Digital Marketing

CRM Advertising with Google, Facebook & LinkedIn

November 21, 2024 12:12 pm

Did you know that integrating your CRM with leading ad platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook can significantly improve your advertising results?

In the fast-paced world of online marketing, staying ahead of the competition requires more than just standard targeting—it demands precision, optimisation, and real-time insights, enter CRM advertising.

CRM advertising provides businesses with a strategic advantage by enabling enhanced targeting, seamless lead tracking, and detailed reporting—all from a single platform. By syncing your CRM data with advertising channels, you can track every lead from their first interaction through to conversion, optimising the journey at every stage. The result? More personalised campaigns, higher-quality leads, and ultimately, better ROI.

The combination of CRM and advertising allows businesses to target high-quality leads precisely, while tailoring campaigns to specific buyer personas and ideal customer profiles (ICP).

🚀✨ Don’t settle for less—upgrade your advertising strategy today! 💡
Join us as we uncover the hidden potential of CRM advertising and show you how it can reshape your entire approach to digital marketing. Stay ahead of the competition by transforming your ad campaigns into conversion-driving powerhouses.

What is CRM Advertising?

CRM advertising involves the use of customer relationship management (CRM) data to optimise marketing campaigns across multiple advertising platforms. By integrating CRM insights with your advertising efforts, you can more accurately target specific customer segments, enhance personalisation, and increase the overall effectiveness of your campaigns.

This strategy leverages a wide range of CRM data—such as contact information, website interactions, purchase history, and social media engagements—to refine your online advertising. It allows businesses to go beyond standard third-party targeting options on platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Instead, you can use your proprietary data to develop highly targeted campaigns that speak directly to your audience’s needs and behaviours.

In addition to online data, offline activities such as lead lifecycle stages can be synced with ad platforms like Google Ads. This not only helps qualify leads but also enables ad platform AI to focus on the highest-quality leads, rather than merely increasing lead volume.

CRM advertising allows businesses to pinpoint key touchpoints within the buyer journey, fine-tuning strategies, targeting, and ad copy for maximum impact. By aligning your campaigns with your ideal buyer profile, you can drive higher-quality leads that are more likely to convert into loyal customers. This powerful synergy is key to achieving sustainable growth and success.

CRM Retargeting vs CRM Advertising

CRM Retargeting is a strategic subset of CRM Advertising that focuses on re-engaging individuals who have already interacted with your brand but have not completed a desired action, such as making a purchase. By leveraging the first-party data stored in your CRM—such as past interactions, purchase history, and engagement patterns—businesses can create highly personalised ad campaigns that target these individuals across platforms like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This targeted approach not only enhances the relevance of ads but also increases the likelihood of converting prospects into customers, making CRM Retargeting an essential tactic within a broader CRM Advertising strategy.

How does CRM Advertising work?:

CRM advertising effectively merges your CRM data with advertising platforms, enabling refined targeting and optimisation strategies that are deeply rooted in the lifecycle progression of your leads and customers. Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of how this integration enhances your advertising capabilities:

Integration of 1st-Party Data

1st-party data is the goldmine of information collected directly by your organisation from various sources. This includes interactions with customers and prospects, whether through your website, mobile apps, physical stores, events, or other channels. The ownership and control of this data rest solely with your organisation, ensuring privacy and relevance.

Rich Insights: The data spans demographics, behaviours, preferences, purchase history, and engagement with your services, offering a granular view of your audience.
Versatility: It integrates various data points from systems like your CRM, email platforms, or payment processors such as Stripe.

Utilisation in Advertising Platforms

Audience Crafting: Using CRM data, advertisers can create detailed audience segments. This proprietary data allows for highly targeted advertising campaigns, which can be tailored even further by integrating with third-party data sources available on the advertising platforms.
Retargeting Capabilities: You can retarget individuals who have interacted with your brand by using browser cookies or leveraging email addresses collected from form submissions. This can be done across most advertising platforms, including Google Ads and Facebook.
Extended Reach on Professional Networks: For B2B strategies, platforms like LinkedIn allow you to target not just individual prospects but also other employees within the same company. For instance, if a prospect visits your website, you can use IP addresses to identify their company and subsequently target other employees from that company on LinkedIn. This approach not only enhances the precision of your campaigns but also the potential for broader engagement within targeted organisations.

