MAR 4860 – Customer Relationship Management MODULE 10

Introduction
Welcome to Module 10: Using CRM in Marketing & Customer Service. In our last module,
we discussed the role of CRM technology in the sales process and sales functions. Our focus
now shifts to marketing, although these two (sales and marketing) are coming together more and
more each day.
Marketing has seen a shift from a production-focused discipline to a completely customer-focused
one. The customer is king. Business is now powered by cloud, social, mobile, the Internet of things
(IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), along with increasing computing power and data. How has
marketing changed? What effect have CRM technologies had on its functions? This module will
focus on the use of these technologies within the realm of marketing and customer service in an
organization.
Creating powerful, differentiated brands and producing sustainable marketing results demands new
skills, strategies, tactics and technology to improve the CX throughout the customer journey. As
devices, platforms and technologies evolve, they impact customer behavior, whether consumers or
businesses. This affects the channels and promotion methods that marketers use to reach customers.
Marketers face challenges: multi-channel marketing, social branding, optimized segmentation and
differentiation, and data-driven insights – just to name a few. High-performing marketing leaders
rely on CRM technologies and analytical focus to deal with these challenges.

According to recent studies, companies lose more than $62 billion a year due to poor customer
service. So, what can leadership do to ensure they stay up to date, stay competitive and
stay relevant? This module also discusses what CRM technology can do for the customer
service and support functions of a company. Technology has made it easier than ever to
track customer preferences and history. Big data gives us trends and insights with much
accuracy. There is no reason to not create a more personalized experience that caters to a
customer’s individual needs.

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Module Learning Objectives

Before we discuss the learning objectives, let’s go over some of the results from the Salesforce State of
Marketing Research Report from 2020 where they talked about what top marketing teams are doing in order to be able
to address the issues or challenges that marketers are facing right now.

1. Innovation is the number one priority. According to the report, 84% percent of customers say the experience a
company provides is as important as its products and services. Marketers are taking a real-time approach to
customer experience. Customers now expect dynamic interactions – where the content they see on one channel is
tailored based on their actions from a previous channel. For the first time, more than half (51%) of marketers
describe their cross-channel content as dynamic. Marketing innovators are seeking to engage customers in new ways
across digital touchpoints.

2. Marketers’ use of AI has skyrocketed. 84% of marketers report using AI, which is up from 29% in 2018. The
use of customer data for empathetic marketing has come to the forefront. AI helps marketers achieve this type of
personalization at scale by distilling insights from data and acting on it. 78% of marketers describe their customer
engagement as data-driven. They are using several customer data sources (median number: 12), with the top three
being transactional data, declared interests/preferences, and known digital identities. Marketers now use an average of
six data management tools. This explains why marketers cite data unification and activation among their top five
challenges.

3. Account-based marketing (ABM) is a cornerstone in B2B. 92% of B2B marketers now have an ABM
program. B2B customers now expect the same type of empathy and engagement as their B2C counterparts. Data and
AI are helping B2B marketers accomplish this through account-based marketing (ABM). Marketers use ABM to
build multiple, highly-personalized campaigns that connect with the accounts that are most important to them. It also
increases the lifetime value of their customer relationships. The rise of ABM programs is pretty recent – 64% were
started within the past five years. But these programs have grown more sophisticated, as 68%of them use automation.

4. A new set of emerging technologies will guide an uncertain future. The COVID-19 crisis has forced
businesses to figure out how to better connect with customers and deliver what they need, when they need it.
Marketers can be at the forefront of this innovation – 79% of them say they lead customer experience initiatives
across their organizations. Marketers expect the next 10 years to bring even greater impacts from new
technologies and societal developments. 60% of marketing leaders believe 5G will have a major impact on
marketing in the decade ahead. Faster speeds mean other innovations, such as virtual reality, can become a
greater part of the customer experience.
In light of these are the different learning objectives, we are going to review some marketing functions, look at those
challenges that we've mentioned a little bit more closely, and see how technology can help. We are going to focus on
CRM and managing campaigns, with ultimately the goal being to generate more quality leads. We are also going to
look at the lead scoring and assignment process and see what that's all about. We will look at why it's so important for
sales and marketing to work together, and then we will touch on content marketing.

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Review of Marketing

We talked about the shift from the 4Ps to the 7Ps when we discussed the customer experience. When we look at
marketing we see that we're shifting more from the 4Ps to the 7Ps and we're adding three additional Ps for the
process, the people, and the physical aspect of marketing. Note on this slide how CRM technology can
facilitate in each of these areas.

