A Complete Guide to CRM For Instagram

Today’s consumer is more connected than ever before. The advances in mobile technology have empowered customers to shop in a huge variety of ways, and on the journey to purchase they engage with countless different touch points. One of the biggest trends of 2016 is ‘omni-channel shopping’ and marketers are being challenged with accurately tracking this customer habit.

For a marketer, the information contained in their CRM is more important than ever, and is an absolute goldmine if leveraged to it’s full potential on social. We know that today’s customer, more than likely, uses either Facebook or Instagram, or both, so leveraging your CRM data to find that customer in a social environment gives you an incredible opportunity to continue the marketing story at scale. As Facebook Inc. now boasts 1.71 billion users connected globally (which is an increase of 220 million active monthly users in the last year) extending your consolidated 1st and 3rd party data to these channels shouldn’t be a ‘nice to have’ strategy, it should be a ‘must have’ strategy.

You could argue that selling to existing customers is much easier than looking for and acquiring new ones, so make sure you are using Custom Audiences to reinforce existing customer connections. This is the first step to linking CRM and social activity. As a business with a CRM, you will naturally have lists of people who are part of your audience segments (for example, current customers/users, past purchasers, high value customers, loyalty programme members etc.) using Custom Audiences you can match to their social profile and engage with them across Facebook and Instagram. People on average check their Facebook 15 times a day, using multiple devices, so it should not be ignored as a communication channel. Lets look at some campaign strategies you can use…

1) Paid social advertising

Using your CRM data when creating your Facebook and Instagram adverts provides outstanding value to your targeting. For example, if your CRM gives you a list of customers who have purchased a particular product, you can easily reach them on Instagram presenting a relevant context ad to them as they browse your desired content, which have the potential to drive a purchase completion, or Facebook adverts which will help provide a further push to conversion.

If you have a CRM, you will have customers and users with different values. Using Custom Audiences allows you to target customers who have a high worth, as well as using the option in your CRM to target a more advanced audience segment (marketing to the ‘most valuable customers’). To make this even more efficient, you can use a detailed Custom Audience, to target all users who have made a purchase within a specific product category, or even defined product. Notice the difference between the two levels:

Level 1 – wide targeting, nice with targeting considering how big Facebook audience is

Level 2 – narrow targeting, achieved at lower CPL, this way you virtually are sure that only the right people see your ads

It is essential to understand that Facebook’s pricing system is based on the Cost Per Click (CPC) model, where the advertiser pays each time that an ad receives a click, the actual amount paid for a click will vary depending on how relevant the ad is to the user. This means that as an advertiser, you will have to spend a lot of time analysing the audience you are targeting and the publications you are targeting in order to use the platform effectively. You need to have an idea of what your target audience wants to know, through studying this, you can create a more successful campaign that will demonstrate an increase in click through rates and, potentially, conversions.

In order to create an outstanding Facebook and/or Instagram advertising campaign for your business, you need to know your audience, and you need to set your goals. The key to creating an outstanding campaign lies within your ability to target specific audiences, using a vast array of options that offer you the ability to pinpoint exactly which audiences you would like to target. For example, the targeting options on Facebook allow you to choose an audience by location, age, gender, education level, job title, interests and behaviours. This allows you to hone in on your audience, ensuring your campaign is reaching the people you would like it to.

2) CRM synced email and newsletter campaigns

Take the convenience of a newsletter and apply it to a platform that has the highest reach. You can gain further insight into the success of your marketing strategy, and drive clicks to your website, app or store using Facebook Loyalty Programmes to communicate with existing customers.

If your CRM has the ability to provide a list of email addresses of your customers, this data could be delivered through your newsletter, or sent to you Facebook’s Custom Audiences, to target your ideal audience who already are connected with your business. If the idea of being able to purchase a product online crossed as a customer browses your content on a mobile device, this should be an ideal opportunity to promote cross-channel sales. Keep in mind that people on average spend 90 minutes a day on Instagram (the longest per day spent on a social media platform). You can also get the data to view people’s Instagram profile privately. You can learn the way of viewing private Instagram accounts.

