The missing link: why CRM integration is essential for content marketing success

by | Feb 19, 2015 | CRM Management, Digital Marketing, Marketing Automation

Implementing content marketing is one of the key initiatives of many businesses in 2015. Organizations who aren’t doing it know that they should be, while many organizations that are doing it wonder if they are doing it right. The musing of where a CRM system fits into the marketing plan is not as prevalent, but to strategize effectively, it should be. CRM is a key factor to launching, measuring, and adapting a successful content marketing campaign.

A CRM system done right will allow you to deliver highly targeted messages and content to exactly the right people, with a voice that is tailored to them. Your CRM can gather the information that is critical to understanding a campaign that works. And it is the place where you deliver the best result of any content marketing campaign—NEW LEADS.

Targeting:

One of the steps of a successful content marketing strategy starts with understanding who is your target audience.  Identifying and understanding your buyer persona is a vital step to developing content which is valuable to your audience.

However, even with a terrific persona, it is only an asset if you have data aligned with those personas that you can market to. Tracking and segmenting the data in your CRM ensures that once you’ve developed your buyer persona, you can quickly define the appropriate list of people that you want to communicate with.

Not sure what to track in your CRM? Making sure you have a tracking process in place to answer these four questions is a good place to start:

  • What is the industry of each lead/organization?
  • What role does the individual play within the organization? (HR, IT, Purchasing, Marketing, Engineering, etc.)
  • What level is this individual in the organization? (Manager, Director, VP) (Influencer or Decision Maker)
  • Where does this lead stand in the buying cycle? (no contact, qualified, sale in progress, former customer)

Sales Enablement & Lead Delivery

Once launched, an effective content marketing campaign will immediately start driving interactions & inquiries—LEADS. What are you doing to take advantage of these newly generated leads?

Integrating your CRM with your content marketing strategy ensures that your sales team can realize the fruits of your labor. Pushing content marketing results into your CRM gives your sales team insights into who is interacting with your content as the interactions occur. Over time, a salesperson will be able to look at a lead and understand all of the content topics that a prospect has had interest in.

Beyond simply routing leads to your sales team, you can also communicate quality with a lead score. Delivering scored leads empowers your sales team to prioritize their marketing delivered leads based on the level of interaction, the topic of a particular piece, and the leads alignment with a qualified profile.

Learning & Validation

The CRM isn’t only helpful in originating the target lists for your data, but also in gathering the data you collect from your campaigns. Leverage your CRM to track:

  • Which messaging resonates with which target audience
  • Which campaigns are driving the most qualified leads
  • Which campaigns are impacting sales results

Because the CRM houses your sales team’s activity and sales data, it is the perfect place to tie in the data from your marketing campaigns. By tying campaign information to your leads and contacts, you can leverage your data to see how different marketing segments react to different messaging, what kinds of marketing qualified leads are being accepted by the sales team, and which content is driving leads that win.

Over time, your CRM will turn into a catalog of objective data on your marketing successes. Leverage it to evaluate what works, adapt and plan new content accordingly, optimize your delivery processes, and empower your entire front-end team to continued content marketing success.

If you are looking to increase the depth, breadth, and effectiveness of your content marketing strategy in a way that effectively blends with your sales cycle NuGrowth Solutions can help. To find out how, contact the NuGrowth team at 800-966-3051 or fill out a contact form and we will be in touch.