Add Some CRM to Your SEO Soup

(I initially compiled this post for a blog post on SeoMoz.)

I've been a lurker on SeoMoz for just under a year now. Patiently soaking up the vast amount of information, advices, and tips passing through these pages. Without resorting to cliched superlatives, I owe somewhat of a debt of gratitude to SeoMoz, and Hubspot - two of the defining sites in the sphere of SEO and Inbound Marketing.

Showcasing a New Toyota Model

I learned the value of blogging to promote our company website, which was duly launched, not merely for the sake of blogging, but to actually add some value to the subject matter at hand. Coming from no previous journalistic background, and being a one-man marketing team (by default), I risked the prospect of online scourn and ridicule perchance I violate simple grammar rules or writing style conventions.
I carefully studied resources found on these two sites and read through other bloggers writings, looking for cues that I could follow. And then I began writing, designing, and posting. These were baby steps at times. Like using this really cool Hubspot Powerpoint template to create a simple infographic showcasing a new Toyota model. It's a daunting foray for a newbie content creator, but (hey! There's only one way to eat an elephant right?)
Naturally, within a few months traffic to our domain had increased substantially, pushing our search engine rankings up for several key terms. These are quite expected outcomes for anyone willing to put in that little extra effort in generating the content, something not many other motor dealers were doing in our region. A little over a year ago, before we re-launched our website, we averaged about 3,500 hits per month. We now average 10,000 hits monthly, about 70% of which are organic. Below are a few screenshots from the last 3 months illustrating the effect of several blog posts in gaining traffic. I use the browser private (incognito) sessions when testing for SERP's which is a little trick I've found that provides accurate results not based on prior search history.







As can be seen from the above Google Webmaster statistics - blog posts feature in 3 of the top 5 pages over the past 3 months.



The New Toyota RAV4 was a trending search, which we ranked quite nicely for.

But marketing doesn't end with getting seen and noticed or getting the website visitor. I learned the value of this early on in my SEO journey, when the director of our company quite innoculously asked me, after being shown what I thought was impressive analytics statistics,

"So how many of these people actually bought a car?" 
I, was, stumped and I hated the feeling.

 

World of CRM

Right then I inwardly vowed to myself that I would get that answer, which led me to the world of CRM - Customer Relationship Management. If I had to pick one single item, that has added the most value to our online marketing in recent times integrating a CRM system with our website would top the list. Of course there are many systems out there, but my choice was Zoho CRM, a cloud based system that never tied me into any long term contracts, which appealed to me at the time.

The Perks of the CRM

I don't wish to bore you with the technical details, but converting our current website forms to web-to-lead forms that would feed the lead details directly into the CRM was not too difficult, even for a relative CRM novice like me. The system generates the code for you, and the code can be customized to suit the look and feel of any website.
Next came activating a few email alerts that would fire off an email to our team alerting us to the new lead, while the person sumbitting the form would also receive a "Thank you" acknowledgement email. This proved a big hit, and I would often receive a reply, thanking me for the prompt response. Later on, I  implemented a time-based lead nurturing email campaign, that would only trigger if the person concerned was not currently in communication with our sales team. This helped in reducing lost leads through negligence on our side, yet freed us from the responsibility of ensuring every single lead was kept in contact.
What lead nurturing does, is it brings the genuine buyer forward allowing us to focus our energy and time with leads most likely to convert.

Results

On our first full month running live with Zoho, we sold 15 cars purely through Internet based leads. In the larger scheme of of our business it may not be huge, (we sell an average of 220 cars in total monthly), but it was enough to raise a few eyebrows. We may or may not have sold more on any previous month, but had no way of accurately measuring or portraying this.
At our next meeting, I presented my figures and dashboards to the directors. And it made me quite popular with them. It's been eight months on the CRM, and whether the month's sales were good or not, being able to really analyze the performance by the many dimensions available, always brings a compliment or two.
So, for those of you in a similar situtation to what I had been, I strongly recommend you consider adding a CRM solution to your marketing soup mix. Besides helping you get more out of your sales leads, it may have added benefits of impressing the boss.

For those of you needing a few more actual details on Zoho, I'll leave that for another day...(or in this case night. #YAWN)
Please comment below, I look forward to your participation.