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A beginner’s guide to programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising

Definition, benefits, examples, and how it works

Programmatic advertising refers to the practice of automating media buying and creating digital ads with the use of marketing technology. For an effective programmatic advertising strategy, use an automated workflow to effectively deliver ads to your audience.

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the use of advertising technology to buy and sell digital ads. Programmatic advertising serves up relevant ad impressions to audiences through automated steps, in less than a second.

Programmatic advertising uses an automated process, within advertiser-defined parameters, to purchase digital ad inventory across the web, mobile, apps, video, and social media. Programmatic advertising uses workflow automation and machine learning algorithms to deliver the most effective ads to audiences based on a variety of signals, like shopping patterns.

Programmatic ad buying takes place when consumers click on a publisher’s website, and the publisher puts the ad impression up for auction through header bidding and one or more SSPs. Then, the DSP bids on behalf of the advertiser for that impression based on campaign’s strategies, budget, creative sizes, and other factors. The publisher automatically assigns impressions to the winning bidder—the advertiser/DSP offering the highest CPM (cost per mille, or the cost per one thousand advertising impressions). The ad is instantly served on the website.

What is programmatic media buying?

Programmatic media buying uses an automated process to buy digital space for ads. Programmatic media buying also cuts down on wasted ad impressions by serving ads to relevant audiences and minimizing ad fraud risk—making it cost-efficient, as well.

Why is programmatic advertising important?

Programmatic advertising is important because it can save time in the creation of your ads and campaigns. Not only does it automate the process, it  analyzes your campaign performance to help you optimize for success.

What is the difference between programmatic advertising and display ads?

Display ads could be a type of programmatic ad. While display ads are the ads themselves, programmatic advertising is the process of distributing these ads. Display advertising is also a type of digital advertising, but it does not necessarily need to be programmatic.

What are the benefits of programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising offers many benefits. Advertisers may achieve greater efficiency, more targeted marketing reach, transparency, and real-time measurement and optimization.

1. Efficiency

Traditional advertising requires time to develop requests for proposals (RFPs) and quotes, conduct negotiations, and create insertion orders. With programmatic, the process is more streamlined. Advertisers can buy and place ads quickly through Real-Time Bidding (more on that later).

2. Reach

Programmatic allows advertisers to reach audiences based on different marketing signals, such as shopping and browsing activity across devices.

3. Transparency

With traditional media buying, ads are purchased in bulk and advertisers have little control over the inventory and placement. With programmatic advertising, advertisers know where their ads will appear and can have greater confidence that they’ll show up in relevant brand environments.

4. Measurement

Programmatic offers real-time measurement and optimization to drive maximum results.

What are the challenges of programmatic advertising?

Potential challenges with programmatic advertisng include commoditization, transparency, and a steep learning curve. Despite the potential challenges, brands that don’t adopt to programmatic advertising strategies may be missing out on the benefits of efficiency, reach, transparency, and accountability.

1. Commoditization

As with other forms of media, programmatic is commoditized. Everyone is playing in the same space and some types of ad supply may be scarce. With the growing popularity of Programmatic Guaranteed, an increasing amount of non-commoditized inventory is becoming available to advertisers programmatically.

2. Transparency

While programmatic provides advertisers with greater control over viewability and where their ads appear, brand safety and transparency remain top-of-mind for advertisers. Amazon Ads and many third-party solutions address these concerns to help preserve brand trust.

3. Learning curve

Programmatic requires a learning curve that may initially feel overwhelming. Working with partners, agencies, or Amazon Ads directly can help advertisers to ease their foray into programmatic.

What is a demand-side platform?

A demand-side platform (DSP) is programmatic software for advertisers. A DSP helps facilitate media buying from numerous publishers through SSPs, ad exchanges, ad networks, and direct integrations. DSPs help brands and agencies (the demand side) determine which impressions to buy and at what price (the supply side). Advertisers can select audiences based on demographics, shopping patterns, browsing behavior, and many other signals.

