CRM and Marketing automation are NOT the same.
Making such a decision would largely require you to examine your particular business situation. How big is your team? What nature of business are you involved in?
For instance, if you provide specialized services, people management could be your main task, which makes a CRM system a must have for you. However, for much broader offerings that require many leads regularly, you would certainly need a marketing automation system.
So, what's the difference?
CRM systems
CRM is a centralized software that stores all your customer information and manages your interactions with them.
All your team members with access to the CRM can populate the system's data. Being a shared platform, it allows you to monitor all interactions between your salespeople and customers closely.
That way, you can avoid duplicate transactions and also stay updated with each customer's journey.
Marketing automation?
Marketing automation involves the use of systems or software to automate marketing activities. Since most marketing activities are repetitive, automation systems help make these tasks easier and faster, enabling more efficient marketing strategies.
Automation tools work with landing pages, email marketing, websites, social media, and several other channels. On these platforms, you can plan, schedule, execute and track your marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation helps you to improve your marketing campaigns as it offers analytics data. The software tools track the customer behavior, e.g., when they visit your website and if they opened your marketing email and clicked on the call to action.
You can then use the results to modify and improve your campaigns for better results.
The Key Differences Include:
1. sales vs. marketing teams
The most obvious is that CRM belongs to the sales department, and marketing automation belongs to the marketing department. Automation tools mainly help marketers manage their campaigns. In contrast, CRM primarily helps salespeople keep track of their prospects and engage them better.
The point of convergence is where marketing automation scores and nurtures leads, later passed on to the sales team to better manage CRM systems.
2. customer focus vs. lead focus
CRMs and Marketing automation differ in usage. For most businesses, CRMs help in creating and managing customer databases, as well as establishing relationships. Meanwhile, marketing automation is predominantly used to generate and nurture these leads before they become meaningful prospects.
3. performance vs. workflows
CRMs are mainly valuable for the sales team to monitor their performance. They can keep tabs on all communications and stages of the customer journey.
Meanwhile, Marketing automation largely centers on streamlining marketing and sales workflows. It allows for nurturing, lead scoring, etc.
4. Customer journey
CRMs and marketing automation play different roles in the customer journey. Marketing automation's primary function is at lower levels of the journey, creating awareness for your products, bringing in leads, etc.
On the other hand, CRM largely falls in lower levels of the journey that focuses on preparing the leads for conversion. So whereas they are different, they play complementary roles.
Integrate CRM and Marketing automation
Both systems play a vital role in attracting customers and generating more sales for revenue growth. So, they both improve your marketing and sales funnels.
Therefore, marketing experts recommend using both systems. Several companies can offer you both CRM and Marketing automation systems, so it is easier. If you have the budget, you could get the whole package.
Marketing automation and CRM integration could much more benefits than stand alone systems, For instance:
1. Improved Data sharing
CRM focuses on the customers and their data. In contrast, marketing automation focuses on making that data actionable, i.e., enabling the sales team to know which customers to call, when to call, and exactly what to discuss with the customers.
Once the customer information is captured in the CRM, the marketing automation software will analyze that data to create a personalized marketing campaign just for that customer. It will send them the correct information and qualify them accordingly.
2. consistent communication.
Sales and marketing departments can complement each other and encourage unified communications within your business.
The marketing team contacts and draws potential leads through automation. Then the sales teams can build deeper relationships with them. Integrating the two enables both departments to communicate better to clients since each has prior information of previous communications and client interests.
3. Identifying hotspots in the customer journey
The CRM and automation integrations create more visibility along the customer journey. You can identify particular lead behavior, key triggers, etc., which is helpful to the overall marketing process.
The information would guide you on where to focus your time and resources.
4. better lead scoring
A key role of marketing automation and CRM systems is to manage Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), respectively.
Marketing automation tools identify and nurture the MQLs. They can then identify SQLs to pass down to the sales team for further motivation based on lead scores generated.
Therefore,
Generally, CRM is for Sales; Marketing Automation is for marketing.
They do share several characteristics but greatly differ in functionality, cost, etc. The system you choose largely depends on your nature of business and also what problems you seek to solve.
Nonetheless, a comprehensive all-in-one automation system is the best option since it helps your business manage customers at all levels of their journey.
Find out more about marketing automation and CRM systems on our blog!