Optimisation and Lifecycle Progression

Lifecycle Targeting: By integrating CRM data, you can target customers at different stages of their journey with your brand—from awareness and consideration to purchase and loyalty.
Continuous Optimisation: Feedback from campaign performance can be looped back into the CRM, allowing for ongoing refinement of strategies based on actual customer behaviour and campaign outcomes.

In essence, CRM advertising leverages your in-depth, 1st-party data to drive more personalised, effective, and strategically aligned advertising campaigns. This not only increases the ROI of your ad spend but also ensures a cohesive customer journey across all touchpoints.

The Benefits of CRM Advertising

In the modern advertising landscape, CRM advertising seamlessly integrates data-driven precision with advertising finesse. By effortlessly merging CRM, financial, email, and other systems with ad platforms like Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Google Ads, businesses can gain comprehensive insights, improve lead quality, and enhance lead nurturing and sales processes, all while scaling their operations.

Increase Profitability

Achieve a superior advertising return on investment (ROI) by leveraging precise targeting and bid optimisation through the ad platforms’ AI machine learning capabilities. Recognise that not every lead holds the same quality and value. Optimising for later stages in the lead lifecycle allows you to instruct the system to acquire better quality leads—those more likely to become customers or high-value sales prospects.

Competitive Advantage

CRM advertising represents a strategic weapon that many competitors have yet to employ, providing an extra dimension to your advertising efforts. Your CRM system serves as a repository for all leads and customer data, offering insights into the transformation of leads into customers.

Improved Reporting & Analytics

Gain valuable insights into converting campaigns, keywords, and ads to measure the cost per lead, sales deal, and customer metrics. Integrating CRM with ad platforms facilitates automated reporting on advertising performance, lead quality, lead progression, and conversion rates. Quantify the impact of online ads on offline business outcomes through offline conversion tracking reporting, refining strategies for budget allocation and facilitating well-informed decisions.

Improved Targeting

Enhance ad targeting with 1st-party CRM data covering interests, demographics, and purchase history for pinpoint accuracy. Utilise CRM audiences to tailor advertising on Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook to increase both online and offline conversions. Amidst the waning influence of third-party cookies, a shift towards first-party data collection is imperative to harmonise online and offline conversions through click ID and contact record synchronisation.

Improved Optimisation

Capture more conversions with first-party data for enhanced optimisation and ROI. Identify where to invest and where to cut back to optimise your advertising budget on platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Insights into customer behaviour fine-tune bidding and targeting strategies, ensuring that ads resonate with the most valuable audiences.

Offline Conversion Tracking

In an evolving advertising landscape, offline conversion tracking emerges as a vital necessity, enhancing measurement accuracy and campaign optimisation. Overall, offline conversion tracking helps bridge the gap between online and offline customer behaviour, providing a more comprehensive tracking dataset for improving the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

Seamlessly track leads from ad click to conversion with CRM systems, fostering a deep understanding of marketing campaigns for continual improvement. Unearth which keywords generate leads that become customers and which ads serve as touchpoints in the customer journey. Leverage this data to enhance campaign efficiency and optimise the allocation of ad budgets.

Maximise Machine Learning

Syncing lead lifecycle stages from a CRM to Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads provides advertisers with valuable insights into lead quality, allowing for more effective ads, optimised campaigns for lead quality, and improved ROI. Synching your lead lifecycle changes lets ad platforms know which leads are of quality, optimising your bidding and budget to maximise sales revenue.

Lead Scoring to Improve Quality

Prioritise leads based on quality variables, ensuring efficient resource allocation. Optimise for high-quality customers, going beyond standard cost-per-lead events.

Compelling Ad Creatives

Ensure the right message reaches the right person at the right time for improved results. Analysing offline conversion data unveils effective messaging and offers, resulting in ads that deeply resonate with customers. Craft personalised and relevant ads that resonate with the target audience, leading to higher click-through rates, conversion rates, and increased customer lifetime value.

