important for marketers

Kyle refers to Mary Meeker's State of the Internet report that was released at the end of May this year. He thinks that we have reached a point where social media has hit maturity, and for us to realize the true value of it, we have to be able to connect it to our customers who are already in our systems.

For example, if a retailer has 1000 customers within their CRM solution, they need to be able to find the social pieces of data that connect them to these existing customers. As a business, you want to turn these customers into advocates. To do this, you need to manage your data around the customer.

Kyle believes that from a social standpoint, it allows you to recognize the true value of social and you can use it to communicate more effectively.

You'll discover how you can drive more sales when you combine customer email addresses with their social networks.

One of the biggest things that Kyle sees right now is marketers who use the one-click sign-on using Facebook on their website. When a customer visits your website and signs in through Facebook, you get all that customer's information. There is so much data you can pull when you connect with customers on a social network.

Listen to the show to find out how social CRM can improve your advertising effectiveness while reducing your customer servic...