10 Tips for More Marketing Efficiency

How do you achieve more marketing efficiency despite decreasing budgets and increasing campaign complexity? In the following 10 tips we show you how you can achieve more with less effort in marketing with the help of the right CRM software.

Excel is a powerful and versatile tool. However, it is not suitable for controlling complex marketing projects! In addition to the lack of convenience in handling the data, working together on a project is a problem due to limited access and storage options. The overview of the current file version is quickly lost. One can only dream of a clean information management that provides the marketing team with all relevant contacts, activities and documents as a common knowledge base.

It is more professional with the right CRM software: All information for the preparation, processing and evaluation of marketing campaigns is managed in a structured and quick way in a central system. A number of powerful functions help to save time and nerves and guarantee an overview at all times.

To implement marketing campaigns, tasks often have to be divided into further task packages and delegated to different decision-makers and departments. The result is a branched network of activities and follow-up activities with different deadlines, persons in charge and relationships to other contacts and documents.

With activity management in the right CRM system, all marketing tasks can be quickly organized, comprehensibly delegated and monitored at a glance. With a group calendar, personnel and non-personnel resources can be perfectly planned. Thanks to the high level of transparency in collaboration, even complex projects can be handled more quickly and with less stress. Employees are freed from routine tasks by the software. Due to the semi-automatic documentation of the individual work steps, historical data can be used again and again. Thus, the last price negotiation with the trade fair constructor, the cost trend for search engine advertising or the meeting minutes from last spring can be called up with just a few clicks and used for current tasks.

What belongs to the convenient standard functionality of modern CRM software is still a cumbersome process in many companies. All enquiries received in marketing via websites, telephone, e-mail, letter, fax, trade fairs, etc. should be qualified without errors, without much typing and without intransparent e-mail communication and should be passed on to the sales department. This is made possible by special functions for inquiry and lead management in the CRM system. It should be immediately recognizable through which channel an enquiry came in, who qualified the enquiry and how, where further processing was delegated and what reaction took place. This is how you succeed in efficient lead management.

Today, it is essential to personalize marketing campaigns and tailor them to the specific needs of customers and prospects. The key question is: For whom do we communicate in which style and with which content? In the B2B environment in particular, advertising mass communication to target groups is not optimal. Rather, the concept of so-called buyer personas, which, for example, also takes into account the respective decision-making role of the target persons, promises more success. In practice, this means that a purchasing manager should be approached differently from a managing director – after all, both have different interests and needs. In particular, the right CRM helps you to act more goal-oriented in marketing by analyzing and selecting existing data.

The problem is not new: Customer data that is incomplete, carelessly maintained and often available as duplicates is not only causing grey hairs to grow in the marketing department. This is not only due to a lack of discipline in data collection. Countless heterogeneous and inconsistent data sources and systems that do not have quality assurance mechanisms are also problematic. The right CRM system helps you with the initial data cleansing and the long-term assurance of high customer data quality.

Sensibly used mandatory fields, standardized selection fields, plausibility checks and easy-to-use data entry wizards are just as helpful as powerful, parameterizable duplicate management.

In addition to the technical precautions, however, it is essential to develop a quality culture with regard to the information managed in CRM. Without the insight of the users that good data is the key to success, the best software is of little use.

The knowledge of regional potentials offers undreamt-of possibilities, especially in B2B marketing. With the right CRM solution, you can display leads, prospects or customers that meet certain criteria on a map. So you can quickly see which regions are successful and where there are still “white spots”. Interesting questions in campaign planning using geomarketing aspects are for example:

The extension of the market knowledge by the geo dimension opens many new perspectives, which can help you to be always a nose ahead of the competition.

In email marketing, too, the personal approach is crucial for success. Think carefully about what your recipients might be interested in and what you might be boring them with. To make these considerations, the right CRM system will help you. Information on the company’s industry sector, position and role of the contact person as well as a range of other data can be entered, selected and used as a basis for e-mail marketing.

Every marketer’s dream is to know the cost and effectiveness of each individual measure. The right CRM system helps to achieve new transparency in marketing controlling. In this way, the actual costs of individual measures can be recorded and offset against the available budget. Cost variances are immediately visible.

In addition, target/actual analyses at campaign level help to gain a quick overview of the status quo of ongoing campaigns. The controlling tools of CRM software also help to make the right decisions based on historical data in annual marketing planning. In addition to the costs already mentioned, the successes achieved can also be seen immediately (Which business opportunities, offers or new interested parties could be generated during a trade fair?). In this way, decisions can be justified on the basis of facts.

Content marketing is regarded as the buzzword of the year 2013. In sober terms, this hype conceals a principle that has always had its validity: quality content that offers recipients added value and is tailored to them pays off. However, many companies already fail in the basic process of efficiently creating and managing content. In particular, the decentralized management of media and marketing materials on a file system causes many problems. On the other hand, there is a lack of reference to content in its respective context and thus no control over how often and to whom, for example, brochures are sent by e-mail or letter. The central media management in the right CRM system provides a targeted remedy here. Individual versions and their editing steps can be traced, all content is centrally available, so that articles, images, videos, templates or documents are available for marketing publications with just a few clicks.

So that your company can permanently orient itself to the needs of your customers, the classic customer survey is still a suitable instrument. In practice, many companies are reluctant to invest in the regular implementation of such measures.

One survey method that does not require much effort is the system-supported online survey by e-mail. Powerful CRM systems offer special functions precisely for these purposes. Your particular advantage: The provision of electronic questionnaires and their reuse is simple. The survey results can be personalized or anonymously captured, stored directly in connection with the respective customer and subjected to comprehensive analysis.