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What is CRM?
Customer Relationship Management is the use of information to build and manage relationships with customers. This process can be facilitated by a CRM software, which is a tool commonly used by sales professionals to help them stay on top of all communications with their clients.
Do marketers use CRM, too? The answer is yes!
CRM software is just as vital to marketing professionals. It’s even found to increase conversion by up to 300%! Let’s talk about how CRM software can help creative marketing agencies, and how you can start using one.
Benefits Of Using A CRM For Marketing Agencies
- Manage Prospect And Client Communication
As your agency grows, you’ll start working with more clients with unique needs and expectations. Good service is providing personalized care and quality output. This is the type of service that will lead them to keep coming back to you and recommend you to their friends.
Client communication can come from different channels – from casual SMS messages to formal emails, or to meetings. Sometimes, information might come from different people.
Marketing CRM software can help you consolidate all pieces of information you gather from your client communications. This will help you streamline the assistance you provide for them regardless of how many clients your agency handles.
- Insight On Audience
Good marketing is about connecting with your target audience on a personal level. To do this, you’ll need to immerse yourself with tons of data: What do they like? What do they engage with? What’s their humor? How do they talk?
CRM in digital marketing consolidates analytics data from several touchpoints: forms, surveys, engagements, customer service interactions, etc. This way, you can have a good grasp of your community’s questions, pain points, and sentiments with just a few clicks.
Drawing insight from analytics allows you to tailor-fit your communications to make them effective.
- Opportunities Management
Central to any business are sales and customer relationships. CRM software like Workamajig can help you do this.
Stay on top of your opportunities by organizing them based on your sales funnel. Add deadlines on when you’re due to follow up, and keep all communications in one platform so anyone can take over if needed.
Once the deal is closed, Workamajig allows you to simply pass the entry to the accounts manager who’ll handle the execution of the project. He’ll then have access to everything that was agreed on even with minimal onboarding.
Managing your opportunities is very important if you want to keep a steady flow of clients coming.
- Task And Project Management
From the outside, maintaining relationships feels like a spontaneous and emotional activity. But as a marketer, you know that it’s a procedure that’s adjusted and personalized if needed.
For example, when you first meet a client, you’ll need to conduct a discovery call. Then, submit a proposal. Negotiations often take place after. And once the deal is closed, you’ll need to do a turnover before someone else takes it from there.
Sounds simple? Great. Now, multiply that by 10-30 prospects. Things will then start to be a little more complicated.
Agency CRM software helps you manage tasks so you can delegate them better. It also helps you stay on top of what the team is working on along with their velocity to gauge project efficiency.
- Team Collaboration
Keeping all communications in one place makes it easy for all team members to be aware of the client’s expectations and how the account is going. In this sense, your CRM software can help make decision-making and brainstorming more productive.
When team members have a clear picture of situations, you can have more time collaborating and less time just getting everyone on the same page.
- Quick Reporting
A CRM data snapshot capability is considered to be a crucial feature by 18% of professionals. Here are just a few examples of info you can extract and how they can be useful in your agency operations:
- Digital marketing data can help you justify your decisions on your campaign execution
- A report on the opportunities you’re working on can help you explain why you need additional resources
- Seeing the number of clients and prospects moving along your sales funnel can help you identify areas that need improvements
Your CRM software can allow you to create detailed reports on what your team is working on and your next priorities. This will be handy when working with internal and external stakeholders and in deciding your next courses of action.
How To Pick A Marketing Agency CRM
Once you decide to inject a marketing agency CRM into your pipeline, your next step is selecting one that will fit your needs. Here are things you may want to look into when making your choice of finding the best CRM for your digital marketing agency.
- Ease Of Use
65% of professionals mark ease of use as the top feature they look for in CRM software. This makes sense considering that tools and software should be adapted because they make operations more thorough and streamlined. Finding a tool that’s too complicated may turn out to be counter-productive.
When picking the CRM software, ask yourself who are the people who will be using them the most. Then, assess how smoothly they can learn the ropes and check if the company facilitates a comprehensive on-boarding. Consider those in making your decision.
- Has Features You Need
The features you need for your CRM will depend on how you want to use it. Here are features you might want to look into:
- Task management
- Social media analytics
- Integrations with tools you use in your agency
- Report customization and export
You may want to inject a CRM into your system little by little. That’s a good way to go about it too. But even if you start small, have a game plan on your end goals. This will help you decide what features you would want to include in your checklist when you start to look around.
- Responsive Support
Support is a crucial consideration when picking a marketing CRM tool that you expect your creative agency to rely on. Regardless of how trusted they are, issues and adjustments will come along the way. And when they do, you need to make sure that you’ll have ample assistance so you can avoid an unnecessary halt in your operations.
Look into the materials they provide for troubleshooting. Do they have a knowledge base? If you have more specific requests, can they be reached via phone, or just email?
Using your initial interactions as a benchmark is probably not a good idea. While they’re trying to win your commitment, it’s certain that they’ll be putting their best foot forward. Instead, try to ask around and look at reviews.
Wrapping Up
Using CRM in advertising can help your agency improve customer relations, increase sales, and improve productivity. Check out Workamajig’s CRM with project management features and request a demo to assess your needs and see how they can improve your bottom line.