Are Your Social Media Efforts Aligned with Your CRM and Marketing Platforms?

It’s safe to say that we all agree that Social Media is a powerful means for establishing your brand and delivering your key messages to your market, customers, partners and prospects. But are you taking full advantage of the integration possible with Social Media, CRM and marketing automation platforms? 

Today, salesforce.com and the Eloqua marketing automation platforms use Social Media pages for tracking of overall reach and success to the account level. 

Here is what is being said about integration of CRM and Marketing Automation with Social Media by industry leading vendors:

The Salesforce.com CRM Platform:
Use public social networks to listen and engage in new ways. Hear what’s being said. Automatically filter what’s important. Know who’s influential. And respond quickly and appropriately. Because questions and requests from customers on social networks become part of your case queue, social media is simply another channel that benefits from the features of the Service Cloud.

Use the social contacts feature to see your contacts’ social profiles and activities (on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter), including pictures and published profile information. Agents can get a deeper understanding of their customers’ interests and needs with a single click, without having to leave Salesforce. Read more.  

The Eloqua Marketing Automation Platform:
Social channels are critical to the marketing mix, but often B2B social media efforts stop at monitoring or content marketing, and are never integrated into email marketing and web campaigns where they can help B2B demand generation and revenue performance.
Start simple with Eloqua Social Suite, a set of social apps integrated seamlessly into the Eloqua marketing automation software.  

With Social Suite, you can easily sprinkle social content into existing Eloqua content marketing campaigns. Over time, you can use social data to better target, segment and measure demand generation campaigns.  Read more.

To have truly integrated campaigns both your content and messages should align across all media including:

• Your Website, Web Landing Pages and SEO
• Email Marketing Messages and Newsletters
• Direct Marketing Messages
• Blogs and Social Media Pages
• PR and Press Releases

Consider integrating all these media (and related messages) with your sales and marketing automation platforms. This will allow you to better track the performance of your campaigns down to the customer, partner and prospect level. If you are planning a Webinar as an example, consider using standard messages and establish tracking of openings, reads, comments, questions and registrations across all your media and attribute these touches so that your sales and marketing teams are able to see overall interest both at the macro and the account level. It’s not only possible, it’s essential to your success. 

For more information about starting, integrating and improving your partner or marketing programs, contact Larry Fournier on LinkedIn or by email at: fourthman@usa.com.