What is CRM-Powered Marketing?

Your CRM should be the beating heart of your business. A happy place where data is up to date and sales and marketing sing from the same hymn sheet.

Some of you reading the above will be thinking "yeah right", and that's a common occurence across a lot of businesses.

CRM-powered marketing is the process of using the data within your CRM (customer relationship management system) to inform and power hyper-relevant marketing to your target audience.

Marketing sucks without data

In essence, we've moved on from data-driven marketing, where marketers use 3rd-party data such as from Facebook (e.g. 35% of women in this area are interested in icecream) to CRM-powered marketing (e.g. 35% of women in my CRM in this area are interested in chocolate chip icecream, whereas 40% prefer chocolate, and we also know that 25% have enquired about our new chocolate honeycomb flavour).

Which do you think would give better results? If you said data-driven, you'd be wrong. Of course, data-driven marketing has its place, especially for a new business or for exploring an entirely new market. However, the best marketing will always be crafted from CRM-powered marketing.

Why old methods no longer work

Customers have got wise to the old ways of marketing, and it's now bad practice to:

• buy data lists
• send mass emails without personalisation
• cold call without consent or decent research
• send SMS messages from random numbers.

Older CRM systems, and I've used many, were not built for empowering marketing teams and making the most of the data in the system. Marketers do not want to be exporting from a CRM and importing into their marketing system! Some modern systems still don't allow for CRM fields to be used in marketing emails and dynamic pages.

CRM-powered marketing solves this, and it requires a leading CRM such as HubSpot to be implemented.

The new way of marketing

HubSpot is built for CRM-powered marketing, in fact, it's defining the category.

Businesses who are getting ahead at the moment are laser-focused on improving the customer experience. With CRM-powered marketing comes experience-driven marketing, they go hand in hand, which puts your customer at the centre of your business's universe.

CRM-powered marketing is the outcome of a solid marketing system, and CRM data, in one place. The benefits of CRM-powered marketing include:

• hyper-personalised messaging
• a single source of truth for your data
• hyper-relevant segmentation of your data
• right message, right time, any place.

Right person, Right time, ANY place

Your content should be accessible on any device and delivered at the right time, to the right person at a non-invasive time. 

For example, your lead, let's call him Dave, is a working dad of 2 who picks the children up from school at 3pm. As Dave is picking up the kids from school at 3, he doesn't like to read emails between 2:30 and 4pm. Luckily, your CRM knows this and delivers your latest marketing newsletter at 8.30pm onto Dave's iPad once Dave is on the sofa with a cuppa.

Without the CRM in that situation, and the insight that Dave is a working dad of 2, your newsletter would have landed to the right person, at the wrong time, in the wrong place and your email becomes a nusance rather than adding value.

It doesn't have to be that detailed.

Another example for you. Dave's job is purchasing administrator, and he doesn't have the authority to sign-off large purchases. In your CRM, you have Dave labelled as an 'End User' and 'Influencer' as their Buyer Role. This is useful, as using HubSpot Marketing Hub, you deliver a customised subject line for End Users and a different one for Dave's boss Helen who is the 'Budget Holder'. 

A CRM allows you to do that, and deliver precisely the right message to the right person.

Not just 'personalised' marketing

The above examples with Dave show that CRM-powered marketing goes way beyond traditional personalisation.

We've all had emails with our first name in them, or perhaps the car we drive, and our address. 

CRM-powered marketing does that, and much more. Here's some other information from the CRM you can use to make your marketing even better:

• Send different messages depending on what deal stage your customer is in
• If a customer has a support ticket live, don't send them anything at all until it is resolved
• Did a customer just visit a product page that complements the service/product they already have? Engage them with a custom offer and sales outreach.

The possibilities are endless with CRM-powered marketing, and it all starts with HubSpot.