Customer data and CRM. Mentioning those words at the start of the blog post makes 50% of you to hit the browser’s back button immediately.

I don’t blame you.

According to Meta Group, up to 75 % of CRM projects fail, and even if the project would be somewhat successful, your CRM is often a warehouse of outdated data and only loosely connected with key business operations.

For the past few years marketers have been buzzing about marketing automation and smarter use of customer data. But how do you build a successful marketing automation plan and an omnichannel customer experience if the data in the CRM is outdated?

How can social data make your customer data smarter?

In addition to visual information, all the photos on my Instagram profile include metadata like date, location, and description text. Here are a few examples what the visuals analysed with image recognition technologies like Clarifai and Flockler social analytics can tell us:

• I like travelling: during the year I’ve been spending time in London, several locations in Finland, The Alps, and Sweden. Go beyond one year and you’ll find that pattern to repeat with a few additional countries.
• Skiing is close to my heart: Based on the Instagram profile I’ve been skiing every February/March from 2014. Excluding the pandemic, of course!
• Most of the images with a location London include food & drinks and a group of people.
• 62 posts have received 1.200 likes from 143 users.

And that’s just hitting the surface and analysing my posts but you could dig deeper into my network and the people who engage with my content to find others sharing the same interests.

Unlike the historical data stored in your CRM, customer insights available from social channels is by nature real-time and up-to-date. It gives you an overview of customers' interests outside of your services, and analysing the data enables you to predict their behaviour in the future.

With all that data available, why would you display the same content and call-to-actions to everyone on your website? Use insights from social content to make your services smarter, personalise the customer experience, and serve inspiring and relevant content on your website, via email, in social channels, and beyond!

Maybe it’s time to consider enriching your customer data with social data?

How can you use the social data to build smarter customer experiences?

It’s not just the data of one customer that is available.

Have you already built a user-generated content campaign asking your customers to give feedback and review your services on social media and you have hundreds or thousands of pieces of content?

It’s the mass of user-generated posts, interactions and their combined data where the patterns truly emerge. For example, taking a look at the most popular posts mentioning the brand's campaign hashtag will reveal trends and similarities in the visual images and associated metadata. If you know what type of content shared by your customers performs well, designing and sharing resembling content in your social channels will most likely resonate with your audience too.

Here are a few examples how to use the social data:

• Identify themes and trends that make your customers tick: Analyse the most popular and engaging content created by different groups of influencers; customers, celebrities, and employees, using Flockler’s social analytics tools and identify patterns in visuals and the metadata. Use the insights to optimise the shareability and engagement of your content, to gather ideas for future content marketing campaigns, and to gain insight and ideas for product and service development
• Build a relationship with the most influential customers: Identify the most influential and engaged customers to build a tribe of people sharing your branded hashtag and engaging with your content. As consumers, we trust peer reviews and recommendations over branded content - and algorithms of social media services increasingly prioritise content from our friends and network. On average posts by our friends and peers have a higher engagement (more likes and comments) and therefore they spread further.
• Provide an enhanced customer experience and personalised communications based on customers' data: Enrich the data stored in your CRM and marketing automation tools with the social data, and use it to personalise your content and call-to-actions. With tools like Rightmessage, you do not need to be a developer to change the call-to-action (assuming you have the data available).
• Serve highly targeted advertising in different channels: Analyse what type of services clients are using or looking for and predict the right timing to serve relevant advertising in social channels, email marketing, and other communication channels. Most of the social channels enable you to create custom audiences too.

Sounds amazing but don't have social data stored? Learn how brands use user-generated content for marketing.