Why are Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems important to marketing communications and how can they be utilised to drive event engagement?

On her first week at Identity, Marketing Manager LizzieNorman has joined Michael Gietzen on Identify, exploring how a CRM system can feed into a wider business strategy.

You can read the full transcript below or watch the episode here.

MG: Hello, and welcome to Identify the news views and insights from within the events industry. I’m delighted to be joined by Lizzie today, the marketing manager at Identity and Lizzie, I thought a topic we could talk about is CRM as it’s something I know you love, and I guess it is the return of live events are coming there’s going to be lots of agencies out there thinking about how they’re going to manage their new stream of enquiries coming through how they can manage their clients. And I guess also, if you don’t mind, we can think about how we, how that would apply to sales teams that are at exhibitions or organizing exhibitions themselves.

So thank you very much for joining me today. And the first question I’m going to ask is how can a CRM compliment kind of marketing activities. How can you use it? Why is it so good?

LN: So in my opinion, um, using a CRM system, it’s not even so much that it compliments the marketing strategy. I think it really revolutionizes the way that we can do marketing.

And so in my experience I’ve previously worked for companies who haven’t been using a CRM and have really struggled with, um, with tracking an end to end marketing process, but by bringing in a CRM system and there are some really good ones on the market and you’ve got Salesforce HubSpot, are both really good examples and you can really sort of track your marketing activities and also report on your return on investments as well, which is something that’s increasingly important now is actually being able to attribute your results to your marketing spend.

MG: Yeah and it would be remiss of me if I was going to do a comparison between kind of a file of facts and what you get now, because we know for the last decade or two, that digital CRMs revolutionized everything, but new CRMs do so much more, like you just said.

LN: Yeah, absolutely and I think one of the really important things for the events industry, as well as actually the fact that you can now use CRM system to, to automate your event processes, which is something that is relevant, really relevant in this industry. So. For example, you could create workflows and automations to carry somebody through an entire events journey.

So that’s driving people to register, to come to your event. And that’s also the cons in the buildup to the event to ensure that you are maximizing on attendance. And then that’s also the followup as well to ensure that the people that have attended your event are going to, going to return and, uh, and potentially become advocates to encourage others, to, to sign up as well in the future.

MG: Exactly. And what I’ve been fortunate enough to have a couple of guests. One is talking about, uh, your audience acquisition piece for an event and so you need a CRM tool to back that up. And the second one was, I guess, where I was talking about that 365 days a year event element that your CRM is going to power, that ability to have that long tail event.

LN: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s something else now that is a real key point about how having a CRM system like this can really help because, you know, we know full well our marketing teams, they’re not working, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but having a CRM system where you can set up these automations and workflows means that like you say, your marketing activities are always on.

So we know now that people sort of live, live in a time where they want information. They want it now. They don’t want to wait. They don’t want to register for an event and wait for a couple of days to receive that confirmation or contact from somebody they want to instantly. Um, and again, that’s something that a CRM system really delivers on.

MG: Yeah, automation has been massive this year for us and then thinking about how we can respond to the, that digital needs now. So Lizzie, it would be remiss of me not to ask our marketing manager, why marketing is so important for a business. Why is that? So in my opinion and this, um, the time that we’re living in, um, as I touched on before, people are, um, they want information and they, they want it now.

LN: So again, having a CRM platform, I think that that is how we really ensure that we’re delivering marketing campaigns that are across numerous touch points, lots of channels, for example, um, social media, email marketing, uh, websites, landing pages. You know, we’re going through and creating marketing campaigns at the moment, but those messages need to be consistent to ensure that, um, that our potential clients and customers are going on that smooth customer journey, um, to eventually, um, to, to convert, which is basically what we do in marketing.

MG: That’s what we want to, that’s the kind of end game. Yeah, and I appreciate that this is such a broad topic. We could have an Identify or two just about it, but yeah, I couldn’t agree more. We’ve spoken loads about it here at Identity around the ecosystem and what that means and the multi-touch point marketing.

So I couldn’t agree more of, of, of now in a world where. You could touch a brand at so many different stages of, uh, of, of a lifecycle really. Anyway, Lizzie, thank you so much for joining me. If you’ve got any comments about CRM, want to know more about some products that we’re working with, then please leave a comment in the comment box below.

Otherwise have a fantastic day. Thank you.

LN: Thank you.