This is the third email in our data mining series. The first was about
Data Mining Your Newsletter and the second about
Data Mining your Website
.
This week we will focus on social media and what it can tell you about your customers and potential customers. This is a new and evolving topic so today's post will be part one of two.
Social Media is not just a tool for you to push out your messages. In fact, if that is all you are doing you will lose the attention of your followers quickly. The point of social media is to be, well, social. It is to build relationships with your customers and potential customers. You can like, comment and reply to other people's posts which is important for your brand. But it is not until you move into the phase of using social media as part of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy that it will really make an impact on your business.
What is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Strategy?
CRM is different for every organization. It is the back-end process that you use to move a customer down the sales pipeline. For a golf club this may mean how you track a new potential member from the stage of lead through to new full paying member. It can also mean the process you use to generate new tournament leads and how you follow them up.
What is Social CRM?
Again social CRM is different for every organization. It is the process that you use to move your fans and followers into customers and how you track them. For social media to really impact your business you want your fans to become customers and your customers to become advocates. For a private club this may mean tracking the social media handles of all your members in your club's database and getting to know them better. For a public facility with banquet space this may mean building social media into your leads list and finding out one or two personal preferences about a potential customer in advance of meeting them in person.
Most golf courses do not have established CRM programs. So for this week we will leave you with a few examples of why you need to get to know your customers (without being aggressive) and how important this is to your business long-term.
These examples are dated but most facilities are still not on board. They will help you wrap your head around the importance of building relationships with your customers.
Gary Vaynerchuk on Keeping it Real With Customers - Article on Entrepreneur
How Business Must adapt to Social Media - YouTube Gary Vaynerchuck
Jeff also has done a talk about "
How the Internet has Changed the Sales Game". You can start to listen to the talk at 14:40 for some examples on Data Mining using social media.
Next week we will discuss processes and strategies to help you and your staff build and track your customer relationships. We do not know of any courses that are currently fully following though with these processes but we believe that this is the future of sales and the success of your business.