There is a unique, and growing, opportunity that exists when you use your CRM to reach your customers on social. Facebook and Instagram are a social networks, so your business should be delivering engaging, sharable content, targeting people who would like to share it. But, you could take it a step further! With the help of your CRM or data vendor, you could expand your reach to your customers, and people who may have interacted with your content in the past on Facebook or Instagram in the past, by creating and promoting content that they would surely like to share. It is important to note that if you are using dynamic content, such as videos, you can create a variety of short and interesting segments, to make your videos more shareable. Each of these segments can be delivered through emails to either specific members of your CRM, or Facebook Custom Audiences. It is important that you create an edited version of each of these videos to make the content easily consumable by everyone.

3) Facebook Adverts

Using your CRM data, you can create a relevant content story by extending beautiful images or quality video to creative ads that are sent to the people who are part of your CRM mailing lists. For instance, if you have a list of email addresses (or you sync your e-Commerce data to the CRM) from happy consumers of your business, you can easily group the results or takeaways from your analysis, and target those specific segments with Facebook and Instagram ads. For example, if you have a list of people who have on-site bought certain products, or who have made various other above average transactions, send them interesting information about the products they have bought so far.

The objective of your campaign is to reach your customers, but this is only a good strategy if your customers are engaging with your content. In order to be able to achieve this, it is essential that you spend time with your CRM data to discover what, or who, you need to target. Are you ready for this?

This looks like something advertisers are missing out on

All a company needs to do is find this content on Facebook and Instagram, and put it on their website. They will have a steady flow of sign-ups and revenue

From what the data, and users, tell us, this is actually a less valuable strategy than –

Pay per click – specially for business owners who want to get leads
Local business – any business that has a physical address. Business owners can rely on the location strategy to get noticed and drive foot traffic to their store.
Local businesses – must have an enticing content strategy based on custom audiences, to drive engagement
Event marketing – a cool way to get leads from organic Facebook fans – buy tickets to events. This is a very effective strategy to prove your business value.
Creative, interesting business portraits – research Facebook is the experience should be as close to ‘reality’ as possible. On this, we think that perhaps that the most effective way to target is to create an alluring, interesting business portrait, that will have the potential to cross over and reach your Google Search audience.

Start now by going through your CRM data and create a campaign strategy that will connect your customers directly to you.

Only the best people and events received Facebook’s local algorithm boost back in 2016. One such highly effective method was to run an event against a target audience of interested parties by publishing a post on Facebook, and running ads to the same audience based on the event.

Businesses can set up events on Facebook to increase exposure for specific days and times, or for an entire day. Only the people you are interested in reaching will be able to find the event.

4) Syncing your CRM with your Facebook and Instagram Custom Audiences

When two companies partner with Facebook, a layer of communication is created between the advertiser and Facebook. Facebook takes care of the admin work for the business, allowing the advertiser to concentrate on their skillsets.

An advertiser can import the CRM data to Facebook upload to create a prospect list:

If you are not using your CRM data, you might as well be missing the boat on this one.

5) Create a social media dashboard

Allocate time each day to plan out the social media content that will be shared across multiple accounts. Your social media strategy should look like your other marketing campaigns.

Key to a successful social media strategy is the review of your Facebook and Instagram analytics, engagement, and likes and share rates. On a weekly basis, this data will need to be reviewed and applied to your social platforms. By taking the time to review these metrics, and to apply the data to your next campaign, your social media presence will demonstrate results, and your business will progress.

6) Using social media to nurture leads

You will notice that any value that you create in the form of social media will impact your relationship building capacity. When it comes to the effectiveness of your social media presence, the best strategy is to keep it simple. Do not rely on social media to reach the same audience that you may be reaching via other marketing methods. Be selective, and to create the most effective social outreach campaign is to target the group of people who are interested in the content that you are producing.

Create a social media strategy, that is based on specific goals for your audience.

The results you can expect from a social media presence vary based on the businesses objectives, the goals they have, and the products they are promoting. For example, a business that is involved in paid advertising campaigns, or paid lead generation campaigns, will have a very different social media strategy from a company that creates a social media strategy to improve overall awareness of the business.

7) Start by understanding your social media audience

Social Media is a powerful way to get more leads, but for small and medium-sized business it’s a big deal being part of the Facebook and Instagram hype. The social media audience is too big – and too dense – to get results, if you don’t understand the details of the platforms you express yourself on.

It’s key to listen to your followers on social media and understand their background. The more you understand your target audience, the easier you can apply the right creative and techniques to attract leads to your business.