End of 3rd party Cookies:

With the decline of third-party cookies and tracking technologies, advertisers are confronted with challenges in targeting and monitoring user behaviour. In response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory changes, a strategic shift towards collecting and integrating first-party data from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with ad platforms becomes imperative. This approach ensures compliance with privacy regulations, establishes transparent and direct relationships with users, grants advertisers ownership and control of their data, enhances audience targeting precision, improves cross-device tracking, boosts retargeting effectiveness, facilitates accurate ad measurement and attribution, and establishes a long-term sustainable advertising strategy. Essentially, integrating first-party data with ad platforms is a crucial solution, enabling advertisers to navigate the evolving landscape while maintaining precision, compliance, and effectiveness in their advertising endeavours.

In-Depth Customer Journey:

Gain insights into the customer journey, accurately attributing sales and driving revenue growth. Shorten the lead lifecycle, convert more prospects into customers, and optimise marketing processes for efficiency and conversion-driven success.

Marketing Automation:

Automate lead distribution and nurture cycles to optimise lead progression. Free up time for business growth by automating routine optimisation tasks using CRM systems. Streamline lead capture, enhance conversion rates, and optimise marketing through automation and integration with Lead Ads (Form extensions).

Lead Nurturing

Leads Ads on LinkedIn and Facebook generate a higher quantity of leads, but many can be higher in the buyer funnel than traffic from Google Search. Automate lead nurturing to guide leads down the funnel. Send personalised emails and messages to leads to nurture relationships and boost deal closures to bolster the offline conversion process.

Improved Retargeting

Syncing lead lifecycle stages from a CRM can also help advertisers with retargeting efforts. For example, if a prospect has a long sales cycle, use this information to show targeted ads that encourage the prospect through the buyer journey to become a customer or upsell and cross-sell to an existing customer.

How to Measure Lead Quality with Offline Conversion Tracking

Offline conversion tracking extends the scope of monitoring from solely online interactions to include significant offline activities within the sales funnel, such as telephone and face-to-face sales. A CRM system plays a crucial role by tracing the full journey from an ad click through to the purchase, allowing this data to be synchronised back to the advertising platforms.

By integrating your CRM with offline conversion tracking, you can accurately assess lead quality and track their progression through the sales process. This tracking can differentiate between various stages such as Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), sales quotes, actual customers, or those identified as a poor fit (negative persona).

Here’s how this process enhances your understanding and management of lead quality:

Comprehensive Lead Insights: The integration provides a complete view of which ads, keywords, or campaigns are most effective at converting leads into actual customers, rather than merely generating initial interest.

Precise Lead Scoring: This detailed insight facilitates refined lead scoring, enabling you to allocate more of your budget towards leads that are transitioning smoothly through the sales cycle. It ensures that resources are focused from the initial lead phase, through becoming a marketing qualified lead (MQL), to finally converting into a deal/quote or customer.

Optimisation of Campaigns: Every interaction and conversion is tracked, providing crucial data points for further optimisation of your advertising efforts. This helps in fine-tuning your campaigns to target leads that not only show interest but also have a higher probability of closing as sales.

Balancing Lead Quality and Quantity: Offline conversion tracking empowers advertisers to find the optimal balance between quality and quantity of leads. By prioritising significant lifecycle events like SQLs or converted customers, you can ensure that your advertising spend is invested in the most promising prospects.

By setting up and utilising offline conversion tracking in conjunction with your CRM, you gain a more holistic view of your advertising ROI, enhancing your ability to drive sales through more informed, data-driven decision-making.

CRM Advertising: E-commerce (Product) vs. Lead Generation (Services)

CRM advertising is a transformative tool for both e-commerce and service-based companies. For e-commerce businesses, it enables the creation of personalised shopping experiences, enhanced targeting, optimised ad spend, automated lead nurturing, and comprehensive reporting. For service companies, it offers precision targeting, enhanced lead nurturing, optimised lead scoring, and comprehensive analytics and reporting.

By leveraging CRM data to craft targeted ads for specific audiences, businesses can develop personalised and relevant content that resonates effectively with their target demographic. This results in more lucrative advertising, boasting higher conversion rates and increased customer lifetime value.

Personalised Customer Experience:

E-commerce: CRM advertising empowers e-commerce businesses to create highly personalised shopping experiences. By analysing customer data such as purchase history, browsing behaviour, and preferences stored in the CRM, businesses can tailor their advertising campaigns to individual customers. This results in more relevant ads that resonate with shoppers, increasing the likelihood of conversions and fostering customer loyalty.