From a product perspective, CRM technology allows sales people and service people to look at different product
configurations. Service and online sales people are also able to handle proposals online by accessing different
product information from their CRM tools. From a pricing perspective, the focus is ROI. How can a campaign
generate more return on investment? What are we going to use in order to measure the outcomes of a
campaign? That's what marketing analytics is all about.

We've also touched on customer differentiation based on value. That's also a very important component of
pricing today, as is the use of CRM technology to help us better differentiate between one customer and the
other based on the value that customer generates for a company. From a place perspective, the importance of the
omni channel strategies is that you can see the full gamut or a picture of the customer, regardless of where they
are shopping or what they prefer to engage in with a company. This allows for the 360-degree view. This not
only addresses customers, it can also address distributors, third party providers, vendors, and suppliers. All of
the individuals who are part of the entire supply chain. We have to go beyond the customer because we have to
look at how we are also relating to these different participants, like the supply chain, and how we're making the
entire process a more efficient and effective one from our promotion standpoint.

We have to focus a lot on lead generation and how those leads can turn into revenues for the company. That
also emphasizes the conversion of those leads. How can we better convert them? How can we use the insights
that we have gained from our engagements and our interactions and touch points with customers to help us do
that and make those conversations with the customer a lot more personalized? When we look at the process P
it's all about designing a great customer experiences and the journeys. Marketing professionals today have a
new set of skills. That's why we're focusing so much on analytical skills -- on being able to assign processes and
workflows and then going into that depth of detail. That's what marketers have to do to really deliver where
customers are looking for today, not only one on the digital side, but also on the face to face side.

When you look at the people P or the physical P we're talking about putting the right people in the right
positions to be able to make the customer experience what the customer expects, that includes the physical
surroundings as well. All of these things have a role in this new marketing shift, from a physical standpoint to a
website, all are considered to be part of the physical aspects. We are now getting more into the design of what is,
that customers are interacting with CRM and core business processes.

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Core Business Processes

In this slide we see that there are three primary operational CRM core processes: 1) sales (and
sales management); 2) marketing; and 3) service or support. Although the types of sub-processes
within each process may vary based on industry and type of customer, the basic ones are listed
above. Be sure to familiarize yourself with each of these listed here. You should be able to identify
these sub-processes.
Our focus in this module is on the middle section: marketing. Your challenge is to ask yourself:
For each of the high-level core business processes for marketing, how can CRM
technology facilitate these processes and help a company achieve its customer-centric vision?
Here are some examples:

• How can we change the workflows for marketing personnel so that they can be smarter and
more efficient when, let’s say, they develop new campaigns?
• How can they use what they learn about customers, gathered with CRM, to develop new
products?
• How can the customer data in CRM aid in managing loyalty programs? How can we know who
is more loyal? How can we differentiate customers based on the value they generate for a
company and based on their specific preferences and needs?
Marketing strategy is about designing smart workflows and then using CRM technology to make
them a reality.

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Role of CRM in Marketing

Here we see some different aspects of marketing. We need to hone in on the multi-channel marketing, which has
to do with allowing simultaneous campaigns to happen simultaneously across different sales channels and touch
points. Also, across social branding, which is really focused on going across different social media
platforms, and then evaluating the campaigns that we have going across these.
Multichannel marketing - Today, CRM technology has the multichannel marketing functionality which allows
for simultaneous marketing campaigns across different sales channels and touchpoints, like regular mail, email,
mobile, social media, web etc.
Social branding - It may be overwhelming for businesses (especially startups) to promote their brand on
several social media platforms. Using a CRM, monitoring and managing the company’s presence in social
media is much more effective and less time consuming. It can track any brand/product mentions and instantly
react to them, evaluate the response from social media campaigns etc. CRM solutions can monitor customers’
online activity, which is required for identifying what matters most to them and deriving insights and the
business value from the data.
Next, we need to look at what we are learning from these campaigns to make them better. Each time
we're looking at optimizing the segmentation. We can't just concentrate on demographic data anymore. We must
look at behavioral data, and we have to look at attitudinal data. Demographic information is just the basics
and the foundation for doing segmentation.
Optimized segmentation and targeting - Thanks to the information that CRM is capable of collecting and
storing, marketers can segment the customers much more precisely, based on numerous criteria. This results in
messages and content delivered to them being much better targeted and, consequently, receive the improved
response and brand loyalty. Remember IDIC? But what are you doing with that information that you're
learning and how are you capturing those learnings about customer behavior and customer attitude? The last
one is focused on what that data tells us. What insights are we gaining from all that information?
Data-driven marketing - A CRM empowers marketers with data based insights, the results of numerous
marketing campaigns measured in figures and reflected in various charts and diagrams. This information is
necessary for efficient campaigns, budget allocation, and resource adjustment. It may mean tracking
conversions resulting from certain marketing activities and campaigns, invaluable in determining which efforts
bring the best ROI and should be carried on and which to stop.
Bottom line - One of the biggest benefits of a CRM system is bringing sales and marketing close together,
enabling and fostering cooperation and data sharing as opposed to creating data silos within departments or
competition. Such software is no longer limited to enterprises. It is widely used by all types of businesses,
offering a variety of solutions for different needs. SMBs are extensively adopting CRM, which streamline their
processes, optimize the need for extra workforce and help build loyal relationships with customers.

