Using a CRM to Set Your Marketing Priorities, Drive More Leads

When setting your marketing priorities, you have a lot to consider. You may be looking at revenue goals, past campaign successes, competitors' actions, AI's influence, and, of course, your available marketing resources.

If your marketing department is like most, your primary goal is generating qualified leads for the sales team. You may coordinate with them on marketing ideas, but if you’re not using the same software tools then you are likely missing opportunities. Software divisions are common: A customer relationship management system (CRM) for the sales team and a content management system (CMS) for the marketing team.

For marketers, the sales-oriented CRM may contain valuable marketing data that can provide great insights. Not all CRMs have the same capabilities, but one that integrates with a CMS helps you detail the full buyer’s journey and identify marketing priorities.

A multi-function CRM comes with several tools, but three core functions help a company grow: marketing features, reporting tools, and the ability to connect with other software–not just a CMS. The most robust CRMs can uncover potential sales-ready leads in your database and help you prioritize your marketing efforts.

Some CRMs Have a Marketing Side, Too

A CRM enables the sales team to efficiently track interactions with leads, from logging calls to setting reminders and categorizing lead potential. If your CRM and CMS are connected you can also automatically log a contact's website activities, such as page visits and clicks. Your sales manager may have to hound their team to log calls and emails, but you don’t have to remind your CRM to log website activity—which can be gold in understanding how your potential customers want to be engaged.

By consolidating sales and marketing data, an integrated CRM provides a comprehensive view of a single contact's journey from the initial website visit to customer conversion. A CRM’s next tool, reporting, helps turn all of your contacts’ individual journeys into a bigger picture.

A Versatile CRM Has a Reporting Side

While the right CRM effectively tracks individual contact activities, its reporting feature can organize all of that activity into actionable summaries. By analyzing website activities logged in the CRM, you can identify potential sales-ready leads and your most relevant marketing needs.

Reporting that comes with a CRM-CMS integration helps address one of the most important marketing questions: What led your current customers to engage with your sales team in the first place?

Learn More About Your Customers

You may track popular content and resources in your CMS, but a capable CRM makes it easier to connect the dots. A CMS that talks to your CRM will identify every digital step a lead takes before contacting your sales team and converting to a customer. It can detail many actions, including:

• How they found you (e.g., Google search, ads).
• Their initial interactions on your site.
• The resources they accessed on your website.
• The pages they viewed before filling out a form.

This data highlights patterns. Perhaps a specific blog was the initial starting point for many of your current customers. Or, maybe one of your product web pages was popular among them. When you start seeing patterns you can start building a reliable story–you can see the actual steps in your customers’ sales journeys.

An example of the story you could discover goes like this: A group of customers found one of your blogs via Google, then viewed the same six web pages and explored a product catalog–all before contacting sales. That would be a revealing trend.

You can apply what you learned about your customers to find opportunities among your other contacts.

A CRM Finds Contacts Who are Stuck on the Road to Becoming Customers

A CRM tied to your CMS makes it easy to deliver your main marketing priority–generating a list of qualified leads for your sales team to review. Because once you have a better understanding of what content influenced your current customers, you can find contacts in your CRM who have taken some of those same steps–only they’ve fallen short of contacting the sales team.

Pro Tip: Filtering contacts for sales-ready activities, even if they haven’t reached out to your sales team, yet, is similar to 'lead scoring’. Lead scoring is using a CRM to proactively identify contacts who are engaging in sales-relevant activity and alerting your sales team. It’s an effective tactic in lead management.

Short of identifying sales-ready leads, CRM-CMS reporting is still beneficial. It will help you identify marketing priorities to generate qualified leads. It narrows your marketing opportunities and helps make informed decisions, but you will still have to make judgment calls.

For example, working on its own, your CMS might tell you one web page earns a lot of website traffic. That’s great! Keep that momentum going, right? However, when your CMS is connected to your CRM, you might find out that the “popular” page doesn’t convert like the two low-traffic “unpopular” pages that helped close a deal with customers. That insight could be a huge signal that you need to revamp that webpage so it can drive more conversions. Or, you could put more SEO effort into those higher-converting pages so they get more traffic.

The more information you can feed a capable CRM, the easier it will be to identify actions to take. That’s why the next layer of a versatile CRM is important–its ability to integrate with other software. This provides deeper insights, allowing you to identify marketing priorities beyond website activity.

Some CRMs Play Well With Others

A good CRM integrates with various platforms, enhancing its reporting capabilities and aiding in pinpointing marketing priorities.

Some examples:

• By connecting to ad platforms, you can assess campaign performance and conversions seamlessly.
• Integrated e-commerce platforms allow you to view product sales and determine ROI, helping in campaign prioritization.
• With connections to SEO tools, you can directly monitor website performance on Google Search, optimizing content based on keyword rankings.

These diverse CRM connections offer comprehensive insights to streamline marketing strategies. Not only does it allow you to more easily determine the ROI of your existing campaigns, but it also enhances the CRM reporting that influences your marketing priorities.

CRMs Give You the Information to Make Smarter Marketing Decisions

A winning CRM has the marketing functions, reporting, and integrations to help reach your goals. You can better understand what’s working well. You can identify the most important steps to converting leads in your database. You can identify the campaign that is likely to drive more leads.

For more details, our guide to digital marketing helps you understand how a CRM can plug into every stage of your marketing strategy.