Lead Generation (Services): Service-based companies can also benefit from personalised experiences. By leveraging CRM data, they can tailor ads to potential clients based on their interactions, such as downloading a whitepaper or attending a webinar. This personalised approach helps in building trust and guiding prospects through the decision-making process, ultimately enhancing the chances of conversion.

Enhanced Targeting Capabilities:

E-commerce: E-commerce platforms can significantly benefit from the advanced targeting options provided by CRM advertising. By utilising first-party data from their CRM, businesses can create custom audiences based on specific criteria such as past purchases, abandoned carts, or engagement levels. These custom audiences ensure that advertising efforts are focused on high-potential customers who are more likely to make a purchase, thereby maximising the return on investment (ROI).

Lead Generation (Services): For service-based companies, precision targeting is equally crucial. By using CRM data, businesses can segment their audience based on demographics, job titles, industries, and past interactions. This allows for highly targeted campaigns that reach decision-makers and stakeholders who are most likely to benefit from the services offered, thereby improving lead quality and campaign effectiveness.

Optimised Ad Spend:

E-commerce: CRM advertising enables e-commerce businesses to optimise their ad spend effectively. Through the integration of CRM data with advertising platforms, businesses can track the entire customer journey from initial click to final purchase. This comprehensive tracking allows for better budget allocation by identifying which ads and keywords generate the most valuable leads and sales. Consequently, e-commerce businesses can reduce wasteful spending and invest more in high-performing campaigns.

Lead Generation (Services): Service-based companies can similarly optimise their ad spend by using CRM data to track the effectiveness of their campaigns in generating high-quality leads. By analysing which ads and keywords lead to the most conversions, businesses can allocate their budgets more efficiently, focusing on strategies that deliver the best results. This ensures that marketing efforts are cost-effective and yield a higher ROI.

Automated Lead Nurturing:

E-commerce: Automating lead nurturing processes is another significant advantage of CRM advertising for e-commerce. By integrating CRM systems with advertising platforms, businesses can set up automated workflows to send personalised emails and messages to leads at different stages of the buyer journey. This automation ensures timely follow-ups, keeps customers engaged, and guides them towards making a purchase, thereby increasing the overall conversion rate.

Lead Generation (Services): In the realm of lead generation, automated nurturing is equally vital. Service companies can use CRM-integrated advertising to automate follow-ups with potential clients, providing personalised content based on their interests and behaviours. This continuous engagement helps maintain interest and moves leads closer to conversion, improving the efficiency of the sales funnel.

Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics:

E-commerce: CRM advertising offers e-commerce businesses detailed insights into their advertising performance. By combining CRM data with ad platform metrics, businesses can measure crucial parameters such as cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, and return on ad spend (ROAS). These insights enable data-driven decision-making, helping businesses refine their marketing strategies, improve targeting accuracy, and ultimately boost sales and profitability.

Lead Generation (Services): Service-based companies also gain valuable insights from comprehensive analytics. By integrating CRM data with advertising metrics, businesses can track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and lead progression through the sales funnel. This holistic view enables service companies to fine-tune their marketing efforts, allocate resources effectively, and enhance overall campaign performance.

Practical Examples of CRM Advertising:

E-commerce:

Abandoned Cart Retargeting: By integrating CRM data with advertising platforms, e-commerce businesses can retarget customers who have abandoned their shopping carts. Ads can be personalised with the exact products left in the cart, encouraging customers to complete their purchases.

Seasonal Promotions: E-commerce businesses can use CRM data to identify customers who frequently shop during specific seasons or holidays. Targeted ads with personalised offers and discounts can be created for these customers, increasing the chances of seasonal sales.

Product Recommendations: Leveraging purchase history and browsing behaviour from the CRM, businesses can create ads that recommend products similar to what customers have previously bought or shown interest in. This personalised approach enhances the shopping experience and drives repeat purchases.

Loyalty Program Integration: For e-commerce businesses with loyalty programs, CRM advertising can be used to target loyal customers with exclusive offers and rewards. Ads can highlight loyalty points, special discounts, and upcoming promotions, fostering customer retention and satisfaction.