What is a supply-side platform?

A supply-side platform (SSP) is programmatic software for publishers to facilitate sales of advertising impressions via ad exchanges. By connecting publishers with multiple ad exchanges, demand-side platforms, and networks at once, SSPs let suppliers sell impressions to a greater pool of potential buyers, and allows suppliers to set the bidding range to maximize their revenue.

What is Real Time Bidding (RTB)?

Real-time bidding (RTB) is a way to buy ads programmatically. With RTB, advertisers can participate in an auction when an impression becomes available. If their bid wins the auction, their ad is displayed instantly on the publisher’s site. RTB is not only efficient, but it helps advertisers focus on the most relevant inventory.

What is header bidding?

Header bidding is a technology that allows publishers to simultaneously request bids from multiple demand sources and send the bids to their ad server to conduct an auction. The ad server determines the winning bid and renders the ad on the site. Allowing multiple bidders to bid on the same inventory at the same time increases competition, but offers advertisers the opportunity to access premium inventory with these publishers.

What is an ad exchange?

In programmatic advertising, an ad exchange is an online marketplace where advertisers, agencies, demand-side platforms, publishers, and supply-side platforms can bid on advertising inventory from various publishers using RTB. Advertisers determine the price by participating in the bidding process. Additionally, with an ad exchange, advertisers gain visibility regarding where their ads will appear.

How do I run programmatic ads?

Once you’ve established your campaign goals, such as driving new product discovery or increasing sales; defined your ad types, such as display, video ads, or in-app ads; and have set up the DSP, you’re ready to get started.

To maximize your impact at the lowest cost, think about the various components of your campaign setup, such as duration and audience size, as this will help determine the CPMs you need to win your bid. At this stage, you can estimate the budget you need for the campaign and develop a bidding strategy.

CPM bid levels vary by media types and creative units. Generally, display demands the lowest CPMs whereas video demands the highest CPMs.

With programmatic advertising, you have the opportunity to evaluate campaign and creative effectiveness mid-campaign through reporting on metrics such as CTR, CPC, overall spend, and conversions. You can then optimize your campaign based on these insights.

How much does programmatic advertising cost?

The cost of programmatic advertising varies and is generally based on CPM. CPMs range in price based on who you’re trying to reach, supply settings, advertising budget, and the amount of time the campaign has to run. Adjusting these factors will change the end price for the campaign.

For example, holding everything else constant, when you’re reaching a broad audience, the CPM is typically less than when you are trying to reach a more niche audience. Targeting and ad group variables impact the CPMs required to secure inventory. With programmatic, advertisers are charged prices through RTB.

How do I measure programmatic advertising?

Impressions, clicks, and actions are three main ways to measure your programmatic advertising campaign, but they are just starting points. You can also measure key performance indicators (KPIs) that map back to your business objectives. Below is a helpful guide; utilize the metrics and OKRs most relevant to your objective:

Goal
KPIs
Branding and awareness – What is x?
Reach/unique reach, average frequency, share of voice, brand lift, views
Interest and consideration – I want to know more about x.
Completed views, clicks/site visits, detail page views, engagements, leads/cost per acquisition
Purchase – I am going to buy x.
Return on ad spend (ROAS), return on investment (ROI), sales, subscriptions, advertising cost of sales (ACOS)

Types of programmatic advertising

1. Open marketplaces

Open marketplaces are also known as RTB. This is a type of programmatic advertising where bids are placed for ad space and impressions.

2. Private marketplaces

Private marketplaces are by invitation only. Advertisers can place their ads after receiving placement options from publishers.

3. Preferred deals

Preferred deals are given priority placement. This type of advertising is a joint collaboration between ad sellers and publishers on the placement or impressions.

4. Programmatic guaranteed

Programmatic guaranteed advertising promises a certain amount of impressions for your ads. This is decided manually, without bidding.

