Whether you’ve been in business for years or you’re just starting out, there are several things you have to get right before you start marketing. You can probably think of a few off the top of your head: an engaging website, an established brand and an active social media profile.
But there’s another thing that flies under the radar for most who aren’t doing marketing: a place to keep your data.
You need a CRM.
There are quite literally THOUSANDS of options for your customer relationship management system (CRM), but it’s important to make sure the one you choose is:
1. Cost-effective
Many CRMs offer free tiers, but it’s likely that you can’t get much done without spending a small fortune to keep using them. Your CRM will likely pay for itself tenfold if you make sure to use it as a marketing tool, but that initial investment can seem significant.
2. What you need
With different CRMs, like HubSpot, Mailchimp and Salesforce offering multiple tiers for businesses, it can seem difficult to know what you need before you’re using it. When you’re presented with a sea of pricing options, make sure you know what you’re getting. It’s best to make the right choice first than make a quick decision and regret it later. Which leads us to our next point...
You need to do your own research
Flamingo has worked with several CRMs over the past six years, but moving to this one was a no-brainer.
(And it still took about four months for us to transition from one CRM to this one!)
Our CRM of choice, and the one we recommend all our clients use, is HighLevel.
Before we explore why, let’s talk about...
WHY CRMs are so important.
We talk a lot about the three Ms of marketing: Market, Message, Media – and how understanding your market is the most vital part of creating a great campaign or marketing strategy.
Making sure your prospects and customers are in one database helps you understand what they have in common. This way, you can start building customer profiles, which should be the very first step to creating your marketing strategy.
Even just the act of moving prospects and customers from your inbox, your black book of contacts, or your list of connections on LinkedIn, you get the chance to think about where these people are in your sales pipeline and whether you should get back in touch with them.
Why HighLevel is great
As a CRM, HighLevel punches far above its weight for the price it costs. It integrates fully with your website, your social media channels and plenty of other marketing and customer systems. It builds forms for you, it makes building marketing emails simple and you can even build entire web pages directly on it.
And it does this all whilst costing a fraction of what the larger CRMs, like HubSpot and Salesforce would charge for the same tools.
The key thing that HighLevel has is that it’s not just good for managing leads or customers, it can handle the entire sales pipeline for you.
What does HighLevel do?
Let’s break down the key features:
Lead and contact management
This is the most basic and vital function of any CRM. HighLevel doesn’t just keep all your leads in one place so your entire team can easily access them, it lets you easily create Smart Lists – custom segmentation in which you can split people up by tags, type, and so much more; you can even create your own custom fields and segment them by that.
Pipelines and opportunities
HighLevel’s pipeline and opportunities section is the ultimate sales tool, helping your team see exactly where prospects are in their buying process. From tracking contacts who fill out forms to those who book in calls, or even those who click on your emails, you can see them all in one place and grow your strategy from there.
It’s the perfect tool for all your business development because you can set tasks for yourself, or your colleagues, to ensure all leads are being looked after.
Automation and workflows
When it comes to marketing, the less hands-on you have to be with your strategy, the wider the audience you can grow it to.
HighLevel’s automation tools extend far beyond just sending emails. In fact, we use HighLevel every single day and have barely scratched the surface of everything it can do.
Just in triggering an automation alone, you can set it to add a tag:
- When a contact is created or changed
- If they missed a phone call
- If they filled out a form on social media
- If they book in an appointment
- If they move to the next phase of the sales process
And so many more (and that’s without even talking about its payment and Shopify integrations!)
Automations don’t just stop at sending emails. They can update contact information, add tags, notify a specific team member and even send SMS or WhatsApp messages.
Content management
HighLevel doesn’t just limit itself to direct customer engagement like emails. It also features an entire social media management system, letting you draft posts, schedule and post them all directly from within the platform.
It will also give you stats on the performance of all posts (regardless of social media site) made through HighLevel, so if you’re posting non-marketing related content, you can separate them without going through each platform’s specific analytics tools.
Email syncing
If you want to be able to see all your emails within HighLevel, you can turn 2-way sync on, and as long as they are contacts and you’re using Outlook or Gmail, your emails will sync into the system. This is really useful for collaborative sales teams or holiday cover when you’re looking after someone else’s leads for them!
You can also set up ‘snippets’ which are templates you can add into an email reply at the click of a button to save writing out the same responses over and over again.
Reporting
The best way to improve conversions and campaign performance (or even the performance of individual emails) is to analyse them. HighLevel gives you so much information about individual contact engagement, letting you score certain actions. Plus, you can see total campaign performance over time or in a specific range.
And those are really just the basics!
HighLevel is already making waves in the agency world because of its sub-account system. However, this also helps companies with multiple audiences or brands keep their businesses separate without having to invest in several different accounts with different logins for each.
If you’re interested in getting set up on HighLevel, whether you’re using a CRM already that isn’t hitting the mark or you’re completely new to CRMs, we can support you.
Our team of experts can give you the knowledge to help you execute your next campaign. Get in touch at info@flamingostrategies.co.uk or fill out the form here: https://flamingostrategies.co.uk/contact/
We are happy to send over a recording of the system and how it works, and we’d love to get you set up and using it! Since moving, we’ve never looked back and now all our clients love it too.
Hear from one of our clients:
"We recently worked with Emma and her team at Flamingo to set up our CRM for our Telecoms company and the whole experience was excellent from start to finish..
From the first conversation, she was friendly, helpful and really informative. She didn’t just jump in and set up a system. She took the time to understand our business properly and helped us work out whether the CRM would actually suit the way we operate before we moved forward. That honesty made a big difference.
We had several meetings with other providers before speaking with Emma, and Emma was the first person to make me feel that she actually understood what we needed and was confident that the system could handle what we needed of it.
Once we decided to go ahead, she supported us with everything. She helped import our contacts and opportunities and built a pipeline that genuinely reflects our sales process, rather than forcing us into a generic structure. The training was clear and practical, and she explained things in a way that made it all feel manageable.
Her availability and commitment also stood out. If we had questions, she was there. If we weren’t sure about something, she talked it through. It felt like she cared about getting it right, not just ticking a box. Many times she answered the phone for impromptu meetings to answer questions I had.
Working directly with Emma has been a pleasure. She’s professional and very easy to talk to. Even better, the entire setup and training was completed within just a few weeks. We could have had more time if we had needed it, it wasn’t that she was trying to get us done and move on, the fact of the matter is, we didn’t need more time to get the work done! It was efficient without ever feeling rushed.
If you’re thinking about implementing a CRM and want someone who will guide you properly and make the process straightforward, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend her and her team."
Peter Eldritch - Triton Telecom
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We’re here to help!
We’d love to offer you 60 minutes of our time to find out more about what you do for your customers and show you how we would tackle your marketing (and messaging) to drive the best results. We’ll spend up to 60 minutes on Teams where you can share what you’re doing marketing-wise and we can give you some ideas, feedback and suggestions of additional things to throw into the mix.
You can watch the video below to find out more.