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The General Marketing Process

This is the general marketing process. Regardless of what company you work for, what types of products or
services you're trying to market, you still go through these five steps. We are using all these technologies
throughout these different steps.

The first step is identifying our target audiences. This has to go beyond the regular market research and
segmentation. We need to incorporate the IDIC model and the voice of the customer continuously into our
segmentation and differentiation strategies, so that we can come up with the best target audiences. We need to look
at what leads are saying and what our existing customers are saying once we've identified our market
audiences. Then, we have to develop those campaigns. Notice on the slide things like the lead generation
tools. What kind of content are we going to use for every step of the process?

We have to design experience maps, assign workflows, and business process maps to help us figure out what we want
to accomplish in each of those stages, what goals are we going after, and then how much it is going to cost us to
execute these different campaigns. You won't be able to get an approval for a campaign until you can show what the
return on that campaign is going to be, and what it's going to cost the company to be able to execute that
campaign.

Let's assume you do get approval to move forward with a campaign. Now you have to deliver on it, so you take
what you created in your development stage and go deeper into it to design its social media or content, or design the
websites, or come up with what the inside sales people are going to do, or the outside sales people, or even the
channel members. You take what you identified or created in step two. Now you execute it and identify who's
going to be doing what, and the different accountabilities within a company.

Next, you have to measure the results of delivering that campaign. You have to be able to score and qualify your
leads and then assign leads based on the different scoring that you assign to them. It’s all about
measurements. If you send a campaign to 100 individuals as part of your target audience, you have to be able to
measure how many you actually reached. Within those that were reached, how many actually responded?
Then, the last piece of it, is to take those leads that were assigned and close them.

Now you need to measure what percentage of those that responded are actually closer to generating
revenues for the company. Then you have to analyze the results of your campaigns using metrics and
dashboards. That will ultimately take you to identifying the return on investment. Notice that there are
double lines in the graphic, double arrows going to and from each of these stages into the CRM technologies.

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Role of CRM in Marketing

Here is an example of what the role of technology is in marketing. Very high level, so you can see
what CRM can do. It can measure all these different campaigns that you have, it can identify the leads
that you're capturing.

Through these various campaigns that you're running you can qualify those leads based on criteria that
we'll talk about shortly. Then, from the qualification process of those leads, you can assign those leads
either to an inside sales corporate unit or an outside field unit, or an outside sales unit. Each of those
units can then follow up on those leads to try to close them.

Then we see the results being reported through a CRM technology tool. We can look at those results
through the reports and the dashboards down at the bottom of the graphic. You also see the connection
between marketing and sales, marketing being the ones to generate or produce the email marketing
campaigns, the SEM, the banners, and the advertising banners. They are putting together any landing
pages that are trying to drive these leads to your website. All of those things are the responsibilities of
the marketing group, and these need to be assigned.

They have to design the content that goes into all of these components, they have to design the
workflows for the different stages of the lead process. All those activities will then generate these
leads or these contacts which are then qualified in the sales process, followed up by the sales
people to identify the specific opportunities, and then to close them. Those opportunities and all of
these steps are being tracked through a CRM technology tool.

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Example of Marketing Automation

Here we see some examples of how marketing automation is part of the CRM technology
process. This is something that Salesforce puts together to help companies determine how all of the
different tools they offer are all connected back to the customer life cycle. Notice the half moon.
The bottom of the half moon or the blue line that you see underneath the top line shows the
different stages of the customer life cycle -- from acquisition and awareness, to the
onboarding, to the engagement, and then to the retention and to the advocacy.

