Every business, or for that matter, every industry works towards one simple goal; revenue generation. However, with multiple facets of an organization comes multiple work responsibilities. Businesses often feel lost and baffled because of the way their leads go cold or their tasks remain unfinished even after working hard towards accomplishing the organizational goals.
Don’t worry, you are not at fault, but maybe the way you are managing your business process needs a little tweak. That little tweak can be made by introducing simple CRM software for your advertising agency.
By using Customer Relationship Management software, advertising agencies can create a unified sales process. The automation feature of a CRM software can automatically collect data of their prospective clients. With CRM for advertising, agencies can get actionable insights by crunching the data stored inside CRM. Doing so will help in –
- improving their sales process
- forecasting more accurately
- completely understand their clients
What’s impacting the advertising industry today?
Creativity must go hand-in-hand with business-sense if advertising agencies want to sustain their growth in a growing and competitive market.
The brand perspective
- Many big brands are building their in-house creative teams. This leaves advertising agencies to opt for short-term project contracts instead of the usual long-term contract model.
- Brands now prefer niche agencies that not just have proven their expertise but can perfectly understand their business model as well.
- The modern business scenario is driven by customer experience analytics and their needs. Brands want agencies that are tech-savvy and can design campaigns based on customer trends.
The agency perspective
- There has been a boom in the number of agencies (individual consultants to small agencies) that are delivering marketing and advertising services to bigger brands.
- The agency fee is decreasing rapidly; so is the efficiency and productivity of the employees.
- Agencies are more focused on mapping the entire client journey and make it visible across the employees.
- Agencies are also keen on measuring the impact of individual campaigns, improving efficiency and saving more time & resources.
Brilliant ideas may create recognition for advertising agencies. However, for staying relevant, stand out from the competition in the market, and effortlessly grow their own business, they must focus on these three aspects:
- Enhance employee efficiency and productivity
- Improve the client relationships quality
- Drive more accountability into their workings
The best way for an advertising agency to achieve the above-mentioned points is by using CRM software for advertising that is specialized to serve their needs and requirements.
A study recently revealed that less than half (45%) of the surveyed agencies were using a CRM system. – Source
CRM features that benefit an advertising agency
To establish the need for an advertising agency to use CRM software, you will have to first explore the features that a CRM software provides. These features come in handy while advertising agencies are pursuing their prospective clients, managing their other important tasks, exchanging emails and whatnot. So, let’s get started.
1. Activity tracker
- Activity tracker can help advertising agencies plan ahead and track their team’s activities.
- Activity tracker also helps advertising agency owners to know where the employee is investing their valuable time by tracking the time spent on call, sending an email or attending meetings with the prospects.
- The automation feature helps in creating new contacts, deals, and various follow-up activities against them.
- With proper delegation, employees of an advertising agency can easily know if there are any follow-up activities and pursue prospective clients accordingly.
- Just so that the employee doesn’t forget about the follow-up task, the CRM system sends out notifications and reminders too.
- Not just that, the automation feature auto-assigns the activities to available employees or employees preselected by the agency owner.
2. Email tracking
- For an advertising agency, email is the best communication tool as it allows the attachment of portfolio and other relevant agency materials for the prospect and client convenience.
- CRM software allows advertising agencies to track their outbound email.
- Whenever a prospect client opens an outreach email downloads an attachment or clicks on a link, the CRM system notifies the agency owner or the concerned authority about the same.
- Such real-time notifications allow agencies to reach out to the interested prospects and make better conversions.
- Advertising agencies can also measure the popularity of the content of their email based on the email clicks done by prospects.
- All the information is available in the deal timeline so that agency employees do not have to waste time digging through various conversations.
- CRM software also allows users to store email templates. Advertising agencies can save a lot of time in email communication by using relevant templates while communicating with their clients and prospects.
3. A built-in virtual phone system
- Client communication is a very crucial part of advertising agencies.
- Built-in phone system of a CRM software allows them to stay in touch with their clients and prospects via calling and text.
- Advertising agencies that are looking to go global without the initial physical office space set-up can utilize the built-in phone system feature offered by CRM software.
- They can get local, toll-free and mobile numbers of their desired country and build trust in their clientele.
- These numbers can be distributed and shared amongst remotely working employees so that they are always available for the prospects and clients.
- If needed, employees can take an important note while on the call with a client or prospect. The note will reflect automatically on the contacts timeline.
- Built-in phone system also offers call transfer and call forwarding option, simply for the convenience of staying in touch with the contacts.
4. Contact management
- Advertising agencies have bulk data related to their contacts. With a CRM system, they can effectively manage their contacts.
- The automation features allow automatic contact creation based on the data filled in the website contact form using integration.
- They can perform mass activities on their contacts such as sending bulk emails, updating information related to contacts, deleting or merging information, etc.
- Create tasks, set reminders and view task history for maintaining a record of the activities done for clients and prospects.
Conclusion
Modern advertising agencies are treading through treacherous waters. They are attempting to win consumers’ attention in an environment that is constantly changing with the change in the technology landscape. The ones that are creative, are able to understand the core requirement of the modern consumer and are utilizing technology to their advantage are winning.