Examples of programmatic advertising

Case Studies

How Bajaj Finserv reached more customers for their Insta EMI card with Amazon DSP

Bajaj Finserv and their media agency, Arm Worldwide, worked with Amazon Ads to identify relevant audiences for their Insta EMI card. Once they were ready, they created a campaign with display ads from Amazon DSP, which would direct consumers to an Insta EMI application webpage where they could learn more.

Case Studies

Inside Lenovo’s quest to engage with the gamer community in the UAE

Lenovo worked with Amazon Ads on strategic campaigns and high-impact placements to help them connect with the growing gaming community in the UAE. They used Amazon DSP video, display banners, and more to showcase their cutting-edge laptop devices.

Case Studies

Amazon DSP helps French manufacturer Groupe SEB increase sales in Belgium for their appliance brands

Groupe SEB, a manufacturer of domestic appliances and cookware, used Amazon DSP campaigns across both Amazon-owned and third-party supply networks. This helped them to engage audiences and bring them relevant products, while also driving ROAS.

Case Studies

Reckitt drives customer loyalty in Brazil with a Subscribe & Save campaign

Reckitt, a producer of health, hygiene, and home products, worked with Amazon Ads and their local agency Cadastra to create campaigns for in-market and lifestyle audiences. By using Amazon DSP, they were able to remarket to prior customers.

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DSP Products

What is a DSP? | Programmatic Advertising 101

Programmatic Advertising 101: What is a DSP?

You need to get started using programmatic buying tools, but you’ve never done it before, and you don’t know where to begin. Join the club. We get it. It’s the same reason we haven’t learned to cook for ourselves yet.

Here’s the good news: We’ve got experts at Basis Technologies who know the ins and outs of programmatic advertising. All you have to do is ask the right questions. Lucky for you, we’ve asked the basic questions and we’ve come equipped with answers (and, lucky for us, everyone assures us there is no such thing as a dumb question).

Understanding Programmatic Ad Buying

To start: Programmatic is a very broad term. Simply put, it’s technology that automates digital media buying. This can include automating anything from rate negotiation and campaign set up to optimizations and actualizations. One of the primary buying tools you have at your disposal is a DSP.

If there really are no dumb questions, then can I ask: What is a DSP?

A demand side platform (DSP) is an automated ad buying platform, where advertisers and agencies go to purchase digital ad inventory. Examples of ad inventory include banner ads on websites, mobile ads on apps and the mobile web, and in-stream video. DSPs are integrated into multiple ad exchanges.

I’ve heard of a SSP. Is that the same acronym and I’ve been typing it wrong into Google this whole time?

Nope, it’s not the same thing, but it is similar in concept. Supply-side platforms, or sell-side platforms (SSPs), facilitate the sale of publisher inventory through an ad exchange. SSPs offer services such as minimum bid requirements in order for the publisher to maximize how much their ad space sells for. The difference is that DSPs are for marketers and SSPs are for publishers. SSPs (like DSPs) are plugged into multiple ad exchanges.

You keep mentioning ad exchanges. What are those? And why do DSPs and SSPs both need to be connected to ad exchanges?

Think of the ad exchange as the “go-between” in the automated buying world. An ad exchange is a digital marketplace that enables advertisers and publishers to buy and sell advertising space via real-time bidding (RTB). Meaning the ad exchange announces each impression—with the inventory flowing through DSPs and SSPs—in real time and asks buyers if they are interested in buying said impression and at which price.

All of this makes sense now, but I still don’t understand why I should use a DSP!

In order to understand why DSPs matter, it’s important to remember where the need came from and how the ad industry operated before automated buying. Traditionally, if you were a media buyer at an ad agency, the buying process was facilitated through human beings—it was you (the advertisers), the publishers (website where ad will appear), an audience (the viewer of the ad), and a bunch of spreadsheets and emails going back and forth negotiating prices. This process was complicated, time-consuming, and often error-prone. DSPs allow advertisers and agencies to buy across a lot of sites at the same time—and all of this is done instantly and efficiently, usually before the webpage loads.