8) Understand how your audience uses your product

The key to moving your social media to a more personal level is to understand your customer’s needs. They are the reason you have a social presence in the first place. So, it is especially important to understand how they use your product and their feelings.

By understanding your customer inside out, you will find out how they communicate, what language they speak, and how to reach them. At the same time, be aware of your own needs.

9) Learn what the audience really wants

We know what you want. What you want is to know how to stand out on social media.

Social media and its platforms have grown to a point that is interesting even to the experts, but there is one thing for sure, you don’t want to try to ‘fit in’. You need to figure out how to utilize your strengths to prove your business value.

Be interesting, and make sure that it makes sense.

10) Create content that is the heart of your social media marketing campaigns

Currently, Facebook is running on autopilot. If you want to get in front of your target audience, you must create content that will resonate with them, and give them a reason to check out your page.

Without a plan for creating content, you are missing out on a significant opportunity to sell your products.

Facebook has created a social media platform that is unique, in that the content you create will have the potential to reach, far and wide in a timely manner – if you are able to convince the social network to do that for you.

11) Appear as a thought leader

If you have a great product, you should have a built-in enthusiasm for telling your story.

Build a relationship with the clientele through Facebook and Instagram by creating content that is interesting and relevant to their interests. Tell stories that explore the world of your product. Tell stories that detail features and benefits of your products or services. By doing so, you will build a solid relationship with your customer base by taking the time to learn what is most important to them.

12) Understand the features of the Facebook Ad Interface

target your audience with hyper-local precision

Imagine the potential to reach a specific target audience in a specific region and lead source. You can tell a more compelling story when you have the ability to target a predetermined audience within a specified location or radius.

The ability to target is also enabled by Facebook’s new Shop at Your Door technology, which brings a personal touch when you target shoppers in a given radius of your business.

This new tool will enhance your ability to reach a specific audience, and to eliminate the possibility of paying for impressions that are costing your budget in wasted efforts.

know what content works with your audience.

As your page grows on Facebook and Instagram, your business will gain more followers. These followers will be interested in a variety of different things, so it is important to respond to their interests with a variety of content that is relevant to them.

For example, if someone visits your page, and they want to know more about a specific product, they can click on that special category and follow it to your product page. Your goal is to keep them on your page by creating engaging storytelling.

13) Decide on your Facebook marketing goals

First, you need to decide what your goals are on Facebook. In turn, this will determine the types of images you use, the posts you create, and the audience you will target.

Provide value on a consistent basis

During the course of a day, your Facebook audience may be pre-occupied with a variety of personal and professional things. They may need something to brighten their day, or to help them relax. Facebook has the ability to help your business bridge the gap between your business and your target audience, and it is done in a way that is uniquely personal.

Keep in mind that many people spend their time on Facebook as a way to connect with their friends and family. Even if Facebook is used primarily for amusing content, it still provides a unique opportunity to reach out to customers and to create a personal connection.

14) Use Facebook’s advertising interface to its full potential

Facebook provides different ways to get your message to your audience. One of the most effective is ads. The Facebook advertising interface is a way to showcase your product with the most compelling and relevant image possible.

What you say and how you say it could come in the form of any image, whereas the one photo you use with your post is what the audience will mostly focus on.

If the image you use is compelling, people will want to know more. This gives you an excellent opportunity to provide them with a free, or low-cost eBook or guide that answers their questions. The result could be thousands of dollars in additional profits.

15) Learn the vital importance of cross-platform activities

You can plan your social media campaigns on Facebook where you can create a special ‘tab’ that is accessible from your website. This special tab will allow you to post to your website, and to Facebook simultaneously. Combining your website with these features will help your business to achieve better results at every level

Your website is a major component of your overall marketing strategy, so is Facebook, so there is no better way to connect the two than a link that takes you to a special tab where you can provide posts that can be viewed on both platforms. If you are reading this blog, chances are that you have already been doing this.

If not, why not?

Conclusion

As more SME invest in social media marketing, so do they expect social media to not only convert their leads, but deliver ROI and target the right people.

The question that is often asked is one of the most talked about aspects of social media; namely, “How to leverage the power of social media to convert leads?”

Now that the most-asked question is answered, how is your organization benefiting from Facebook and Instagram in your ongoing effort to get more leads into your funnel?