The Hidden Marketing Plan in Your Operational Data
Traditionally, operations is separate to marketing, which is supported by IT. But what if you could pull data from your CAFM system to make operational marketing decisions?
Your marketing team likely use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, you manually log sales opportunities, and some of these convert via a sales pipeline. There's probably a contact log in there, and it's separate to your operational data.
But what if your CRM was linked?
CAFM systems are a wealth of information, every asset, every service, every quote. Usually this is unstructured data, but given the right system and setup this data can be extracted to synchronise with your CRM.
But why would you want to do that? And that's a good question!
Imagine supercharging your CAFM data to make actionable marketing decisions, showing the right staff the right data, at the right time. Operational data actually maps very well over a traditional CRM.
You could have a top level view of your sales pipeline, all work tendered and won. Linking up tenders, quotes & work orders, you can see all open leads/opportunities. Win a contract, it becomes a converted order. Quote accepted becomes a converted order. One single pane of glass for all opportunities, with standard conversion reports from your CRM - it was built for this.
So what about A/B testing
If you fancy getting a bit cleverer, why not use A/B testing on your website? If you're not aware of this concept, you set up two pages, A and B, and show each visitor one of the two.
Now you record how many leads come from page A, and page B. This gives you actionable data - if page B performs better, ask why. Then improve, rewrite, iterate.
The interesting bit - a lot of CRM systems can link to your website. So you can report on the conversions in a single place. Very soon you know which writing styles, and which CTAs work for your business.
... and campaign tracking?
If you're not in marketing or technology, this might be another unknown. The idea is you add analytics onto your website to record where the visitors come from.
If you've ever seen a URL like this, you might wonder what it's all about.
https://mattchubb.co.uk/your-post-slug/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fm-thought-leadership&utm_content=post-title-here
Every time someone clicks on this link you know the source was LinkedIn, the medium was social, the campaign was fm-thought-leadership, and the content was the specific post or link - useful when you're running more than one link to the same campaign.
Over time you build up reporting in Google Analytics. How many visitors come from LinkedIn? From Google? How many click through from your email footer? Which blog articles, or pieces work the best?
Once again, learn from it, and do more of what works.
Summary
This is just a brief overview of how you can create an incoming marketing platform using your website, and a few publicly available tools.
Your existing CAFM data feeds a CRM which tells you what works. Analytics on your website show you where to put your marketing efforts.
None of this is new, marketers have been doing it for years - but precious few FM companies use the data they've already got, and put it into actionable platforms.
With the right platforms and training, every piece of data is sales information - and every account manager, a salesperson.