DSPs offer a host of other benefits as well, including audience targeting capabilities, brand safety and fraud prevention tools, a real-time view of campaign performance, optimizations toward a goal, multi-tactic approaches, and flexible budget shifting.

Selecting the Right DSP for Your Programmatic Ads

How do I know which Demand side platform is right for me?

There are many DSPs in the programmatic world to choose from. Choosing the right DSP for you depends on a number of factors, like what type of data you need (first-party or third-party) and how many ad exchanges the DSP is plugged into, because that can affect reach. DSPs like Basis DSP give you access to over 40 billion daily impressions across all devices and channels. Other things to consider include cost, how much training and hands-on support you prefer, and ease of use—many DSPs have multiple, clunky or confusing user interfaces, which require a lot of education.

Speaking of training, I’m glad you mentioned that. What if I sign up for a Demand Side Platform and find out I have no idea what I’m doing?

Some DSPs come with a full team of experts, offering you everything from full-service to self-service and everything in between. With Basis DSP, you’ll start with a three-month platform training program, offering you an overview of programmatic, a walk-through of the interface, and best practices for campaign creation and optimization. Ongoing support is available in the form of a customer success manager and resources to keep you informed—like new feature webinars, best practice guides, and new quarterly business reviews.

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DMP Products

CDP vs. DMP—How to tell the difference

What is a CDP? What is a DMP?

Customer data platforms (CDP) and data management platforms (DMP) are marketing and advertising tools (in that order). They have similar sounding acronyms and, in some ways, work in the same way. For example, they both capture and organize data, use existing data, generate analysis and reports, and help to create a single customer view. With a CDP and a DMP, digital marketers can personalize their marketing campaigns, see how effective those campaigns were, and drive leads.

But to maximize your marketing results, there are distinct differences between the two platforms that you need to understand.

How to use a customer data platform and a data management platform

Data management platform

A data management platform collects, segments, analyzes, and stores anonymous customer data from various sources. Advertisers (mainly) use this unified, segmented data to effectively target (and retarget) advertising campaigns to their intended audience. Designed primarily as an adtech tool, a DMP can also drive product recommendations on your website for each unique visitor.

Examples of how to use a DMP effectively include:

  • Leveraging audience data to identify any new customer segments and reach those target audiences through various paid media channels

  • Using this audience data to personalize interactions

Learn more about DMPs

Customer data platforms

A customer data platform is a marketing solution that collects data from your existing customer database, website, mobile app, and CRM to customize marketing and content for current customers. It’s an ideal solution for any/all remarketing efforts.

Learn more about CDPs

CDP vs. DMP—Data types, targets, and storage

Both platforms handle first-party data (direct from the customer, CRM and/or marketing automation database, or purchase transactions), second-party data (data provided from other companies, such as partners, resellers, etc.), and third-party data (data from multiple sources).

Both CDPs and DMPs collect the same types of data, but what they target differs. DMPs primarily pursue third-party data (cookies and segmented customer IDs) and then store that data for a short time. CDPs focus on structured, semistructured, and unstructured PII first-party data.

A CDP stores this data over long periods of time so marketers can build in-depth, accurate customer profiles and nurture customer relationships. And a CDP can share and draw data with any system (CRM or DMP) that needs it (and has it) to influence all types of marketing.

CDP vs. DMP—User profiles, data selection, and data capture

User profiles for DMPs segment and categorize people tied to a cookie’s lifespan to capture their anonymous behavioral data.

Data selection involves several field values to collect the necessary data. Yet, as part of the field data, DMPs can gather important insights, including when people visited a website, how long they spent there, and what type of information they read on it. But to get the most out of DMPs, you need to turn to analytics tools to extract more patterns.

CDPs avoid anonymous data and focus on specific data that identifies individual customers. An email address is one example of the type of customer identifiers used by CDPs.

The role of CDPs and DMPs in your marketing strategy

Data management platforms Each platform can play a role in your marketing strategy. Through access to historical data, both platforms can illuminate and inform your digital marketing strategy, but in very different ways. For example, DMPs are effective for digital channels and audience segmentation.