Lead Generation (Services):

Targeted LinkedIn Campaigns: Service companies can leverage CRM data to create highly targeted LinkedIn ad campaigns. By focusing on specific industries, job titles, or companies that match their ideal customer profile (ICP), businesses can reach decision-makers who are more likely to be interested in their services.

Retargeting Webinar Attendees: If a service company hosts webinars, integrating CRM with advertising platforms allows for effective retargeting of attendees. Ads can be customised to address specific pain points discussed in the webinar, encouraging attendees to take the next step, such as scheduling a consultation or downloading additional resources.

Nurturing High-Quality Leads: By using CRM data to identify high-quality leads, service companies can set up automated nurturing campaigns. These campaigns can include a series of personalised emails and ads designed to keep the company top-of-mind and provide valuable information, gradually moving leads closer to a purchase decision.

Optimising Ad Spend: Service companies can use CRM data to track the effectiveness of their ad campaigns in generating high-quality leads. By analysing which ads and keywords lead to the most conversions, businesses can allocate their ad spend more efficiently, focusing on strategies that deliver the best results.

Go Beyond CPA Optimisation

In the realm of advertising strategies, service companies have traditionally focused on optimising their approach for a cost per lead using target CPL (Cost Per Lead), aiming to acquire the most leads at the lowest cost.

It’s essential to acknowledge that not all leads possess the same value, as some are more likely to convert into customers, and certain leads may yield a higher long-term value. This is particularly true when you scale your account with more audience targeting at varying stages of the buyer funnel.

While many advertisers prioritise obtaining the maximum number of leads at the lowest cost through CPA optimisation (e.g., Lowest Cost Per Lead), offline conversion tracking offers a more advanced approach that delves deeper than mere cost-per-lead optimisation. By honing in on these high-quality leads, you can optimise your budget allocation, thereby enhancing your ROI. This strategy becomes even more crucial as targeting options diversify higher up the advertising funnel, where lead quality might vary.

So, rather than fixating solely on quantity, the emphasis now shifts towards prioritising lead progression tracking for enhanced bidding strategies, leading to the acquisition of high-quality leads. This optimisation strategy moves beyond early lead events and directs attention to later stages in the lead lifecycle, including qualified leads, sales proposals, and converted customers.

Instead of optimising for a lead event, such as an online form submission or phone call, consider optimising for specific outcomes like the cost per SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), cost per sales opportunity (deal, quote, proposal), or cost per customer. You can choose to optimise for all events in your lead lifecycle or focus on a specific stage beyond the lead event step.

It’s crucial to note that for machine learning to perform effectively, a minimum number of conversions is required. For instance, with Google, a minimum of 20 conversions per month is recommended. Therefore, carefully consider this requirement when selecting a stage in your sales funnel for optimisation.

In today’s advertising landscape, where quality prevails over sheer quantity, the importance of offline conversion tracking as a transformative optimisation tool cannot be overstated. Going beyond conventional online conversion tracking centred on the cost per lead, the real value lies in optimising for tangible outcomes: cost per customer, cost per Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), and cost per quoted customer.

Maximising the AI Machine learning of Ad Platforms

AI’s pervasive influence extends to online advertising, and acquiring more conversion data significantly enhances the potential of machine learning. Elevated data quality serves as a cornerstone for training AI models, facilitating pattern recognition and real-time auction predictions.

Embracing these strategies not only improves data quality but also fine-tunes the training process, maximising the capabilities of machine learning in advertising. Leveraging AI-powered techniques enables the utilisation of advanced bidding strategies, leading to superior ad performance, increased ROI, enhanced personalisation, and more effective retargeting. By incorporating these approaches, your advertising efforts are poised to stay at the forefront in today’s AI-driven landscape.

Examples of using CRM Advertising

Specifically, here are some examples of how a CRM system enhances Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads campaigns:

Google Ads:

Google Ads provides essential metrics like conversions, leads, and cost per conversion. However, integrating a CRM system takes this a step further by offering detailed reporting metrics such as cost per customer and cost per sales quote/deal/proposal. This integration also enables the calculation of Cost vs Revenue (ROAS), providing a comprehensive revenue operations capability when combined with advertising efforts.

CRM integration goes beyond basic reporting, offering insights into campaign performance. It unveils the top-performing keywords that drive leads, quotes, and customers. Armed with this data, campaign optimisation becomes a strategic tool for maximising budget efficiency and achieving the best ROI.

