1. Bill Furlong
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CRM—Better Practice What You Preach
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Bill Furlong
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CRM, Customer Relationship Management
If anything, this acronym has been around longer than any dotcom handle,
and surely should be, by now, embedded into the DNA of a publishing
company. After all, aren’t many of us reacting urgently to our own
advertisers’ needs by building and offering lead generation services? Aren’t
we constantly working with Clients that are deeply interested in knowing
more about their customers (your readers and site visitors), and how they
navigate and consume your content? Isn’t the marketer moving more of
their spend to services that help them manage the “funnel”, guiding
prospects down to the transaction? Certainly, as this transition happens
right before your eyes, and as you scramble to meet the market’s needs, it
now should be fairly obvious that CRM also needs to be an essential
apparatus for your publishing company.
It isn’t as if CRM isn’t in place already: the bingo card, and qualification card on the print side, surveys and
registration online, trade show and webinar data always being gathered, all inform and build a strong view of
your various customer segments. But moving CRM up the initiative list and focusing more globally on the
power of proper CRM, can only bring greater success. There are a slew of great applications available: from
Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, to Sage, SAS, to name a few, any one of them can provide
a service that will work for the media company and its nuanced strategies and needs. There are even some
smaller specialty CRM firms that have made a dent into the media specific niche.
So why the urgency to raise your CRM intelligence? Let’s take a look just how powerful it could work for the
media company, for both the user/buyer as well as for the advertiser community. For the users, CRM can be
the linchpin to all the “touches” your brand pushes out to them. For instance, the media company should be
connecting all SEM and SEO initiatives to landing pages and capturing all that data right into your CRM
system. And through other marketing technologies, like Marketo, you can even see the visits to any of your
platforms by that registered user. All of these metrics can be housed in the CRM system. Imagine being able
to reference and leverage these multiple customer interactions, with all your products, with a click onto a
dashboard; and with it, get to know that much more about this “Customer segment”.
Once you build a comprehensive reader/ user database, these platforms CRM system can also be the
marketing machine that alerts all or one, about upcoming events or content that may interest the user. And
of course, you can begin to package up advertising specifically to those segments as you build this data
story. Many publishers are doing great work here, but not necessarily doing it all from a robust integrated
CRM platform. It is the magic of the current crop of CRM services that make all this work for a smart media
company.
As for the advertiser silo, most publishers still house their promotion and sales contact lists on sales force
automation platforms (technically just a “piece” of CRM strategy), or haven’t demanded a corporate strategy
yet! Not acceptable anymore, believe me. It is absolutely essential that the sales and promotional database
is on a state of the art CRM platform, as it will power all the great engagement tools that CRM can deliver
on. This is one of those absolutely mission critical initiatives a publisher must engage!
Bill Furlong is vice president of business development for Bizo.
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