CDPs, on the other hand, are beneficial for social media websites, offline interactions, and insights into customer needs and purchase behavior. With a CDP system that manages data, you’ll better understand customer needs and expectations based on their purchase behavior and past interactions with your brand.

Knowing when to use or choose a data platform

Deciding on whether to use a CDP, DMP, or both comes down to:

  • Understanding the differences between the two platforms

  • Determining how each platform can help you achieve your marketing objectives.

  • Knowing how you want to use your data

  • Establishing if you can dedicate enough resources to using these platforms to optimize their potential

Not CDP vs. DMP, but CDP and DMP

A CDP and DMP can work together. However, if you need third-party data for short-term customer leads and conversion, you should work with a DMP. If you seek long-term customer engagement that requires first-party data, you should work with a CDP. Both platforms offer ways to enhance the customer experience (CX) and can help you create, provide value, and maximize return on investment (ROI).

Depending on the type of CDP you select, there are also opportunities to combine these platforms to take advantage of more marketing opportunities. For example, you can use DMP data in real time to personalize the interaction with first-time site (anonymous) visitors to establish and maintain trust. You can also deepen your customer profiles with the third-party data that a DMP delivers.

CDPs draw data from DMPs and share information back with them. The two systems work well together, with DMPs driving in new prospects and leads and CDPs helping brands connect and engage with them. So when a DMP is integrated with a CDP, you can gain access to first-party data that shows what customers are doing beyond their interactions with you. This insight helps you find out more details about what they want or need.

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Products

CRM 101: What is CRM?

What is CRM? The complete CRM guide.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a complete software system that manages customer relationships, but it isn’t a single solution. To effectively manage, analyze, and improve your customer relationships, you need a comprehensive set of cloud solutions that supports your organization at every customer interaction point.

Which is why your CRM solution should include a sales cloud, service cloud, ecommerce cloud, and marketing cloud, as well as a customer data platform (CDP) that can combine online, offline, and third-party data sources for an always up-to-date customer 360 view.

What is a CRM system?

A CRM system gathers, links, and analyzes all collected customer data, including contact information, interactions with company representatives, purchases, service requests, assets, and quotes/proposals. The system then lets users access that data and understand what happened at each touchpoint. Through this understanding, a complete customer profile is developed, and a solid customer relationship is built.

Customer data can also be aggregated to populate incentive compensation modeling, sales forecasting, territory segmentation, campaign design, product innovation, and other sales, marketing, and customer service activities. CRM tools and software help you streamline the customer engagement process, close more sales deals, establish strong customer relationships, build customer loyalty, and ultimately increase sales and profits.

Learn more about Oracle’s comprehensive CRM sales solution

Who should use a CRM?

CRM tools have almost always been seen as sales tools. However, over time, these solutions have extended their reach and become integral to marketing, ecommerce, and customer service functions.

The power of customer relationship management is derived by constantly gathering customer data, analyzing that data, and then using those insights to deepen relationships and improve business results. It allows any customer-facing employee to convey, “We know you, and we value you.”

A set of data-driven CRM tools supports you beyond the sales process, which is crucial to business performance. With the in-depth knowledge of your customers, you can:

  • Offer and sell new, add-on products—at the right time in the right way at the right price

  • Help customer service teams resolve issues faster

  • Help development teams create better products and services

Signs you need a CRM

CRM: What is the goal?

CRM software supports strong, productive, loyal customer relationships through informed and superior customer experiences. The goal? To improve customer acquisition and retention by providing experiences that keep your customers coming back. Customer relationship management is both a strategy and a tool that supports those experiences in five key ways.

1

Answer the most basic customer questions

Customer relationship management helps you find new customers, sell to them, and develop a loyal customer relationship with them. These systems collect many different types of customer data and organize it so you understand your customers/prospects better and can answer (or even anticipate) their questions.

