How to use paid media to build your CRM for better customer engagement

Today, customers interact with brands through various channels such as social media, search engines, email, and display ads. This creates a competitive environment for marketers. By integrating paid media and CRM, you can transform your strategies.

In our blog post, we will demonstrate how leveraging first-party data and understanding the customer journey can help in crafting personalized campaigns that engage, build loyalty, and drive results. 

How can you engage with your customers when there are numerous touchpoints?

In our digital team at The PHA Group, we often hear this challenge from almost all our clients, whether it’s from a paid social or paid search perspective. Both of these channels have traditionally worked together, but with changes in customer behavior and generational shifts, we’re seeing paid search and paid social appearing at all stages of the sales funnel, rather than just the traditional ‘see an ad on Facebook and then go to Google’.

For example, YouTube operates as a search engine that generates directly attributed revenue, while TikTok engages users from the awareness stage down to the point of purchase. However, one advantage we are leveraging is first-party data. We can utilize platforms like Dotdigital to use this data to create lookalike audiences on social media and incorporate signals into search.

This integration was initially as a way to mitigate the impending loss of cookies, and more recently as a way to support our clients’ commercial targets. Beyond looking for new users, we can reflect and start to understand the wider touchpoint journey of our client’s customers.

How can paid media be used to build your CRM?

The most obvious use case for paid media is usually advertising your goods and services to potential customers as part of your wider marketing strategy. It can also be used for lead generation and help support the growth of your pipeline – whether B2B lead generation or your retail customer newsletter.

For example:

• Promotion of content that is gated,
• leveraging platform audience data to entice new customers to your website.

This in turn can then be re-fed into your paid media campaigns to inform the persona of your customers or clients, informing the next step in your ongoing marketing plan and how else to engage with your audience. You can also use your paid media data to evaluate how they reached you and what they engaged with on your site beyond the intended goal of pipeline and newsletter growth, again informing the next steps.

How can paid media promote loyalty and improve lifetime value with your CRM data?

If lifetime value (LTV) is important to your business growth, paid media can be there to support your customer retention and repeat purchase rate goals.

Your CRM data can be split into audience segments and be used in multiple ways, through remarketing and observational targeting:

• Already engaged or loyal customers – can be shown your next launch of the product, or if you have a preview launch or discount.
• Actively engaged, but no purchase – could be shown specific discounts and copy to encourage that all important first purchase to enable you to show off your amazing customer service from purchase to delivery, all the way past with the aftercare.
• Purchased, but nothing since – the beauty of paid media is that we can engage this user in several ways – whether intent driven search or disrupting their feed on socials.
• The cold one, signed up but zero since – in much the same way as above, we can cater the messaging to entice the cold ones back into your warm welcoming business. However, this one will need to have some thought applied as there may be a very good reason they became a cold customer.

Remarketing with CRM data tends to yield the best results for us, much like the right keyword at the right bid can capture your customer at the time of intent to purchase or contact you – adding this beautiful layer of audience detail, can make this a more efficient click, CPA, ROAS etc. For example, in our Google Ads accounts the CRM audience has a 10% CTR vs 3% average, and a 15% conversion rate vs 5% average.

In Google Ads (across search, shopping, performance max, and video) you also have the added benefit of layering your CRM data with platform data, demographics, and website data. When we have done this, we have seen CTR shoot up to 30% and the conversion rate reaches the heady numbers of 45%.

Conclusion

We hope you agree that using your CRM data can not only benefit your paid media performance but can be used to inform your tactics within paid media. If you’re not already implementing segmented audience layering from your CRM, whether it is Dotdigital or another platform, it’s something you really should consider. Especially as cookie-led data is ever-evolving.

All your performance channels should be working as one, and the first-party data – from remarketing to signaling and lookalikes should be a key unifying factor. If you’d like to learn more about how we could elevate your first-party data to achieve thrilling results in your paid media activation – please get in touch, we’d love to chat.