Why PPC Management Software?
While highly effective in delivering qualified prospects, the management of pay per click (PPC) advertising on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is increasingly complex. Many software marketers marvel at how their simple campaign with a hundred or so keywords has grown into a multi-national lead generation machine with thousands of keywords, across multiple search engines, and bidding strategies that sound a bit like war.

Successful PPC campaigns require extensive keyword lists, constant management and monitoring, sophisticated bidding strategies, and well-tested creative and landing pages to outperform the competition. Manually managing a PPC campaign of any significant size is nearly impossible.

Paid search marketing software helps software marketers manage their ad campaigns by consolidating campaign management, optimizing bidding, and eliminating tedious account management tasks to improve their marketing return on investment.

Signs Your Company May Need PPC Management Software
Is your marketing team spending more and more time monitoring your PPC campaigns? Have you shifted more of your marketing budget to PPC advertising? Or perhaps you have the opposite problem, a campaign that hasn’t been looked at in months? These are some of the indicators that send marketers in search of paid search marketing software. Another sign that it might be time to abandon your manual optimization efforts are competitor ads that continually outrank yours (and they are NOT spending more).

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CRM in Action: Big River Telephone

To keep its large customer base loyal (in the notoriously competitive telecommunications industry), Big River Telephone decided that it must integrate its back-office and customer-facing functions, and gain centralized control over both areas.

A Focused Implementation and Customization Phase
Working side-by-side with its Sage SalesLogix business partner, Big River examined several leading CRM solutions, ultimately selecting Sage SalesLogix.

“We looked at other software, but only Sage SalesLogix met our needs,” said Kevin Cantwell, President, Big River Telephone Company.

Big River’s business partner led the implementation process, installing Sage SalesLogix suite and integrating it with Microsoft Outlook and Sage MAS 90 ERP in only 90 days. After the initial implementation, Big River’s developers were able to take over and further customize the solution, as a result of the partner’s expert guidance.

Now, Sage SalesLogix resides at the core of Big River Telephone’s business. From sales opportunity management to ongoing customer support and targeted retention marketing, Big River utilizes the solution’s broad functionality to handle all stages of customer relationship management.

Improved Productivity, Customer Service, and Reporting
The new solution has enabled Big River to vastly improve employee productivity and effectiveness. For example, before the implementation, Big River needed six customer service representatives to cover its support lines. Now, using Sage SalesLogix, five representatives perform the same work, but with fewer customer complaints and faster resolution times.

As Cantwell described, “Because Sage SalesLogix delivers up-to-the-minute information, the customer service experience turns out positive, even if there’s a perceived ‘negative’ reason for the call. We know the exact status of that person’s account and how to help them.”

During an outage last year, Big River took advantage of Sage SalesLogix Support to perform critical damage control. They used the solution to e-mail 300 inconvenienced customers and explain the situation, even providing updates every 15 minutes. Once the problem had been resolved, support reps called each customer personally. As a result of these swift and primarily automated efforts, Big River Telephone managed the crisis without losing a single customer.

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The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question: “How important is the use of personalization in our email marketing campaigns?”

A: Email is one of today’s most popular marketing communication channels, and as a result, buyers receive hundreds of unsolicited promotions every week.

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Top CRM News

What’s Coming in 2008?
Experts predict that this year will bring many exciting things to the CRM marketplace – new trends, new announcements, new products, and much more. So, what can you expect from CRM in 2008?

State of the Market
The CRM market grew an impressive 14 percent last year, according to Gartner, reaching $7.4 billion.  The analyst firm is projecting an additional 12.5 percent growth in 2008, with the market topping $8.3 billion by year end. 

New Products
• Microsoft CRM Live, which was in beta throughout the latter part of last year, will formally launch in the first half of 2008. 

• TigerPaw CRM 10.6 began shipping on January 1st and includes such new features as quote management, project management, and materials management. 

• Expect SugarCRM 5.5 to appear in the middle of this year, according to company CEO John Roberts.  The new release will feature some of today’s most advanced Web 2.0 collaborative capabilities. 

Key Trends
Web 2.0 
Web 2.0 technologies are expected to spark new innovation in the CRM market this year, with companies scrambling to leverage social media to enable the kind of collective intelligence gathering and instant feedback and communication needed to create closer connections with existing and potential customers.  

Mashup Services
Some CRM vendors will be working on features that allow customer data to be dynamically recombined with other information.

For example, forecasting accuracy can be enhanced by incorporating credit history reports from third-party sources with the records of prospects that are currently in the pipeline.  Or sales reps can better plan their client visits by combining customer addresses with a Google map.