2

Manage customer data

Bad decisions come from a lack of access to and inability to interpret customer data. Being able to store, track, and validate customer data within an automated system will allow sales and marketing teams to optimize customer engagement strategies and build better relationships.

3

Automate the sales process

Sales force automation makes selling more efficient, helping you sell more quickly. The best CRM systems use artificial intelligence (AI) and unified customer data to automate the sales process by prompting sellers with recommended next-best actions.

4

Personalize marketing campaigns

Customers and potential customers arrive through various channels, including websites, social media, email, online/offline events, etc. Unfortunately, many businesses struggle to connect marketing efforts across all these channels. Marketing teams can improve conversions, strengthen customer relationships, and align messaging across their digital customer channels by leveraging CRM systems.

5

Align sales and marketing

With customer relationship management, marketing and sales work better together to drive sales and increase revenue. When sales and marketing are in sync, sales productivity goes up along with marketing ROI.

CRM features and benefits

Customer relationship management solutions are one of the largest and fastest-growing enterprise application software categories. The CRM market size was valued at $41.93 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $96.39 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 11.1% from 2020 to 2027.

More and more companies are using CRM solutions to acquire more sales leads, improve the sales pipeline, boost productivity, and improve customer satisfaction. However, many have encountered problems ranging from cost overruns and CRM integration challenges to system limitations. These are avoidable problems, and you can help ensure success by focusing on a customer-first strategy.

It’s critical for businesses to have integrated, customizable, and comprehensive views into their customers’ and potential customers’ solution/product interests, customer service needs, and purchase history. A good CRM system should provide that view. All data is in a single location, viewable through optimized dashboards.

Additionally, your marketing team can leverage CRM solutions to orchestrate personalized marketing and lead generation campaigns. These systems can help track all cross-channel interactions—from engagement to purchase. Mature cloud CRM solutions do more. They are fully integrated with back-office solutions to successfully support the entire customer journey.

Because it manages prospect and customer engagement points across all channels, your CRM system can inform all your communications and marketing activities, delivering the 360-degree customer view needed for a truly connected omnichannel experience.

Many different vendors have many different types of solutions. However, a few capabilities are must-haves.

  1. Be easy to use, or people won’t use it

  2. Fit within your budget and provide an acceptable ROI

  3. Integrate well with your other software systems

  4. Provide accurate, consistent data for that much-needed, complete customer 360-degree view

Types of CRM

CRM software solutions, at their core, are used to manage customer relationships and sales interactions. Still, many businesses leverage these systems simply as a sales force automation tool. But these solutions, such as Oracle’s, offer many more valuable capabilities that span a wide range of marketing and sales functions, including marketing, customer service, sales, and partner channel management.

Today’s CRM software can support the entire customer journey. But what one company may need from a CRM system can be vastly different from what another company might require. To help you select the right CRM for your organization, it’s helpful to know that there are three main types of CRM solutions: collaborative, operational, and analytical.

Learn more—types of CRM

CRM and data

Data is the most critical part of any CRM software solution. In fact, customer data is the starting point for all marketing and sales activities. Successful customer engagement and relationship strategies hinge on accurate, complete, and accessible customer profiles. Bad data comes from several places, including:

  • Fraudulently entered data

  • Keystroke errors

  • Duplicate customer information

  • Natural changes (company bankruptcy, job changes)

Incomplete and inaccurate data can increase quickly to degrade the value of your CRM tools, resulting in unnecessary expenses. Conversely, when customer data is complete and accurate, businesses stand a better chance of reaching their target customers and prospects. In short, your data is a valuable asset. So it’s important to focus on collecting and optimizing these four CRM data types:

Identity data

Identity data includes descriptive details to identify customers, leads, and contacts. This data should be used for marketing segmentation.

Descriptive data

Descriptive data includes lifestyle details relevant to your contacts. It is what completes that all-important 360-degree view of leads and contacts.

Quantitative data

Quantitative data includes measurable data points that can help you interpret how your leads and contacts have interacted with you.

