The holy grail of all marketing data enthusiasts is to tie all of your data together into one massive all powerful knowledge base that could be leveraged for sales and marketing. Unfortunately this has always been the dream and is not close to what is reality today. Perhaps IBM’s Watson can get right on this after Jeopardy and helping doctors diagnose patients, look out Doctor House.
I doubt Watson or Dr. Gregory House will be able to help us with an integrated marketing strategy, but our marketing dreams will not be crushed so easily. In the words of Yoda, “There is another.” According to a Gartner study about the use of Social CRM for customer service, one-third of “leading” companies will extend their online community activities over the next two years “as customer awareness and use of social CRM for marketing as a back door to customer service increases.” (also reported by Mashable)
Social media is all the rage these days and social customer relations management is slowly breaking new ground online, I’m not quite sure Social Media will be our holy grail for a one ring to rule them all kind of CRM marketing utopia world. Although that would be really neat and I defiantly be one of the first in line on the data ferris wheel. I’m sure the view would be amazing at the top. It’s just that we’re still at that not even crawling stage yet. Especially on the sales front as the recent Mashable post points out.
However, don’t quite leave the park without a spin on the teacups at least. I firmly believe there is room for opportunity even at the point we are in right now. Social CRM does have it’s place that we can leverage right now for both the pre conversion and the post conversion rate funnel. Opportunity at this stage exists for lead nurturing to take place before sales steps in. The online social aspect, weather it’s happening on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, or email for that matter needs to delight the prospect at each step of the customer service experience.
Delighting your prospect using data from social graphs and just good common sense rules of social media can create and build momentum for your prospects to convert on the pre conversion funnel side. On the other side of that conversion funnel, your post conversion CRM nurturing opportunity takes a different role, that of retention. It doesn’t really matter what the platform is, Twitter, Facebook, or the next big thing. What matters is the strategy behind your social CRM / conversion rate marketing plan.
The pre and post conversion rate marketing plan is something most of us forget to think through, perhaps because the CRM ferris wheel is less sexy than the Social Media roller coaster but you really need both to have a good carnival.