LinkedIn Ads:

Similar to Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads benefit from CRM integration, providing enhanced targeting capabilities. Creating audiences based on company names of past website visitors using the IP of the company domain elevates the precision of ad targeting. Efficient tracking of leads generated by LinkedIn Ads sharpens targeting precision further. The collected data enables more effective ad customisation, ultimately boosting conversion rates.

Facebook Ads:

For Facebook Ads, CRM integration offers similar capabilities to Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads. You can import a variety of audiences from your CRM for ad targeting, ensuring a more personalised approach. Additionally, syncing lead lifecycle changes with Facebook informs the platform about the quality of leads, allowing for optimised bidding and budget allocation to maximise sales revenue. This strategic integration enhances the overall effectiveness of Facebook advertising campaigns.

The End of 3rd-party Cookies & Tracking

The diminishing use of third-party cookies and tracking technologies, coupled with their eventual discontinuation, presents considerable challenges for advertisers reliant on these tools for targeting and monitoring user behaviour across the internet.

This shift primarily stems from growing privacy concerns, heightened regulations, and alterations in browser policies. As access to third-party data becomes more restricted, the acquisition and utilisation of first-party cookies data within a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system become increasingly pivotal. The integration of this first-party cookie data with ad platforms emerges as a strategic manoeuvre for advertisers. Here’s how:

Privacy Compliance:

Challenge: Third-party cookies are often perceived as invasive by users, prompting increased privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) and limitations on third-party tracking.

Solution: first-party cookie data, gathered directly from users who willingly provide information, aligns with privacy regulations. Integrating this data with ad platforms ensures compliance and fosters trust with users.

User Relationship Building:

Challenge: third-party tracking can be viewed as intrusive, potentially damaging the advertiser’s relationship with users.

Solution: first-party cookies data, obtained through user interactions with the brand, fosters a direct and transparent relationship. Integrating this data allows for personalised and respectful ad targeting, enhancing the user experience.

Data Ownership:

Challenge: Advertisers have limited control and ownership of third-party data, relying on external providers.

Solution: First-party cookie data is owned and controlled by the advertiser. Integrating this data with ad platforms ensures a direct and secure connection, allowing businesses to leverage their data fully.

Audience Targeting Precision:

Challenge: third-party cookies provide broad audience segments, limiting precise targeting.
Solution: Integrating first-party cookie data with ad platforms enables advertisers to create highly targeted and custom audiences. This precision improves ad relevance and engagement.

Cross-Device Tracking:

Challenge: Third-party cookies struggle with accurate cross-device tracking, leading to fragmented user profiles.
Solution: first-party cookie data collected in a CRM offers a unified view of user interactions. Integrating this data with ad platforms allows for more accurate cross-device targeting and a seamless user experience.

Retargeting Effectiveness:

Challenge: third-party cookies for retargeting can be less effective due to incomplete data and ad blockers.
Solution: By integrating first-party cookies data with ad platforms, advertisers can improve retargeting effectiveness. They can create custom audiences based on user interactions within their CRM, ensuring more relevant and engaging retargeting campaigns.

Ad Measurement and Attribution:

Challenge: tracking limitations affect ad measurement and attribution accuracy.
Solution: First-party data, when integrated with ad platforms, provides a more accurate and comprehensive view of the customer journey. Advertisers can measure campaign performance and attribute conversions more reliably.

Long-term Sustainability:

Challenge: The decline of third-party tracking technologies raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of current advertising practices.
Solution: Investing in first-party data and integrating it with ad platforms ensures a sustainable and adaptable advertising strategy, mitigating the impact of external changes.

In summary, as third-party cookies decline, collecting and integrating first-party data with ad platforms becomes a strategic imperative for advertisers. This approach not only addresses privacy concerns and regulatory challenges but also empowers advertisers with greater control, precision, and effectiveness in their advertising efforts. The CRM serves as a central hub for this valuable first-party data, allowing advertisers to build stronger, more personalised connections with their audience.

Lead Ads (Forms) on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google

Integrating Leads Ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Lead Ad Extensions with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a strategic approach that streamlines the lead management process and enhances the overall efficiency of your marketing efforts.

