Online advertising has become a crucial element for companies looking to reach their target audience and generate leads or sales. Online advertising platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and TikTok Ads enable companies to precisely target their audience, measure the performance of their campaigns and optimize their strategy accordingly.
That said, it should be noted that advertising is expensive and is becoming increasingly so. So it's absolutely essential to seek the best possible return on investment. The quality of your advertising strategy and the optimization of your campaigns is often what makes the difference between campaigns that generate a lot of customers for a very interesting investment, and campaigns that just waste your time and money.
The benefits of using a CRM for online advertising
Bridging the gap between online conversions and offline sales
We can't say it often enough: no (good) tracking, no advertising. Technically, there's nothing to stop you from doing it anyway, but you're heading for disaster if you do. As a reminder, online advertising networks work with artificial intelligences that need data in order to optimize and perform. So no (good) tracking, no (good) data. No (good) data, no (good) optimization. No (good) optimization, no (good) performance. And who wants to pay for ads that don't perform?
Of course, this also applies to lead generation. You want your ads to be optimized to generate more leads.
Good tracking on your site is therefore essentialHowever, it can be difficult to link these conversions to actual sales that take place offline, such as telephone sales or sales in person. So tracking on your site, however well done, won't be enough in this case, as it won't be able to feed back to advertising platforms what's happening outside your site.
In short, while you want your ads to generate more leads, it's not really the leads themselves that make you money, but rather the moment when they convert into sales. So rather than optimizing your ads to generate more leads, you need to optimize them so that they generate more interesting leads.
And bridging the gap between online conversions and offline sales is one of the key advantages of using a CRM for online advertising. By using tracking identifiers such as GCLID (Google), FBCLID (Facebook), TTCLID (TikTok), and MSCLKID (Bing / Microsoft) in conjunction with a CRM, you can link online conversions to actual sales, allowing you to better understand the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and better target your efforts to maximize results.
Each click on an ad has a unique identifier (ID) (the famous gclid, fbclid, ttclid, msclkid) assigned to it by the advertising platform that generated the click.
Let's take an example to popularize the principle:
Mrs Martin searches for a lawyer on Google. She clicks on the first link (which is a Google Ads ad for Me Durand's law firm). She arrives on the landing page of the ad, which has just after the normal URL of the page "?gclid=123xyz" (we call this a URL parameter). Me Durand's site retrieves this parameter and automatically places it in a hidden field on the contact request form. When Mrs Martin sends the form, Me Durand receives her contact and her form in its CRM with the tracking identifier in question. The CRM then takes over, because a law firm is not an e-commerce business, so sales don't take place on its website. When Me Durand notes in his CRM that Mme Martin has made a sale of €4,000, the CRM sends Google Ads the information that the gclid "123xyz" has generated a sale of €4,000. Google Ads can then add this crucial information to the ad's data, so that the ad is placed in front of more people who look like Ms. Martin. CRM has thus bridged the gap between online lead conversions and offline sales.
Improve customer traceability
As we saw in the previous section, unique tracking identifiers make it possible to know which ad has brought each customer. Why, then, should you be content to pass the information on to Google without take advantage of it yourself in your sales ?
By building your customer relationship around your CRM and converging all information towards it, you can know at a glance which ad your visitor clicked on before filling out this contact request. You'll know which advertisement brought him/her to your site, so you'll know what he/she was looking for even before you call or email him/her (if Mrs Martin clicked on your ad for a tax lawyer in Bordeaux, you'll know that's what she's looking for). So, for example, you can better prepare your contact beforehand, directing the prospect directly to the right person or the right subsidiary of your company, or even start to get an idea of the type of customer (a customer who comes from a fairly cordial and serious ad on Google is probably not the same profile as one who comes from an offbeat ad on TikTok), etc....
Boost the profitability of your ads
As I said earlier, if you optimize your ads around your actual sales rather than your leads, they'll be more profitable in the end.
But that's not the only good thing a CRM can do for your advertising ROI. Remember, advertising is expensive, so you want to get the most out of every click you buy. So don't hesitate to set up a complete marketing system to do just that. And there's nothing like a CRM to play the role of conductor.
- Automated segmentation All good CRMs can sort your contacts into lists based on different segmentation criteria. You can then better personalize your marketing with them, for example by setting up processes and automations according to each list, so that your offer is always more relevant and adapted to each customer.
- Automations : Automations in marketing can make a huge difference to your conversion rate. Let's take a different example: Mr Petit is looking for a hearing aid specialist. He requests a quote online on the website of a large chain of hearing centers. Your CRM receives the lead, places it in the list corresponding to his needs and geographical area (automatic segmentation seen earlier), and immediately starts the appropriate automatic email chain to make an appointment with the customer near his home.
Taking a more long-term view
Taking a more long-term view is another advantage of using a CRM for online advertising. Online advertising platforms allow you to track conversions in real time, but as we saw earlier, it can be difficult to know whether these conversions translate into actual offline sales. But this is also the case for long-term sales!
Indeed, ad attribution models only count sales made by people who have interacted with them relatively recently. But what about long sales cycles? And how do you know if an ad that's making you almost nothing directly isn't actually one of the pillars of your entire long-term acquisition that it would be a great shame to cut off? Certainly, we prefer a customer who buys a service to a prospect who doesn't, but we prefer even more a customer who buys a lot and often - so how can you make a good decision about whether or not to cut an advertisement that apparently brings you little in the short term without having any idea of the quality of the customers it brings you? After all, if it brings you little volume, but it's this ad that brings you all your best customers in the long term, do you really want to cut it? Wouldn't you even want to increase its budget?
By using a CRM, you can track the customers who have interacted with your advertising campaigns, even after the period of attribution of conversions to each platform. This lets you know whether customers coming from such and such campaigns on such and such an ad network or ad set earn more on average over their lifetime than those coming from such and such campaigns on such and such an ad network or ad set.
This more long-term view enables you to better understand the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and optimize your ad spend to maximize long-term results.
And of course ... all the advantages of using a CRM itself
This is especially true when you're doing digital advertising, almost all companies should use one. This point alone could count as 50 good reasons elsewhere.
A CRM brings so much value to your company that we can't recommend it enough: improved internal coordination and communication, better task sharing, improved customer satisfaction and relations, better sales tracking, improved customer loyalty, more efficient project management, improved customer service, improved customer satisfaction.data and performance analysis...
Conclusion
At the risk of repeating myself, let me remind you again that you want every euro invested in advertising to bring you the maximum return on your investment. A CRM is a powerful sales and customer relations tool that will improve your understanding and management of your prospects, customers and sales by an order of magnitude.
Anything that improves your conversion rate also de facto improves the profitability of your advertising.
Without optimization, you're likely to disqualify certain campaign opportunities, certain keywords, because they don't achieve the level of profitability you're aiming for. A CRM can provide you with this missing layer of optimization, enabling you to "unlock" a whole new field of marketing possibilities and opportunities which, thanks to it, become viable. You can then continue to grow by capitalizing on these new customer acquisition opportunities.
And since advertising is optimized with data, the more you sell, the more data you have, and the more you sell.
