CRM 2.0: limited to campaigns?

In my earlier post on Social Media and CRM integration, I had pointed you to a “great discussion” that is on right now. Now, I am a little unsure.
Having read all the posts so far, I wish these guys will hurry up and get to the point. At least the point which deeply interests me. 😉

How do you make CRM “social”?
1. Is it by capturing all the myriad customer voices on Facebook, Twitter and blogspaces, by monitoring millions of conversations and winnowing those that are relevant to your product, company and brand? Is it by being able to drill down to an individual customer’s comments and relate it to his profile on our database?
2. Is it trying to create a “complete map” of an individual contact by using his profiles and activities on sites such as FB, LI and Twitter? These ideas have a lot of wow, how do you do it in a way that is not so expensive as to drive Citibank into bankruptcy? 🙂 And, how do you manage this without employing an army of intelligent, empowered and motivated marketers who will be needed to participate-in, mentor, or seed those thousands of relevant conversations?

So, guys, hurry up. I am waiting to know. In the meantime, check out this post by Mario Pergolino of Marketo which details the state of the art ):
If you do not have the patience, let me summarise:
Mario essentially advocates using social media as another channel of disseminating marketing messages. It does not answer my questions above; but, to be fair, the article is not seeking to. It had a limited brief of summarizing how e-mail can work with social media, and it does just that. Social media is virtually an advetrtising platform and since this article is from Marketo, it calls for deeper engagements via email (“give your e-mail recipients the inside scoop”).

From here, to Social CRM or CRM 2.0 is a long way. There are still many posts left of the promised 30 on the CRM Magazine blog. I will wait.

The chicken and the egg

What comes first?

In an ideal business world, you can:

1. Have your advertising agency release the ad and pay them from the revenue you realised from the “sales leads”.
2. Get the best marketing research done and have your fortunes foretold; all before starting to sell and get revenue in the door.
3.  Grow your business purely organically and funded only through internal accruals.

If this sounds like a dream; too right. It is.

So, you are a start-up and you want to grow the business, add to your portfolio, improve your product quality, set up a customer service department? Bad news. You have few people; motivation is a problem as is quality. And cash flow is tight.
You want sales to grow, but can’t afford a lot of salesmen. And, you certainly want your salesmen to call on customers who have evinced a desire to buy or talk business. You want qualified sales leads. You want to “pull”. Who will run this for you?
Good marketing talent costs money. And, great marketing talent does not want to work for a small company, especially if it is a startup.  You want to hire freshers and train them up; problem is, you do not have trainers.

Consider outsourcing

A lot of companies have been outsourcing one of a kind or infrequent activities like building customer databases or gruntwork like posting letters and mailing even now. But, what you might want to consider is getting part-time access to outside talent.

Outside talent can help design your campaigns, customer databases, sales management systems: deadline driven intense activities that require expertise that you do not need inhouse. After all, if you do a yearly planning excercise and you need an experienced marketing head on board for about 15 days to a month, why not look for him/ her outside?

Similarly, tactical implementation of marketing plans can largely be left to outsiders. From profiling the target audience to appropriate messaging to the target audience; from deciding the media choice for communication to creating the communication to capturing the leads and passing the leads on to your sales.

All when you need them.

Tu Sprite pee!

Just a short post on lazy, nay clueless advertisers. And, things are getting worse, not better.

Years back, when Sourav Ganguly was dropped from the Indian cricket team, and it did not look likely that he will ever make it back, he disappeared from all advertisements very soon as well. Much as Ganguly fans would contest this, a player’s visual appeal (ability to move sales stock!) is linked to his playing days.

Why am I reminded of this? Because, Sprite is going against all marketing wisdom, even commonsense; asking folks to open bottles of Sprite in the currently running ad in the hope that they get to meet Shahrukh and the Kolkata Knight Riders team.

There are several things that are wrong with this ad. Firstly, KKR might be a great brand (some study quotes their brand value as the highest among all the teams, inspite of finishing last in IPL), but surely, cricket audiences are not enthused about wanting to meet resounding losers in a competitions; one that is still going on?
And, do they expect KKR to have such strong fan following outside of Kolkata to warrant mass adulation of the kind that is needed for people to be motivated to open Sprite bottles in preference to some other?

Shahrukh does have a multicity appeal and so does Sourav. But both of them have done much in the last 30 days to dissipate their appeal. Shahrukh will gain it back with his next hit, whenever it is. But, KKR is still at least a year away from being a winning brand.
Meeting KKR? Huh! Show me the money!

Here’s what must have happened. Some brand manager spent six months coming up with a message and haggled with many teams, owners and players to finally rope in KKR/ Shahrukh as the star-cast.
Then he and his agency took eons to find dates on Shahrukh’s calendar, shot the ad at enormous expense and  by the time they were done, KKR were on their way home.
Perhaps this was planned. Perhaps they honestly believed that KKR would reach the semis, perhaps go all the way. So, they booked media space and planned their blitzkrieg  to co-incide with the fag-end of the IPL. Alas.

Till such time, you can put this down to laziness; maybe even bad luck. Lots of us shared their optimism regarding KKR’s progress in the torunament. But, to continue to run the same ads, when they clearly are counterproductive – “what a bunch of losers” – is inexplicable. If the media slots can’t be cancelled, whu not run one of several canned advertisements they surely have?

Back to the original point..

Content is king..

I do not mean to trivialize the process of segmentation of customers. It remains one of the most difficult arts to practise. However, it is far from being the end of your campaign design. Targeting this finely segmented market (a collection of micro-markets each with their own needs, expectations and not to forget, business potential) with unique communication/ messaging and delivering it through the channel that best reaches them, is what is going to test you.

Who creates the messages? And who writes the content that will resonate with each of the target market and who provides the support points that will make the messages credible?

The internet made it easy to communicate but, it is akin to your being in the same room with your client. You still need to know what her individual needs are at that point in time and how to verbalize your solution to her needs. 

When you have one segment to chase and only one message (one person to chase in a crowded room with one single thought in mind) to deliver, perhaps you can handle it. When you have many segments and as many individual messages/ benefit statements to deliver, it gets tough. Not the delivery so much but being ready with the right benefit statement.