Sales funnel 2.0 – Social meets CRM -> SCRM

You don’t need me to tell you that online channels, Internet Marketing, Social Media and Online Business Networks  have developed very rapidly over the last few months and years. New terms are entering the marketing and sales vocabulary particularly Social CRM, SCRM and Sales funnel 2.0. So what does all this have to do with a smaller business, and what can they do to make sense of it and move forward? What follows are some thoughts and ideas of how they link together and an approach to joining them up.

Don’t interrupt, attract me!

One major change is the decline in effectiveness of ‘Interrupt Marketing’ and the rise in ‘Attraction Marketing’. Cold calling and direct mail are in decline and search marketing has been very much on the rise.

This new Attraction Marketing paradigm has been paraphrased and summarised quite neatly by a the phrase ‘Know me, Like me, Follow (Trust) me, coined by Penny Power of ecademy.

Get yourself Found

A vital first stage and key here is to be ‘Found’ when people are looking for what you offer, or are looking to solve a problem where you have the solution. Unless you are doing very well and getting way more leads and business than you can handle from your current contact network, channel partners, referrals, physical networking etc. then putting yourself in a position where you can be found by a much wider community of potential customers is pretty important.

Be relevant

Google has championed and facilitated this with its crusade for ‘relevance’. Google’s objective is to strive to deliver a better experience to someone using its search engine, by matching great content and highly relevant Adwords adverts to every natural search. Search marketing, link building etc is a very specific discipline or online marketing, but the principles are widely applicable. Put yourself in your customers shoes, see things through their eyes. If they had a problem or need you could solve, where would they go and what would they look for? Put yourself in that place, using those words.

Be an Authority

To do well in the Search engines you need to present yourself as an authority in your area of expertise or niche. To be attractive you need to come across as an expert ‘problem solver’, rather than a product or service sales-person. You need to show that you add value, to increase the money in the prospects bank account, not just deplete it. You also need to put out new material on a very regular basis. But it’s increasingly difficult to get to the top of the Search rankings, as it’s a very crowded and competitive place to be.

Develop your Social Media Hub

Social Media is a great way to establish your authority, to demonstrate your value add and to be found. As an individual or small business it’s well worth developing a Hub within Social Media. By this I mean somewhere (a primary place) that you keep regularly updated with content that supports your authority position. Your hub could well be your Blog if you publish content, or Facebook / LinkedIn / ecademy for networking and group discussions. You’ll need to update your hub regularly in order to build your brand.

It’s worth having this hub embedded within a relevant community rather than being stand-alone. A Blog within WordPress or Blogger will attract cross-links and be Search Engine Indexed very quickly. A Facebook, LinkedIn or ecademy page will be a focal point for your contacts there. A six page brochure-ware site on an obscure hosting platform (to make a point) will be extremely ineffective as your hub as it will be very hard to get it found. It will take much more effort in the search engines and satellite communities to attract and direct traffic to your site.

Develop your Social Media Satellites

With the Hub in place the next step (if justified) is to develop the satellites. These are your presence on the minor social networks and elsewhere. Elsewhere could be Twitter, which you can use to highlight items you’ve published or things you are doing day by day or resources your target audience could find useful and that support your authority position. This could be articles that you publish and distribute through ezine articles and similar. It could be YouTube if you’re into video, either with you in-front of the camera or an audio slideshow. There are many secondary media where you can set out your stall, build up a presence and where you reach out to a new audience. However, do try to draw people back to your Hub to reduce duplication of effort and mainstream your prospect funnel.

Farm Social Media to Feed your CRM

The next step (again if justified) is to draw people from the hub, and maybe from the satellites, into your CRM. There are many advantage of drawing people into your CRM system. One is that you can communicate, track and prioritise much more directly than you can in Social Media or Search.

Switch on Marketing Automation

Using Marketing Automation techniques especially email marketing and auto-responders you can make your messages much more specific and tailored to the recipient, not just in terms of their interests but also how far along any buying process they may be. You also have multiple opportunities to put your messages out to them. In this way you can increase the potential sales value of the prospect, to outweigh the acquisition and development cost. You can also do this without your competitors being too aware of what is happening, as may be the case in the open environment of social media.

Put together a joined-up plan for Social CRM

An online communications strategy, together with a plan, and a joined up approach is a great way to increase your sales pipeline and generate leads. By developing and executing a joined-up plan along the lines above it doesn’t need to take excessive amounts of time. However it isn’t something that can be built and become effective overnight. Start planning now and take action progressively and in 6-12 months you should be seeing significant results from your SCRM project.