This is a great blueprint that a company can use at a high level to figure out what tools they might
want to use for all the different stages that these customers are going through. Here we have from
advertising, to sales reps, to digital commerce. In order to make the transaction complete or the
close complete to an email marketing campaign, lets say to welcome new customers on board,
there may be two different mobile apps and messaging that you want to use to walk the customer
through the onboarding or the engagement process.

Then you have all these other tools on the right hand. These marketing automation tools like
social media, maybe assigning them to different communities, and then your customer service
piece, so all these little bubbles represent the strategy that the company is designing to help
this customer through the entire life cycle with them.

Note that there are many providers. We are just using an example from Salesforce.

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Example of Marketing Automation

On this slide here we see an excerpt from the Salesforce website. What I wanted to show you here
was that if you look at the products that they offer you will see a sales piece, a service piece, a
marketing piece, commerce communities, collaboration industries and platform solutions. These are
all the different categories of solutions that Salesforce offers. If we delve into the marketing one and
you look at the marketing cloud being their basic marketing platform, you will see that within
marketing cloud you have all these different tools available to them or to companies.

For example, they have an email studio that focuses on email marketing campaigns, tracking and
managing those, they have the mobile studio. the social studio, advertising studio , data studio, and
then they have journey builder. Then they have Pardot, which is a business to business marketing
automation tool.

There is a very important distinction there that you might want to make a note of, especially if
you're working in the area of CRM or if you're working on a project related to improving the
marketing flow for your company or for a case that you might be working on. Journey builder is for
consumers, and then the PR doors for business to business marketing.

This example is just Salesforce. All of the vendors that are selling some type of CRM have a tool
and some or all of these different components, it just happens to be that Salesforce is one of the
most innovative ones.

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Key Challenges Marketers Face

Here we highlight the key challenges that marketer face. Their number one priority is they have to generate
traffic to the website and to other social media venues, and ultimately generate quality leads. The more
qualified those leads are the better the chance of closing and converting those leads -- the justification of the
return on investment for all marketing campaigns. It is a big priority.

Collaborating with sales is an important part of the customer experience. It's not just about the workflow
design and the journey mapping. It's also about the content that you're delivering to customers, that content
development and management. How are marketers then using CRM to be able to face these challenges?

On the right-hand side of the slide you'll see the five steps that they're using. Along with CRM technology,
they're able to measure and analyze leads. They're creating healthy funnels from marketing leads to sales, and
nurturing those leads along the way for that nurturing process. We call that lead nurturing. They're able to
trigger sales actions based on the behavioral data that they're capturing from those leads. They're able to
better qualify those leads and then trigger sales to basically take on the responsibility from there.

In the first two steps you see how sales and marketing work together. In step three sales is able to better
identify leads and are able to nurture those prospects along the buyers’ journey. Because they know more
about that customer they know more about that lead. They're able to capture behavioral data even based on
how that lead is interacting with a website or how they're responding to some of the different campaigns
that you're generating, whether it's an email campaign, or whether it's a social media campaign. Then,
marketing is able to communicate that data to the sales teams, so that when they are following up on those
leads they have that information available to them.

Step five is the whole measurement component again and being able to play some predictions on how you
think a campaign is going to be successful tracking those results, so that you can then come up with better
strategies in the future and put some budgeting dollars in this.

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MAR 4860 – Customer Relationship Management MODULE 10

Lead Scoring & Assignment

This slide focuses on lead scoring and assignments. To put it into perspective, the CRM technology
tools enable marketing to identify a set of leads. Those leads are then scored based on criteria that
company decides is important to them. For example, if you look down at the bottom of the screen
you'll see that, for this particular example, there's a lead scoring system and here there are six
different things for five different scores that let's say can be used to qualify this lead.

First of all, do you know who the company decision maker is at this company? In this example that is
checked off. Do you have a decision timeline from that decision maker? That's checked off. Do you
know what the annual revenue or potential revenue would be for this lead? That's already included
here. Does that lead or does that company have a budget? It's checked off.

The ranking of that lead in terms of all of the other leads that you have it's considered a high priority.
Since we have answers for those five criteria. What that does is it goes through a system and it
assigns different scores based on the results that we have captured through this lead scoring system.

In this example there's a score of five, a three, a 10, and a seven, and that leads to a total score of 25
for this particular lead. Let's assume you have 100 leads out there. You can rank those leads based on
the scoring that you're able to generate. The more an opportunity costs the lower the score. The less
the opportunity costs to follow up on the better because it's going to maximize your results and it's
going to offset those results with lower costs -- that's what makes the score increase, you are
spending less in order to get more out of that lead.

