CRM for marketing and advertising

Modern CRM systems are used to manage a company’s interactions with new and potential customers. They help collect, structure and analyze consumer data and help build more customer-oriented marketing that effectively spends the advertising budget.

CRM marketing opens up new opportunities for companies:

• Understanding the target audience. CRM brings together all customer data in one place and, thanks to analytical tools, helps businesses get a complete picture of their target audience, their preferences, interests and geography.
• Customer segmentation. A company may have several groups of customers who, for example, are interested in different types of goods or services. By dividing the client base into groups, the marketer gets the opportunity to create different marketing and advertising campaigns aimed at a specific segment of consumers. This approach will significantly increase ROI.
• Attraction of new clients. A business can use information about its existing customers to more effectively reach new audiences with similar interests.

• Marketing automation. CRM capabilities allow you to optimize the performance of most of the marketer’s routine tasks, such as bulk email, SMS and push notifications, launching contextual or media advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, maintaining social networks and others. To perform such tasks, additional external tools and services are integrated into CRM.
• Analytics. Analytics in marketing is one of the most important functions. A variety of metrics in CRM systems make it possible to constantly analyze the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and draw appropriate conclusions to improve their effectiveness and rationalize budget spending
• Trends and planning. By constantly analyzing changes in customer preferences and behavior, the company is able to respond in a timely manner to any market changes, and can use this information in their economic planning.

It is generally accepted that every dollar invested in a relationship management system should bring at least nine dollars in profit, but in practice, about 70% of CRMs do not cope with this. Most often this is due to the use of standard solutions that are difficult to integrate into the actual business processes of the company.

As an example, consider a network business, which is almost entirely based on marketing. Work in this area is quite multifaceted, and includes:

• search for channels to promote goods;
• building a customer base;
• training new partners and monitoring their work;
• distribution of bonuses and financial flows;

• monitoring the work of each team member;
• tracking the development of the structure.

Accordingly, CRM for network marketing must take into account all these and many other nuances, and only in this case it will be really effective and be able to make a profit. At the same time, it should remain simple and convenient so that new network partners do not spend a lot of time learning software and can focus on their core business.

Typical CRMs tend to cover all areas of business at the same time, since this is their main monetization model. Because of this, they are characterized by cumbersome functionality, and the absence of narrowly focused and non-standard tools. As a result, the effectiveness of such solutions is noticeably reduced and, often, they are simply not able to take into account all the features of each particular company. Therefore, investing in your own CRM system is often more profitable in the end.

In the production process of CRM for advertising and marketing, a different stack of technologies can be used, which in most cases depends on the chosen platform:

• Web version. The frontend can be implemented with standard HTML and CSS, or with reactive technologies such as React.js and Vue.js. The backend is written in Python, PHP, Java and their frameworks, or in Node.js. You can work in such CRM systems both from a PC and from a mobile phone using a browser.
• Mobile app. The backend of a mobile application can be shared with a web system, but the front part is

most rationally developed on the Flutter cross-platform framework or on native technologies – Swift for IOS and Kotlin/Java for Android.

In addition, the choice of technologies for developing CRM depends on the functional load and tasks that the system will perform. Optimally matched tools ensure high productivity and project stability.

The entire production stage can be divided into several main stages. Let’s consider each of them in more detail.

Step 1. Collection of information

First of all, AVADA MEDIA specialists need to determine how the business works and what specific tasks the CRM system will perform. To do this, an interview is conducted with the customer, solutions that are already on the market are analyzed.

Step 2. Design and preparation of technical documentation

At this stage, the business analyst and the designer create a prototype of the future system interface and a special technical project document that describes all the functionality of CRM, a list of technologies that will be used and an implementation plan. Based on this information, the timing and cost of project production are calculated.

Step 3. Design

CRMs are multi-tasking tools, and they are characterized by a high concentration of functionality. In order for the system to continue to be convenient and intuitive despite this, it is important to take care of its visual design. This task is performed by UI designers.

The design of the system can be created completely from scratch, or using ready-made components for building interfaces, such as Vuexy. In the second case, the speed of implementation increases significantly.

Step 4. Programming

At the stage of technical development, the logic of the operation of the entire functionality of the CRM system is programmed. This stage consists of two parts:

• Frontend development is the programming of the user interface with which end users will interact: marketers, managers, department heads and other specialists. The task of the frontend is to receive requests from the client, send them to the server, and then display the result.
• Backend development is the creation of a CRM server part responsible for processing incoming requests, working with databases and interacting with external APIs.

Step 5. Testing

After the development of CRM is completed, it is transferred to the QA department, where it undergoes thorough testing. In particular, this step checks for:

• The correctness of the functionality.
• Compliance of the project with the initial plans.
• System performance.
• Data security.
• Ease of use.

If bugs are found, the project is returned for revision, after which it is tested again. This allows you to make sure that the error was actually fixed, and that the corrections made did not break the operation of other functions.

AVADA MEDIA specializes in the production of high-load systems for businesses of any complexity. In our work, we use powerful technologies, thanks to which we can guarantee the quality and stability of the software.

We have already formed teams of experienced specialists for the development of a CRM system for marketing and advertising, who can begin to implement your project.