Benefits of integrating Leads Ads with a CRM:

Automatic transfer of lead data reduces manual data entry and accelerates lead response time.
Integration ensures consistency and accuracy of lead information between platforms.
CRM becomes a central hub for managing leads, providing a unified view of leads from different advertising channels in one holistic view.

Facebook Leads Ads Integration with CRM:

Facebook Leads Ads are designed to capture lead information directly within the Facebook platform, eliminating the need for users to fill out external forms. Integrating this with a CRM allows for seamless transfer of lead data from Facebook to your CRM systems.

Process: When a user interacts with your Facebook Lead Ad and submits their information, the data is automatically sent to your CRM system. This integration ensures that the leads generated on Facebook are directly accessible within your CRM, enabling quick follow-up and lead nurturing.

Benefits: Real-time lead capture: Immediate transfer of leads to CRM for swift response.
Automated lead segmentation: Leads can be automatically categorised based on predefined criteria.
Efficient lead nurturing: Integration facilitates targeted and personalised follow-up actions.

LinkedIn Leads Ads Integration with CRM:

Similar to Facebook Leads Ads, LinkedIn Leads Ads allow you to collect lead data directly on the LinkedIn platform. Integrating with a CRM ensures a seamless flow of leads into your CRM database to be followed up by sales or by marketing through lead nurturing.

Process: Once a user engages with your LinkedIn Lead Ad and submits their information, the lead data is automatically transmitted to your CRM system. This integration simplifies the lead-handling process and provides a unified view of leads across platforms.

Centralised lead repository: All leads from LinkedIn are consolidated within your CRM.
Enhanced lead tracking: Visibility into LinkedIn campaign performance and lead interactions
Improved lead engagement: Efficiently manage and respond to LinkedIn-generated leads.

Google Lead Ad Extensions Integration with CRM:

Google Lead Ad Extensions enable users to submit their information directly through Google search ads. Integrating with a CRM allows you to capture and organise this lead data and follow up with this.

Process: When a user interacts with your Google Lead Ad Extension and provides their details, the lead information is automatically sent to your CRM system. This integration ensures that leads generated through Google Ads are efficiently processed and managed within your CRM

Streamlined lead flow: Leads from Google Ads seamlessly integrated into your CRM workflow.
Enhanced reporting: Comprehensive insights into lead performance and conversion metrics.
Unified lead management: All leads, regardless of the platform, are managed cohesively within the CRM.

In summary, integrating lead ads from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google with a CRM system enhances lead management, improves response times, and provides valuable insights for more effective marketing strategies.

Elevating Lead Nurturing with Retargeting & Email Marketing

When targeting a larger audience higher in the funnel, many leads may not be immediately sales-ready (Marketing Qualified Leads) and will require nurturing before passing them to your sales team. Many CRM systems come equipped with robust lead scoring and nurturing tools to help manage this process. You can segment these leads based on their level of engagement and use these segments to build remarketing lists or email nurturing campaigns, ensuring that potential customers are gradually guided through the sales funnel until they’re ready for direct outreach.

Not all leads are ready to make a decision and may require nurturing to move through their buyer journey. CRM advertising enhances lead nurturing through email and remarketing to amplify the efficiency of these strategies. Here’s a comprehensive exploration:

Segmentation of Leads:

CRM Integration: Seamlessly integrate your CRM system with advertising platforms to segment leads based on behaviours, interactions, and demographics.

Targeted Campaigns: Capitalise on this segmentation to craft specific lead nurturing campaigns, tailoring email sequences or creating remarketing ads aligned with a lead’s position in the sales funnel, preferences, or past interactions.

Personalised Email Campaigns:

Leveraging CRM Data: Exploit the wealth of information stored in CRM systems, including preferences, purchase history, and engagement patterns.

Customised Content: Use this data to design highly personalised email campaigns, extending personalisation to addressing leads by name, suggesting products based on past purchases, or delivering content tailored to individual interests.

Automated Email Workflows:

CRM and Automation Integration: Integrate your CRM with marketing automation tools to establish email workflows.

Streamlined Nurturing: Design automated workflows triggered by specific CRM events, such as lead sign-ups or webinar event attendance. These workflows should comprise a series of targeted emails guiding leads through the nurturing journey.