Qualitative data

Qualitative data can help you better understand your contacts’ intent, including search behaviors related to buying decisions.

CRM vs. marketing automation

Both CRM and marketing automation systems are data-driven. They focus on gathering, storing, and using data. For example, marketing automation systems gather leads by communicating with potential and current customers.

Specifically, marketing automation looks to gather enough customer data points to show intent and then hands that person off to the sales team as a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). A CRM solution picks up where the marketing automation solution left off and works to convert those marketing-qualified leads into contacts.

AI in CRM

Discover the next generation of CRM (0:38)

The best CRM systems offer robust analytics coupled with AI and machine learning. AI is the future of customer relationship management, going beyond contact management and sales force automation to truly helping you sell.

AI in CRM can guide you toward the next-best actions and provide smart talking points—specific to each customer opportunity. AI also delivers timely customer intelligence that helps you optimize customer experience (CX) across marketing, sales, and customer service.

CRM vs. CX

When customer relationship management first arrived on the scene, businesses would capture data but not know what to do with it. Today, CRM systems are integrated with AI, which helps interpret and predict what that data means.

CRM AI capabilities are the foundation to using a 360-degree view of the customer that will start them on their way to becoming your customer. As these AI enhancements continue to evolve, CX will continue to improve—and in turn, customer expectations will continue to increase.

Your business needs to fully understand your customers (and how they buy) to not only meet their expectations but to provide them with compelling experiences. This is the future of CX and should serve as your guide to selecting the best CRM solution.

How CRM improves customer experience

A complete customer view is necessary for business success and growth. Without a CRM system, you’ll struggle to develop that much-needed 360-degree view of the customer that you need to:

  • Personalize customer interactions

  • Automate business processes (with appropriate CX integrations)

  • Track all customer interactions

Explore ways to improve CX

How CRM improves customer service

CRM software solutions help sales reps organize their leads, automate follow-ups, and manage their opportunities and pipeline. But sales isn’t the only department within your organization that can benefit from your CRM platform. Marketing, customer support, product development, content management, and HR can all achieve high ROI from a CRM solution.

For example, since your solution holds essential information about every customer, your customer support teams can put that customer data to good use. With CRM data, your customer support reps (CSRs) have more insight into who your customer are, their needs and motivations, and what type of relationship they’ve had with your brand in the past. This information gives your customer service reps context when interacting with those customers.

The more your CSRs know about who they’re working with, the better they can serve them and improve the customer experience.

Cloud CRM

As with any other business application, the decision to host your CRM on-premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid model depends on your business needs.

On-premises CRM

On-premises CRM gives you complete control over your system, but there is a trade-off. These systems must be purchased, installed and deployed, monitored, maintained, and upgraded. As a result, they can be costly, involve time-intensive installations and upgrades, and require in-house IT resources for ongoing maintenance.

With an on-premises CRM solution, access to new functionality can be a long, drawn-out, and expensive process. Also, sophisticated AI-based technology—to support virtual assistants, chatbots, next-best recommendations, and predictive analytics—will not be available.

Cloud CRM

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) options offer simple interfaces that are easy to use and require less IT involvement and investment than on-premises CRM tools. Because upgrades are pushed through automatically, you always have the most up-to-date functionality without significant IT effort.

This includes new advanced technology, such as AI and machine learning that can help you turn your customer data into relevant customer experiences. Cloud-based CRM also offers the convenience of anytime, anywhere access through mobile devices.

Hybrid CRM deployment

A hybrid CRM deployment requires trade-offs in all the areas mentioned above, but this deployment model can also deliver the best of both worlds. However, it’s important to recognize that IT technology is increasingly moving to the cloud. Companies that remain heavily invested in on-premises CRM risk being left behind as competitors advance to the cloud. Your ability to provide mobile access will also be limited.

There are so many things to take into consideration when selecting a CRM system for your organization. But in the end, the CRM model most suitable for you is the one that allows you to interact with your customers in meaningful ways to drive exceptional customer experiences.

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