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Collaboration Sales & Marketing

Here we see again the importance of aligning sales and marketing together, according to Marketo,
which is one of the marketing automation leaders. This is where they feel the largest opportunity is
for improving business performance today.

If marketing and sales unite and focus on that single revenue cycle, they can dramatically improve the
marketing return on investments of campaigns. They can also improve sales productivity. More
importantly, the two of them together can work on increasing the bottom-line profitability growth for
the company.

It's important that marketing and sales work together through the lead generation process in order to
make it a successful one. This is easier said than done, historically, or traditionally. The sales group
and the marketing groups have somewhat been divided or separated. We're beginning to see a
restructuring in organizations, where they're bringing these two groups together under the same
management to minimize the "this is mine and this is yours" type of mentality - the silo mentality.

The same thing is happening with service. Service is also being brought together with marketing and
sales, especially as you continue to go through the sales cycle and the lifetime of the customer. After
they've gone ahead and onboarded with you, and they are now an existing customer, all of the
services, engagements, and touch points that you have after the customer comes to work with you are
also part of marketing because that’s part of the customer journey.

Sales and marketing work together more on the front end and then marketing and service work more
on the back end, on the service piece. It's also important to note here that, if you have business to
business interactions and say a salesperson that is an account manager, and they have existing
customers, service and sales work very closely together in that area as well.

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Content Marketing Trends

Most marketers are making significant investments in content marketing to drive awareness. The top
performers use this content to grow leads and revenue. According to the 11th Annual B2B Content
Marketing Benchmark, Budgets, and Trends Report, 2021 Insights by the Content Marketing Institute,
79% of B2B marketers reported their organization has a content marketing strategy. Of those, 70% made
major or moderate adjustments to their strategy due to the pandemic. 22% view those adjustments as short-
term and 66% view them as both short- and long-term.
There are some challenges with that. A July 2020 article also by the Content Marketing Institute
identified five big obstacles encountered by B2B Content Marketers. On the left you will see lack of
budget, resources, and time as one of the biggest obstacles encountered by 87% of B2B Content
Marketers, lack of cooperation from other departments as a challenge for 86%, inadequate access to
customer for 79%, changing priorities and unclear briefs 59%, and stakeholder interference for 14%.
It's important to note that the “old” way of using content was a one way communication by marketers to
their prospects, solely focused on how great their company and products are, and why people should buy
their products, using typical basic promotional and advertising campaigns. It was all about the company
producing a nice billboard with bells and whistles, even TV advertisements. Those are all one-way
communication, This type of content certainly still has its place towards the bottom of the funnel;
however, today’s content marketing involves also creating content that is educational, entertaining and
relevant to an audience at the middle and top of the funnel, and even before our prospects enter the
funnel/buying process. As you can see on the left, as a result of events in 2020, the most widely used content
types are blog posts/short articles, email newsletters, and case studies.
That's the challenge top performers in marketing understand. They know that this is the new way of creating
and curating their content, and they have stopped from the egocentric marketing focus. Today's content
marketing is intended to build trust and a lasting relationship with prospects, converting those prospects
into customers. They look at a company when they're ready to enter the buying process, not when the
company thinks that they're ready to answer and that's what IDIC is all about. It is making the experiences
relevant to the customer, not to the company alone.

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Foundation In Marketing
This slide shows that content is needed, no matter where you are. Whether you're using marketing automation
to track everything that's happening to your website, to the email campaigns you may be tracking, or even the
pay per click landing page offers that you may have.
We see that the foundation for your marketing is your content marketing automation vendors like Adobe,
HubSpot, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce. They're all dependent upon the value that content generates.
Then, if the content is very poor you have nothing to track. For sales, you're not going to have the leads that
you expect on the sales side. Vendors like Freshsales, HubSpot, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce are going to
have very little to work with.
If it were not for content, many of the key parts of marketing automation would not function. With no content,
drip campaigns would come to a halt — there would be no content to drip to leads. With no content, lead
scoring would stop since there would be no content for a lead to browse on a site. With no content, many
demand generation campaigns would come to a halt because there would be no enticing offers for many lead
capture landing pages. With no content you wouldn't be able to have any lead scoring processes in place you
wouldn't be able to move leads to browse and website. You wouldn't have any demand generation campaigns
to track. That's really what's important -- the content that's driving customer acquisition.
Given that content is crucial to the customer acquisition process, what tools and technologies can support this?
There are a myriad of content marketing tools out there. But there’s still a need for a Content Marketing
Platform (CMP) that sits on top of the Marketing Automation Platform and Sales Force Automation system.
Content marketing needs attention and structure. Although organic work is fun and exciting (and still
relevant), we see a need to develop more organized ways of planning, organizing and managing the content
marketing functions of a company. It’s called the new “integrated marketing” model. You have to ask yourself
what tools or technologies are helping support this, seen on the bottom of the slide. That's where the next big
opportunity is in terms of technology. There are some tools out there that track or manage content marketing,
but there's still a big need for a content marketing platform that sits on top of the marketing automation
and the sales force automation platforms. There are tools that handle smalls pieces, but there's still a
need out there to come up with something that embraces the other two platforms here.