Remarketing Ads:

CRM-Driven Segmentation: Segment leads within your CRM based on interactions with your website, email lists, company lists, and previous purchases.

Custom 1st-party Audiences: Utilise CRM data to create custom audiences for remarketing across platforms like Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn.

Precision in Remarketing: Showcase tailored ads to leads based on past actions, such as displaying service pages they viewed on your website or progressed through lead stages in your sales funnel.

Lead Scoring and Prioritisation:

Harnessing CRM Insights: Leverage lead scoring functionalities within CRM systems, considering engagement levels, behaviours, and demographics.

Strategic Outreach: Use lead scores to prioritise outreach efforts. Focus email campaigns and remarketing strategies on high-scoring leads, ensuring optimal resource allocation.

Closed-Loop Reporting:

CRM and Analytics Synergy: Integrate your CRM with analytics tools to establish closed-loop reporting.

Continuous Evaluation: Analyse how leads progress through the nurturing process, from initial interaction to conversion. Use these insights to continuously refine email campaigns and remarketing strategies.

Integration of Lead Lifecycle Stages:

Harnessing CRM Data: Organise your CRM database into lead lifecycle stages through integration.

Strategic Ad Tailoring: Identify prospects in different stages of the buyer funnel (awareness, consideration, or conversion) and tailor ads accordingly, guiding them through the funnel to increase the likelihood of conversion.

Retargeting Strategies:

Synchronisation of Lifecycle Stages: Sync lead lifecycle stages from CRM to ad platforms for a pivotal advantage in retargeting.

Targeted Ad Deployment:

Capitalise on this information, deploying targeted ads that guide prospects through prolonged sales cycles and motivate them along the buyer’s journey.
Additionally, use retargeting for upselling and cross-selling to existing customers.

Enhanced Advertisement Creation:

Use the understanding gained from CRM data to create more resonant advertisements and fine-tune campaign strategies for optimal lead quality and enhanced return on investment.

In essence, integrating lead lifecycle stages from a CRM empowers advertisers to strategically nurture leads, refine retargeting efforts, bridge the gap between online and offline behaviour, and gain valuable insights to augment lead quality and campaign effectiveness.

Embarking on Your CRM Advertising Journey

As you venture into the world of CRM advertising, you can make data-driven decisions, improve targeting, optimisation and reporting. When you’re ready to embark on this transformative journey, let us guide you through the intricate maze of CRM-powered advertising for a future of enhanced engagement and growth.

Define your Integration Capabilities: Decide what your requirements are and what needs to be done to complete the project.

Select Your CRM Platform: If you already have a CRM. determine its ability to to integrate directly with ad platforms. If your CRM does not have native integration with ad platforms like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, using Zapier.com as an integration gateway is an option. Another option is to just use a CRM built with advertising in mind out of the box.

Harmonise CRM and Advertising: The next stride involves integrating your chosen CRM platform with an advertising counterpart. This synchronisation empowers you to craft tailored audiences based on your CRM insights and target them effectively.

Build 1st-party Audiences: With the integration of your CRM and advertising platforms, commence the creation of first party audiences. This is achieved by defining the criteria that best align with your ad targeting objectives. For instance, you might shape an audience comprising customers who’ve made specific purchases within the past year, or a Lookalike/Matched audience of these customers.

Audience Targeting Ads: Once custom audiences are formed, it’s time to steer your ad targeting efforts. Pick the advertising platform of your choice and initiate the formulation of ad campaigns. As you embark on this journey, leverage your CRM data to craft ads that resonate personally and relevantly with your audience.

Optimisation: Bidding, machine learning & AI: Make sure the CRM system has the ability to pass offline conversions of leads that progress through your lead lifecycle back to the ad platform(s).

Evolution through Analysis: The process doesn’t end with ad deployment. Regularly assess the performance of your campaigns and use these insights to refine your strategies. Employ analytics and metrics to gauge the impact of your CRM-powered advertising efforts, making informed adjustments as needed.

How to Create Audiences for Targeting

Audience creation and sharing 1st-party data with ad platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook through a CRM system is key in CRM advertising. This process involves leveraging the information stored within a CRM to refine and target advertising efforts effectively. Here’s a breakdown of how this is achieved: