We all have tools in our businesses that we pay for that we only use occasionally or that we only use some of the functions while we ignore the rest.
What do I mean by tools? I recently did a podcast about software tools that increase your productivity. You can listen here.
They are tools like Dropbox, Boomerang for Gmail, Evernote, Zoom, etc.
There is one other tool that most businesses have, but they don’t use it fully.
It’s your CRM or Customer Relationship Management program.
Now in different industries, a CRM means different things.
In some, it tracks every interaction with a prospect and possibly your customers. Salesforce, for example, is the most widely known CRM. There are many others and some that are industry-specific.
In other industries, a CRM is primarily for email marketing. Some you may have heard of are Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Aweber. These handle your email broadcasts and some automation but don’t give you a chance to track contacts outside of email on a person’s record.
Both of the above have value and, used well, are an integral part of your business.
However, they both are lacking in some functions I find critical for my business.
What I find important in a system is the ability to keep track of who’s a client or customer and what they’ve bought and what is their current status. Along with the ability to collect money from them and to market to people who are customers as well as prospects.
Oh, and it needs to be affordable.
The right system is a key part of my business. When I installed it my business grew.
I now look at my CRM as the cash register system of my business. In my years in the grocery industry, one of the key systems we used was our cash register systems.
And if you don’t know there are 1000s of hours of programming and work in the systems in every store to install it and keep everything updated.
Well the CRM in my business is my cash register system.
I collect money and leads and customers in it and track interactions and stay in touch with everyone.
My weekly message goes out to the people who asked to get information from me through my CRM, both clients and people who are interested in marketing and growing their businesses.
For those interested, I use Keap (formerly knows as Infusionsoft) for my CRM. If you want to know more about it or have questions feel free to reach out to me.
Now there is one more thing that your CRM can do for you that in the past few years has been forgotten about for many.
And that is, it can help you track your sales and prospects and help you see where people are in your marketing process.
Since Facebook and Google have gotten so good at tracking, many of us have stopped relying on our CRM for information.
We go into Facebook ads manager and see how much we spent on ads and how much Facebook says we earned, and when everything is working as it should we found Facebook to be accurate.
And since we’re busy people we stop going to our CRM to verify the numbers regularly. Oh sure, we do it if we feel something isn’t accurate to double-check but …
Well, with all the privacy changes happening right now we may be losing some of that accuracy.
This means we’ll need to get back into looking at the numbers we’re getting in our CRM.
We also are going to need our CRM to “talk” to Facebook.
You see we can now set it up so that we can send information from our CRM back to Facebook. That way Facebook knows who bought or signed up for information or took other actions.
This lets Facebook track the results of your ads, no matter what the browsers or Apple or Google do but more importantly, it lets Facebook know who is taking action and lets them optimize your ads to find more people like the ones taking action.
This is a little understood or appreciated part of the tracking Facebook does.
Yes, it’s great to be able to look at Facebook ads manager and see the results of your ads but what’s more important is that this information lets Facebook refine the types of people who take you up on your offer and deliver more of them to you at a lower cost.
In one of my recent podcasts I talked about the value of a CRM and Keap in particular. It does everything we talked about in this article and more. Click here to listen to that episode if you missed it.
In the future, I’ll be talking about how your CRM can help you grow your business as well as all things Facebook and Online Marketing.
It’s a good thing I like to learn new things as there is always something new or something old coming back around to keep me interested.
My goal is to bring you what you need to know to grow your business faster.
If you’d like help planning and designing a system to grow your business faster reach out to me at www.gosocialexperts.com/workwithus.
I look forward to talking with you.
Brian
P.S. Yes we help businesses grow faster with Facebook and Instagram ads. And we also offer consulting and planning services where we help you go in-depth about your Customer Avatar. In these sessions, we help you build out an 8-Step Marketing plan. You can sign up to talk about how we can help you at www.gosocialexperts.com/workwithus.