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CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Systems and Small Business Marketing

CRM systems can provide an invaluable tool for your small business. Typically, they integrate multiple core areas of your small business such as marketing, sales, customer service and more. If you’re a larger manufacturing organization, it may integrate with your ERP system.

This page will cover how CRM systems can greatly improve your small business marketing efforts.

How do CRM Systems help Small Business Marketing?

Marketing Prospect Database

Most CRM systems will function as your prospect database as well as your customer database. Creating a clean, organized marketing database is a very important part of effective small business marketing. If you have an existing marketing database, you can generally import all of your data into the CRM system of your choosing.

Campaign Management

If you want your CRM system to integrate your marketing efforts, make sure it has some sort of campaign management functionality. Campaign management will allow you to transfer information from your external marketing campaigns, and link that marketing information directly to the leads in your database.

Marketing Automation

What does linking external marketing data to internal customer data accomplish? This is part of a process called marketing automation – and it’s enormously beneficial to small business marketing efforts. Consider, if you had a reliable data on the following:

• Dashboards of your small business marketing efforts
• Marketing campaign revenue
• Marketing Campaign ROI
• Best performing Google AdWords
• Sales from organic search engines
• Evaluate your search engine optimization profitability
• Internet marketing performance such as banner ads
• Which print publications generate positive ROI
• The cost effectiveness of your last trade show

This is just a start, but CRM systems provide insight to your small business marketing efforts at the highest to most granular level. A CRM system provides the framework for a successful marketing process.

Can a Small Business Afford Marketing Automation

Yes. CRM systems and small business marketing integration can be done on many different levels. You hire a company to customize a product and integrate it with your current systems, which can be expensive. Or you can use products that operate as SAAS (software as a service).

For many small businesses considering CRM marketing, I recommend they take a look at SalesForce. SalesForce is an “In the Cloud” CRM system that comes with an optional marketing module. It will more than adequately support most small business marketing efforts

The cost of SalesForce for a small business is very manageable. It can run under $100 per month per user

CRM Systems and Marketing Integration

Another reason I like SalesForce is because they worked directly with Google to develop a prepackaged, fully integrated AdWords system. Once your landing page is correctly configured, your CRM system is completely integrated with your Google AdWords campaign. The data flows in automatically and you can integrate the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns with your actual sales data, down to the individual customer level.

CRM Systems and Sales Force Automation

CRM systems will also integrate other key areas of your small business, including sales and customer service. Sales Force Automation is the process of automating your sales department – I won’t get into all the features here, but it includes things like developing a product knowledge base, integrating your sales and marketing efforts, tracking individual sales staff performance, viewing your sales and marketing funnel or pipeline, and much more.

CRM Systems and Customer Service

Similarly, small businesses also benefit from CRM systems that provide customer service modules which allow even small businesses to create and track service issues utilize ticket tracking systems. The end result is a fully integrated operation starting with small business marketing and ending with post sales follow up from the customer service group.

Integrate your Small Business Marketing with a CRM System

Marketing Practicality has direct experience with custom CRM systems as well as SAAS CRM Systems like SalesForce. This is perhaps the most critical step you can take to improve your small business marketing efforts. Contact Marketing Practicality to utilize CRM systems and start to improve your small business marketing efforts today.