How I've Used CRM Data To Guide Paid Media Strategy

During my time in the agency world, I never had access to a client’s CRM. Since going out on my own, I’ve realized that this definitely put up a barrier to growth.

The insights I’ve been able to gather through analyzing CRM data have shifted the overall paid media strategies I’ve recommended to clients. The goal of advertising is to attract more customers, and there’s no better source of customer information to guide advertising strategy than a CRM.

In this post I’ll be covering my experience and process for analyzing CRM data, then leveraging customer insights for paid media.

How I Analyze CRM Data

Depending on what CRM platform you’re working with, you might have slightly different types of information available to you.

Most CRMs will offer some sort of reporting feature, or at least allow you to export data as a CSV. Using readily available quantitative data can allow you to quickly identify trends across both customers and leads. You can start to answer questions like:

• Where are the majority of opportunities coming from?

• What types of actions typically contribute to a closed deal?

• What does a typical customer look like in terms of demographics and firmographics?

By generating answers to these questions from the data in your CRM, you’ll start to understand who your customers are, and how the company has found them thus far. Next, you’ll want to dive into why the contacts in your CRM have taken these actions. This is where analyzing some qualitative data can be handy.

Going through sales notes and emails can be a time consuming process, but it can often reveal some of the most powerful insights hidden within your CRM. I recommend segmenting to a handful of relevant contacts or deals to make the process more manageable. The details found from actual conversations can answer questions like:

• What motivated a prospect to reach out?

• Why was, or wasn’t, your brand ultimately the right fit?

I recommend building out a spreadsheet to categorize and collect some of this information because it will make your analysis easier. Segmenting this data by won and lost deals might also be helpful to understand what drove the two opposite results.

Once you’ve analyzed your quantitative and qualitative data, you can begin planning how you’ll take advantage of these insights across your paid media program.

How You Can Leverage CRM Insights For Paid Media

I’ll break down this section through the lens of the questions outlined in the bullets above. In response to each of the questions below, I’ll share actual insights and actions from the work I’ve done with clients.

Where are the majority of my opportunities coming from?

• Insight: When analyzing data for one client, I found that 45% of their online deals were coming from direct traffic. This meant that leads were doing their research before going directly to the site to take a purchase action.

• Action: We began to workshop a shift in strategy to pivot away from trying to capture direct response leads from paid search (which hadn’t been consistent), and focus more on ICP education by promoting a lead magnet.

What types of actions typically contribute to a closed deal?

• Insight: Data from another client’s CRM showed that 70% of customers all had a lead score above a certain threshold. This indicated that these customers took actions like subscribing to the newsletter, downloading content, and opening marketing emails before taking a purchasing action.

• Action: I conducted research into what types of content this audience found valuable so that we could create a lead magnet that solved a need while introducing the brand.

What does my typical customer look like in terms of demographics and firmographics?

• Insight: There was a clear trend in one client’s CRM data that showed the majority of customers fit within a certain demographic bracket.

• Action: I evaluated the performance of the current lookalike audience we were using against these demographics to determine if manual adjustments needed to be made in order to better align targeting with the ideal customer profile.

What motivated a prospect to reach out?

• Insight: Sales notes from multiple closed deals for one client revealed that stories shared from the founder on radio shows resonated well with prospects. These stories actually ended up being the final push needed for multiple future customers to reach out.

• Action: We started working on updated creative that includes some of these short stories as video ads.

Why was or wasn’t your brand ultimately the right fit?

• Insight: Lost deal data revealed that technical limitations prevented one client from closing a handful of deals.

• Action: We then listed the brand’s technical capabilities on the landing pages we were using to help site visitors self-disqualify themselves before going through the sales process.

Wrapping Up

The processes and actions I listed here are not meant to be a step-by-step instructional by any means, but rather a (hopefully) helpful example of the value that CRM data can provide to paid media programs.

If you work in the agency or freelancer space, I encourage you to have conversations with your clients around getting access to their CRM if you don’t already have it. There are insights in these platforms that aren’t always readily apparent from other forms of research!

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).