For reasons that deliver better outcomes, marketing in the present times is all about working with a plethora of data.
Hence if your business is using an easy to use CRM solution as a business growth technology and having data for backing up the strategies in your business, it is best to provide marketing a place in the table which will help them to create more successful campaigns for boosting lead generation and revenue growth.
Nevertheless, as one of the best small and medium business CRM software vendors, we have experienced that in modern times there is a mad rush to get recognized as marketers who are data-driven, using software platforms like Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms in the marketplace.
Therefore here are some to the three most critical errors that businesses do while handling their data and things that you can accomplish to rectify them:
Not all metrics found in the CRM database are tied to business results. Since there are many data points that are totally superficial and may make the performance of the marketing, and sales departments in the company look good, nevertheless, it does not necessarily imply or indicate that a campaign is effective in generating quality leads that can predict sales.
For example, the number of downloads of content, followers on social media websites, are mostly considered as vanity metrics by most companies.
Now, let us state one aspect very clearly- vanity metrics found in the easy to use CRM platforms are not essentially bad.
There is utterly nothing ‘wrong’ if you want to track your businesses’ shares, likes, or followers on social media websites since it obviously aids in gaining a wide-ranging view of brand awareness of your business in the marketplace. Likewise, tracking the number of total page views of your business website or the number of content downloads can help you to see which topics and messages resonate with your targeted audience most effectively.
Nevertheless, the main lacuna that comes into play when you use vanity metrics as a marketer and permit these metrics to represent more meaningful information that denotes the rise and fall in your business.
Per say, having a very large number of page-views of your website actually means nothing for highlighting your revenue goals, if most of those visitors immediately bounce off, or seldom make any purchase.
-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake
The solution to avoid this above-stated mistake lies in focusing on clarity metrics, which is, in fact, the real operational data in the CRM database that can make a difference to your businesses’ bottom line.
For an example, the amount to time your prospective customers need to wait before they are contacted by a sales rep from your organization, or the number of new leads being generated, is what counts as clarity metrics.
Therefore, the most important thing that you can do to keep away from focusing on vanity metrics is to repeatedly ask yourself how each of these data points in your easy to use CRM directly relates to your business outcome.
Always keep in mind that what counts as vanity metrics depends on whether or not that data supports a business outcome for your specific industry.
Like if your company is a media house that makes it revenue advertising to followers on social media, then the number of shares or the number of followers can also be a very important metric that plays a big role in your digital marketing strategy.
Now without relevant and proper context, data is just a cluster of number in the database of your easy to use CRM software. Hence, if any of the email campaigns that you have sent had an awfully low open rate that for sure does not necessarily mean that it was really a bad email. We say this because it can also suggest that the campaign was fired at the wrong time. Similarly, if a blog post did really good, it can also mean that it could have happened due to a sudden growth of subscribers from your previous day’s blog posts, else it can also be due to an unexpected rise in Google searches for that topic.
Therefore, if you never look for reasons why the numbers in your metrics have turned out in a certain way, you will never be able to avoid mistakes from occurring times and again or might not even be able to take the benefit of some action that has turned out to be really successful and good for your business.
-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake
Question every action. Since in order to find the context you need to really understand what your marketing data is telling you in-between the lines. Therefore constantly ask yourself and brainstorm with your teams, why the data in the CRM database is what it is. Hence do not play with your assumptions that are based on a single data point in your CRM for small and medium businesses.
Finally, the biggest mistake that marketers most often do, is not being able to adjust their preset course based on what the easy to use CRM data say to the data-driven marketers.
As marketers, it is easy to find yourself accustomed and acclimatized to a certain course of action, and therefore focuses on the CRM data or the metrics that support your activities.
Most often, this occurs owing to pressure from the management or simple stubbornness on their part that if an email campaign can just run its course, as planned, like many others it will also work out well.
-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake
Never be too proud to admit that something is just not working. Always keep in mind that a major part of working in a data-driven manner in sales and marketing is to have an objective resource to guide you with your strategies.
Therefore, be open to accepting what the data reveals- even though it can be not all that favorable. Additionally, it is even more important, that you must remain bendable enough to flex and change your strategies and make alterations when it is required. Since by being open to changes, your flexibility will certainly pay off, as your future campaigns will be more effective that can user in stellar business growth.
