Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short, is no longer limited to sales, but also takes marketing to a whole new level. And that's a much-needed step, as the demands on marketing have risen sharply in recent years. Thanks to CRM, companies can master the new challenges.
In recent years, CRM has also opened up a new dimension in the area of marketing thanks to new technological possibilities. A customised customer experience is already standard in many companies. The modern, beautiful world of marketing is now personalised, contextualised and dynamic. The customer approach is becoming more emotional, more human and more accurate. The aim is no longer to manipulate customers, but rather to fulfil their wishes. The handling and in-depth understanding of data is the basis of the new marketing approach. CRM-Systems provide indispensable services here.
CRM has become an indispensable link between customer-relevant departments in companies.
It is now much more effective to attract the interest of customers ("pull marketing"). Companies can achieve this by providing high-quality content that matches the concerns, questions and problems of customers and interested parties, i.e. by offering added value. This approach, also known as inbound marketing, aims to get potential customers to become active themselves and approach the company. This is because they normally search for a product themselves and ultimately purchase it.
CRM provides marketing with important information
The task of marketing is to attract and address interested parties and (potential) customers convincingly and personally - CRM makes this possible. This only works if the behaviour and purchasing decision patterns of the individual prospective customers are known. The usual target group segmentation according to psychographic and socio-demographic characteristics is no longer sufficient. In order to reach customers as early as possible in their purchasing decision, it is much more important to categorise the target groups into so-called buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional person based on real facts about the target customer .Buyer personas show you how different potential customers "tick".
And this is exactly where CRM comes into play in marketing. Marketing departments now have to recognise the needs of customers and address them with an efficient content and marketing mix on a wide variety of channels. Here, marketing benefits above all from the extensive search and filter functions of a CRM solution in order to select target groups according to specific criteria.
Innovative CRM-Systems then enable companies to accompany consumers throughout the entire customer journey - from the initial idea through to the purchase. The systems track user behaviour across offline and online touchpoints and thus support companies in optimising their customer journeys. This makes it possible to evaluate huge amounts of data in order to predict customer behaviour.
CRM as a link between marketing and sales
A CRM-System is therefore much more than an administrative tool for the sales department. It now serves much more as a link between marketing and sales. In order to raise customer management to a professional level, regular dialogue between the two departments is important. Marketing and sales measures must be harmonised. Both departments are better networked with a CRM tool and can access and amend the same information. This gives each employee a 360-degree view of the customer and enables them to create analyses and forecasts of how the customer or entire customer groups might behave in the future.
In order to produce such complex analyses, the CRM-System currently still needs to be connected to various other systems via interfaces, for example to an ERP system, a content management system or route and tour planning. A link to marketing automation also makes sense. After all, the marketing department has the task of collecting prospects and passing them on to the sales department when they are ready for sale. However, many manufacturers are now also working on new technologies that could supplement or even replace existing CRM tools in the future.
The so-called Customer Data Platform, or CDP for short, is very promising here. In contrast to conventional CRM systems, the information in the CDP no longer has to be entered manually. Customer data platforms create customer profiles virtually autonomously. Data from a variety of primary, secondary and third-party sources is integrated, for example from data management platforms, transactional systems, web forms, email and social media activities, website and e-commerce behavioural data and much more.
CRM: New marketing opportunities through new technologies
In plain language, this means that a CDP brings customer data for marketing, sales and service purposes from all company channels onto a single platform and complements CRM in a meaningful way. In this way, employees not only receive a complex all-round view of the respective customer, but also insights that they can quickly and easily turn into real measures. This creates a kind of standardised, real-time self-service access to customer data from a variety of sources. A customer data platform could therefore make a significant contribution to minimising data silos and gaining a better view of your own customers.
Wherever the rapid developments take us - the ever more precise analyses of the sheer immensity of available information and thus the creation of ever more accurate customer profiles, including behavioural predictions, will become increasingly sophisticated in the future. With the help of CRM, marketing can therefore break completely new ground in addressing customers - with content that customers will love and want to engage with.
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