You are probably wondering why should you combine marketing with ERP (Enterprise Resource System) system and how it can help to boost your business. It sounds confusing, right?
In general, ERP solutions broadly cover human resource, finance, operations and corporate services. Whereas, marketing strategies help to drive revenue, fuel up your business growth, and outline the overall direction and goals for your business.
So both have their roles for your business. If you are already using ERP to manage the core business processes & marketing to increase the profit margin, then why do you need to connect marketing with ERP.
Why Connect Marketing With ERP System?
Digital Marketing is moving too fast to equip the new market needs, customer demands & technology shifting. Now marketing processes are directly intertwined with technology and the data that ERP software brings to a business. By integrating the ERP system with marketing strategy, you can ensure the access to real-time data.
Using those comprehensive data, marketing team would be able to make data-driven decisions which will take a step forward to create a customer-centric organization. Let’s discuss how business can leverage by connecting ERP systems with the marketing process.
Combined Data Sets To Be More Data-Driven
If the marketing strategy can’t access the data properly, then they are literally missing out metrics and components that could have assisted them to maximize the sales. When marketing team is planning, it has to be based on the data from CRM and all other resources in order to make it successful.
By connecting the ERP systems with marketing, it will result in one unified database. And it will automatically sync the entire organization. This accurate database will help marketing & sales team to analyze the whole customer journeys. Also, there will be zero chance to have any errors and customer retention will be easier than ever.
Predict Customer Needs Before Product Development
To optimize the acquisition process, you need to target the right audience. But how do you know who are the right audience?
Here you need actionable data so that you can analyze and find the insights.
From ERP systems, you can find out the performance of each product and CRM (a core part of ERP system) will also give you the idea of customer engagement and buying process. The marketing team will get the clear idea about the trends, interests, customers need even their purchasing patterns.
Before going to product development or even promoting a certain product, marketing teams will have the exact information if they have access to ERP system. Based on those data, they can take the decision when to expand the market or who are the potential buyers that company need to target for getting the maximized ROI.
Competitive Edge with Increased Efficiency
If ERP systems and marketing department is properly blended together, they would provide the company a competitive edge. The customer service will be better than ever since they already can skim through the buyer persona using the data.
The efficiency level will increase since task process has been automated in many ways. From the cost of production to customer service, the workflow will be streamlined in every step throughout the organization.
Speed Up The Decision-Making Process
Usually for the marketing team, creating a sales funnel or planning a mega campaign is quite easier. But the difficult part is getting the approval or budget allocations. It’s always hard to convince the managing board that what will be the outcome of that specific marketing effort or why should even we go for it.
But when marketing team has the business data, they can validate their proposal using those data and decision-making process will be faster and smoother than before.
Easier To Manage Promotional Offer
For marketing campaigns, marketers are now trying to micro-segmenting the audience as much as possible, and create a personalized campaign based on each segment. Not just for email marketing, even for social media to retargeting campaign, they are using the micro-segmentation model to ensure the best outcomes.
This sophisticated targeting is only possible when technology lets you do so. The marketing team can do that by using CRM system or any other BI (Business Intelligence) tools. Marketers can analyze from the day a customer visited your website to how long they spend on which pages and the process of final purchase in order to find the trigger points. So, you get a complete overview of the customer journey what they have done until leaving your site. Based on that they can send promotional offers exactly where the customers are most interested in and make the final decision.
Final Thoughts
Spending in ERP can literally provide the data to the marketing team that they can utilize to increase the conversion rate. The whole integration process will also help to fine-tune the sales funnel. Combining the marketing with ERP systems can save businesses a considerable amount of money and time. Besides, it will make the whole business process efficient and ensure your company keeps growing.
If you are still confused about how to leverage all the resources by ERP software for your business, please feel free to contact WP ERP. It will be our pleasure to help you to grow your business.