It's a change required by the market so it’s fair to say that the end goal of a digital transformation is mostly about the customer himself. Transforming your business can be scary especially when we know that the majority of them fail. Causes are numerous such as bad technology choice, data management, lack of process structure or simply organisational challenges due to change management. At DIGITAG, we won’t do magic but we can definitely help you setting-up the right technical environment with an appropriate customer relationship management and automation system.
"Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies (...) to meet changing business and market requirements."
Getting a CRM is not an option anymore. You need an enriched database and a technological tool allowing to segment, automate and personalise interactions. This is the only way to share the right information at the right time to satisfy the customer throughout his entire lifecycle. But depending on your industry, your business model and your budget, you might go for one CRM or the other. There are various solutions on the market. It goes from very niche solutions to market leader. We have summed them up on the graph below.
What should a good CRM bring you to boost your marketing & sales process?
First and foremost, make sure you can have total visibility on your contacts, companies & deals, transverse to the company. Then, you should have clear visibility on your pipelines. Then, you need to log as many sales activities automatically including all your customer interactions whether it’s a call, an email, across social media or website visit. To capture these events, the CRM will have to sync with your different channels. Make sure it’s the case. Finally, you should be able to see all the interactions for every single lead on an organised timeline.
This is why we make a real difference between a sales CRM and marketing software that is fully integrated with your sales CRM. That’s how you bridge the gap between marketing and sales. That’s how you allow your marketing team to be at the service of your sales team. That’s how you make the link between marketing & sales actions. That’s how you measure ROI and improve the cost of marketing and sales.
Transforming your organisation into a digital business can be overwhelming. The set-up or migration process can be very time-consuming and complex but this doesn’t have to be the case. It depends on the solution you are considering initially but also on the process.
First, make sure that you are prepared for such an operation. It means giving yourself the necessary time by planning availability in the team’s calendar. The preparation phase also consists in organising your data to be imported making sure everything is labelled correctly.
Once the data is migrated to your new CRM, you will have to integrate with other tools like your website, your forms, email service, social media, ads account, etc. Or even more using APIs. Like this, you will be able to track all your customers' interactions automatically. This is crucial to get the most of your new CRM.
The next step is to test that everything is running smoothly from a marketing, sales and customer services point of view. It’s time to spot the eventual errors, the performance of every single feature and whether all the data is correctly organised.
Getting used to a new CRM can take some time so it might be a good thing to rely on external support especially as your teams will have to learn how to use their new toys. Sorry, their new tools! The CRM editor usually provides some basic instructions, courses and even certifications. Alternatively, you can also turn to a specialised agency who can provide their expertise. At DIGITAG, we have been working with many CRM migrations and we love to share the learnings we have accumulated through the years. So don’t hesitate to reach us!
The very first step to create a connection with potential customers is to genuinely help them solve some of their problems. In order to do so, we promote special content to our audience so that we can start building a relationship and retarget them afterwards. As soon as a content has to be downloaded or exchanged against contact information, it becomes what we call a lead magnet. The leads are then integrated into your database so that you can directly get in touch with them through email from now on. Note that depending on the business model, this can also be done with a combination of outbound efforts where we advertise by pushing the information to your specific audiences.
The format of a lead magnet can vary from blog articles or video masterclass to chatbots or more complex engineered marketing among many others. It has to be adapted to both your business goals and audience. No matter the selected format, it has to comply with a few prerequisites to make sure you don’t push the wrong content.
Even if you comply with these prerequisites, it doesn’t mean you will have it perfect right away. We can share best practices and give our best gut feeling at DIGITAG but we can’t read the future yet. What we can do though is to track the engagement with your content and A/B test to optimise your lead generation.
Finding the right communication channel can be hard. New media are appearing all the time as technology enables richer interactions. Every day there are more and more options to promote your product and getting the combination is not an easy task. Is traditional media relevant for you? Should you rather focus on social media or use programmatic platforms? Can you rely on third party ambassadors? Are search engines still a viable option today? Your media mix will have to evolve and adapt during the overall customer journey. Now the question is how do you select your channels?
At DIGITAG, we conduct a permanent market watch to compare every option so that we can guide you through this process. We categorise the different channels based on several variables.
Once we have shortlisted the main channels, our goal is to start testing and measuring the return on investment for each single channel. This is also when we start integrating different media together to create a multi-channel approach.
