Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is imperative to the success of your initial and repeat sales and marketing processes. It allows you to have a clear idea of when, where and how you’ve interacted with past, potential and existing customers. That way, you can hit them at the right moment with the right content.
As you’ll know, there are a lot of options for you to choose from when it comes to finding your ideal CRM. But it’s all about finding the right one that works for your individual needs. Within the manufacturing industry, there are plenty of different ways that you can use your CRM to your advantage.
We believe that the perfect CRM for manufacturing businesses is HubSpot. But why? Well, we’ll explain exactly that in this post. Plus, include useful tips and tools to look out for your business to get the most out of HubSpot.
We’ll cover:
- What is a CRM tool? A quick recap
- HubSpot is more than just a CRM tool
- It’s rich with unrivalled CRM sales and marketing features
What is a CRM tool? A quick recap
As the name suggests, a CRM tool is a useful tool that helps you easily manage your relationships with customers. We’re not trying to be funny here - it really is that simple. Within manufacturing, one of the most valuable commodities for your business is your customers, right? Without them, you don’t have any demand to meet and, therefore, don’t need to create and provide products.
Simply speaking, without them, you have no business. So that you can provide the perfect customer journey and sell effectively, you need to know a large amount of information about your customers and their habits - who they are, how they typically interact with your brand and more.
Image credit: HubSpot
Long gone are the days of this information just being in the brains of your team members. That’s where a CRM comes into play. As your business grows, all this information must be stored in one central place. That way, everybody has access to it and can tap into it whenever they like.
Your team members all need to be singing from the same hymn sheet when interacting with prospects and customers. Otherwise, it’s easy for your audience to become confused if they’re getting mixed messages.
Your audience should have a relationship with one company voice - not individuals within that. Each team member should easily be able to pick up where another left off without any crossover. And that’s exactly what a CRM tool allows you to do - especially the easy to use, Hubspot.
HubSpot is more than just a CRM tool
HubSpot is the birthplace of the Inbound Methodology - while that might not currently mean much to you, it’s quickly become the holy grail for sales and marketing experts around the world.
The Inbound Methodology is the method of growing your business by forming, growing and solidifying your relationships with prospects and customers - both, past and existing. It’s centred around empowering your audience with your approach so that they can grow with your business and achieve their goals too.
But why? What’s wrong with more traditional methods of billboards, advertisements and TV clips? Well, when your customers succeed, so do you! And that’s the beauty of HubSpot. Their Inbound Methodology that incorporates marketing, service and customer service is unrivalled by any other business in the market.
The Inbound Methodology can be broken down into three main stages:
- Attract. Draw the right kind of people into your business with valuable content and establish yourself as a credible source for information.
- Engage. Massage their pain points and provide solutions to their problems. It’s at this point that you’re warming them up so that they’re ready to buy from you.
- Delight. Empower your audience and provide above and beyond support to help them through their purchase and way after - keep them coming back for life!
So, how are you going to dissect and move your customers through these phases without a CRM? Quite simply, you’re going to have a hard time. It’s such an effective sales and marketing process and HubSpot’s CRM tool is at the core of all of this. If your CRM falls down and you incorrectly segment your audience, your whole campaign and success falls down too.
Within the manufacturing industry, if you provide somebody with too much information before they’re at the right stage, it could be curtains. Nobody wants to be overloaded with reams of content they don’t understand. That’s why it’s important to use the HubSpot CRM to your advantage and put the right content in front of the right people at the ideal time.
It’s rich with unrivalled CRM sales and marketing features
As we’ve established, by using the CRM, you’ll be able to segment your audience and see which stage of the Inbound Methodology will be the most useful to target them with. With that in mind, each stage comes with its own incredible features within the HubSpot platform. That way, you can be sure you’re feeding them with the right type of information at the right time.
Image credit: HubSpot
Attract
At this point, prospects may have not even landed on your site yet and don’t know who you are. So, it’s all about convincing them to click on your social media platform ad, read your latest blog post or watch your latest video. But you don’t want just anybody landing on your site, you want the right kind of people to get there, stick around and eventually get involved.
Luckily for you, HubSpot has all the tools that you need to attract the right kind of people to your content. One of the main traffic drivers to websites is blog posts that rank highly on search engines. Everybody wants to be number one, don’t they? Nobody scrolls past the first page for top results.
With that in mind, your content has got to be optimised for it to get there. Within HubSpot, you can search for relevant keywords that you can factor into your content to improve its chances of climbing the rankings. Plus, the easy to use CMS allows you to upload your content and simply optimise it to best position it for amazing results.
These can then be tagged within the CRM too, so that your sales team knows how and when to use it. Plus, the SEO tool allows you to track your keywords, so that you can see whether the manufacturing industry is responding to your content or not. This is useful to know, especially when trying out new things.
Plus, the built-in Social Media scheduling tool allows you to easily share content to improve its reach - you could have the most amazing strategy, but if you’re not shouting about it, who’s going to know! This includes the use of video marketing too, drawing people into your business with attractive, simple to digest and fun videos.
Engage
During this stage, prospects may have visited and engaged with your brand before, but they’re not quite ready for the purchase and need a little bit more nurturing. Within the manufacturing industry, that’s incredibly common as larger investments are often needed, so it’s easily forgivable that the prospect will want to take a little longer to think about it.
This stage is where the HubSpot CRM really comes into its own. You can see all the touchpoints of information that you’ve provided with each prospect, so you can guide them down a desired journey and pipeline. Feed them personalised content to their email inbox with HubSpot’s email marketing tool.
Or, provide custom chatbots on your site that pick up the conversation where you left off. That’s all thanks to the CRM and knowing what they’ve seen before, their contact details and what they best respond to. If a customer has a personalised experience that shows your company care about them, it’ll be a lot more warmly received.
A tailored approach is definitely the way to go - especially with purchases that require a lot larger investment. Customers like to be empowered - and that’s what the HubSpot CRM allows you to do at every step of the way throughout their journey.
Delight
So, they’re on the precipice of making a purchase, or they’ve just gone through with a purchase. HubSpot’s CRM allows you to acknowledge their status and provide them with smart content. For example, if they’ve invested in a new piece of industrial machinery, they don’t need to receive any more information about which is the best one to buy.
Instead, by sending them articles about using, maintaining and looking after the machine, you’re naturally continuing their journey. You can take this as far as you like. Whether you regularly check in with them to see how they’re doing or give them tips and tricks to the machinery that they might not know about.
You can still carry this on years down the line too - when’s the best time to upgrade? Signs that they need new machinery and equipment - the journey never ends. Period.
Through the delight stage, HubSpot has a fantastic range of tools for you to take advantage of, including:
- Smart content
- Email marketing
- Conversations inbox
- Attribution reporting
- Marketing automation
Red-Fern can help grow your manufacturing business - today!
So, you’ve seen how HubSpot can massively benefit your customer relationship management, sales and marketing processes. But how can you roll it out within your business? Well, that’s where we’re here to help! And that’s not all we can provide too.
At Red-Fern, we’re manufacturing industry experts for full digital transformations. From bespoke system development to world-class marketing strategies, we’re confident that we can help your business grow and reach your overall goals. Plus, we’re HubSpot experts too and can utilise the CRM to its fullest potential to improve your customer relations.
Of course, talk is cheap! So, to see how we can help your business, who we’ve helped in the manufacturing industry beforehand and how we’ve developed a long-term partnership with them, we've created a FREE Ebook for you! It's not quite ready just yet, so in the meantime, please feel free to visit our dedicated manufacturing site and find out everything you need to know.