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Content Marketing
According to Salesforce, one of the biggest mistakes when developing content is that the workflows
haven’t been adapted to include omni-channel publishing. Most organizations promote their content
primarily as a way to drive traffic to their site. They publish long-form content on their blog, and then
promote it through various channels with the goal of increasing site traffic.
Using this method, a linear workflow will work. As many companies move away from this model,
they’re finding it more effective to publish and promote standalone content on a wide variety of
channels. This means not only sharing your content via multiple channels, it will mean actually
publishing your content on these channels without directing readers to your site.
As seen in the slide, various channels can and should be used both for native publishing as well as for
promotion. These channels can include social media, sponsored (editorial) content, your email list and
your website or blog. This shift will impact your content marketing workflow at each stage of the
process.
Here are some components of Content Marketing:
Content creation: Content won’t simply be used to drive traffic to your website. It will be created as a
standalone product to be consumed on that particular channel or platform.
Editing: Under this model, some degree of autonomy will be sacrificed. When publishing content on
other sites, for instance, your content may be subject to external editorial or legal review.
Publishing: Instead of simply hitting the ‘publish’ button on your blog, this process will be split
between various channels (some of which you won’t have total control of).
Promotion: This will mean more than just sharing blog post links on social media or via email. It
will mean publishing long-form content on social media, via sponsored content, etc. that can be
consumed entirely on those platforms.
If your organization is moving towards publishing standalone content on multiple channels, make sure
you adapt your workflow accordingly. Be very clear about the precise process your content will go
through, and who will be responsible at each stage.
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Best Practices for Content Marketing

Even though these are just two of the best practices that you need for content marketing, these are probably the
two most important ones. You need a formal process in place for collecting all of your content ideas. You need
to be able to know what's frustrating your customer, what personas you want to target. What are some of
the frequently asked questions from your leads and your customers? What's your market research telling you?
This is what is going to help you come up with the ideas for your content. Your content should be driven by
what your customers are experiencing.
You also need to have clear roles and responsibilities. Make sure that you know who is doing what, who are the
key members of your team for content, who are the stakeholders, what kind of subject matter experts you need to
have as part of your content marketing. Also, where are you going to store all the requests or ideas that people
are coming up with for content? How are you going to figure out which of those ideas you want to walk down?
You need a repository. Then, from that repository, you need to select what you think should go into production
and where it's going to go into production.
You also need to think about who's going to be working on the topics before people start working on them. Are
you going to have an internal committee that decides on which topics to focus on? Then, what has to happen in
order to move from an idea to actually creating the content? You have to determine what the sequence of
the work is going to be. You need to map it out. Even though this is not a content marketing class it's important
to mention this because this is the essence of technology. It's coming up with these great processes, workflows,
and contents that will make CRM technologies more effective.
In summary:
Identify who needs to be involved in content requests and ideation. Consider where requests and ideas are
coming from. Include the key members of your team, as well as relevant stakeholders and subject-matter
experts in other departments.
Create a central location or repository for requests and idea submissions. Require that all content requests
and ideas be submitted in a standardized fashion to one place. You could create an email alias that goes to your
team lead (e.g., contentideas@[Link]), an online form that auto-populates a shared spreadsheet, or a
cloud-based solution. The repository also should serve as the place where you prioritize, and select content for
production.
Detail who needs to approve or review ideas. Who needs to approve topics before work is begun, such as the
sales team, internal subject-matter experts, or executives?
Determine the sequence of work. Map out what has to happen in the ideation stage and in what order – ideas,
submit ideas, fill out a content brief, etc.

©2021 Sarah Cherres 16