WHITEPAPER MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND CRM

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1 WHITEPAPER MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND CRM

2 WHITEPAPER MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND CRM 2 ABOUT Nowadays, it is essential for a company to have a defined and efficient marketing strategy. Implementing such a strategy requires following some rules and adopting solid processes. When planning and executing a marketing strategy, the so called 4P s are core elements. The 4P s stand for Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Promotion is where the communication is taking place. There are a few important questions a company needs to consider before planning its promotion: How to communicate? Which channels to use to communicate? What type of communication to use? To answer these questions, companies conduct research to define the right mix for their business. At the end of the process, they have decided on a mix between advertising, sales promotions, public relations, sponsorships, internet promotions, direct marketing and personal selling.

3 WHITEPAPER MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND CRM 3 CRM: THE FOUNDATION FOR HIGH QUALITY MARKETING COMMUNICATION Over the past years, building a relationship between the individual customer and the company has become more and more important. Depending on the saturation of the different markets, the costs for winning a new name customer have increased and, because of that, keeping existing customers has become more important. In order to enable the company to build a strong relationship with customers, the right communication via the right channel is the key for success. Personal selling is the type of communication that first comes to mind when thinking about CRM. Sales executives are working with a CRM solution and they are talking with their customer on a regular basis. But are they always talking to the customer at the right point of time and about the right topic? Direct marketing is the second type of communication most people think of. This is because of the need for addresses and lists. Most recently, based on the development of Web 2.x, internet promotions are on the radar, too. When thinking about marketing types like advertising, sales promotions, public relations and sponsorships which are focusing more on brand awareness, CRM-Software is not top of the list of enabling tools. Most of the things mentioned above used to work more or less successfully without a CRM solution, even before ERP or any other system and strategy. But times have changed, companies have started using ERP and then started their journey into CRM. In the beginning, ERP systems with information stored about the customer have been used as a tool to enable the CRM strategy. Soon they realised that not all information needed was available in the ERP system and that it also wasn t the right place to store it in the future. This is and was the starting point of CRM system implementation. Personal Selling Sales as communication channel is still a major part of the communication mix. The personal contact enables them to bring the most targeted messages across. Through visit preparation, marketing is able to give information to the sales teams about relevant topics to mention. In addition to that, sales executives now have a second task. While talking to the customer, sales executives are able to gather a lot of information. Today they are not the only ones interacting with the customers. Other departments like Services and Products are part of this personal selling. Pivotal CRM provides a single platform for Marketing and Sales to share information and it is flexible enough to be extended to capture the required information and link those together. Direct Marketing Phone marketing, direct mail marketing, catalogue marketing, direct response advertising and online marketing are the major forms of direct marketing. Finding the right target audience for a specific marketing type requires relevant data. This again, like personal sales, is not a one way communication. There is information such as clickthroughs, responses, opt-outs and others that are coming back and enrich the information. The knowledge enables marketing to execute more targeted and overall more effective communications. Pivotal CRM is offering you sophisticated functionalities for direct marketing. Letters, e-marketing and call centres offer the possibility to execute direct mail, or telephone marketing campaigns and capture the feedback. To find the right target audience, all data stored in the system can be used to select and filter specific fields.

4 WHITEPAPER MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND CRM 4 Internet Promotions Internet promotions cover a wide range of marketing communication activities. This all started with the development of the internet. Companies put their own websites out to broadcast their messages to a wide audience. With the technology evolving, the websites got more and more interactive. Customers left their footprint on the sites by clicking through the topics and showing interest. Web 2.0 caused a major change by enabling new channels for direct communications, not only from company to customers, but also between customers. Word of mouth entered a new dimension. This area is still going through a lot of changes. How this vast amount of information might be used, how the communication channel is going to be used, how to engage etc. is still under construction. Pivotal CRM offers a platform that is flexible enough to store information in a way that it is relevant to your specific business processes. It enables companies to discover the structures, segments etc. within the customer base. Customers and prospects are not only touched through one channel, they are affected by all channels. The key is that the communication has to be consistent. Step by step, companies are moving towards a multichannel integration and are in need of a flexible platform to support this. CRM is the platform offering a good point to start from and to continue the journey towards Multi-Channel Customer Management combining the integration between the growing number of distribution channels and communication channels. Pivotal CRM offers different functionalities like social media research, social media marketing and social media collaboration, etc. All these can help companies trying out different things as this area currently is a tremendously fast moving target. The base requirement currently is to enable marketing by having a central communication platform to push consistent messages into the different social media channels and to capture feedback. In addition, sales get a direct way to see what contacts to talk to before entering a meeting. Brand Awareness The relationship between brand awareness marketing communication elements and CRM is less visible, but is still there. The data gathered about the needs and wants, the structure of the customer base (age, position, affinities, etc.) help to design the right advertisements, choose the right locations for sales promotions, choose the right media for public relationship purposes and find the right areas for sponsorship.

5 WHITEPAPER MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND CRM 5 CONCLUSION Using APTEAN s Pivotal CRM platform combined with the relevant modules offers you the right tool to improve your marketing communication. Marketing is able to build relationships with customers and prospects by choosing the right marketing communication mix based on a high quality set of data which is easy to analyse. Using the built in tools for sales, direct, phone and social media marketing information gives direct access to relevant data and helps to directly enrich the information. Pivotal CRM: CRM That s Built for You Pivotal CRM is the solution of choice for companies seeking customer relationship management software that can fully and cost-effectively satisfy their users expectations. Built with the user experience in mind, Pivotal CRM offers unparalleled flexibility and customisability, enabling companies to tailor the system precisely to their sales users needs. Pivotal CRM highlights Microsoft-style interface Personalisable dashboard Role-and-task based navigation SharePoint integration Outlook integration Office suite integration Microsoft.NET Framework Powerful querying capabilities Custom workflows and sales milestones Mobile CRM Low cost of ownership Highly flexible and usable application development platform. More than 5,000 customers around the world rely on Aptean to give them a competitive edge. By providing innovative, industry-driven enterprise application software, Aptean helps businesses to satisfy their customers, operate more efficiently, and stay at the forefront of their industry. For more information, visit: Copyright Aptean All rights reserved.