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Generative AI is everywhere now. You see it in content, campaigns, customer experiences, and even internal workflows. It promises speed, scale, and efficiency, but there’s a harder question sitting underneath all that progress; Do your audiences actually trust it?

Trust in the Age of AI: What Consumers Really Think About AI Generated Content

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

Since their emergence just three months ago in February 2021, NFTs - “non-fungible tokens”, or blockchain-based certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets - have taken off in a way we haven’t seen since - well, the previous crypto boom in 2017. 

Non-fungible token, NFT - Explore - Google Trends

On 10 March, a digital artist named Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million, making him the third most valuable living artist, behind only Jeff Koons and David Hockney. The work, ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ is a collection of crude, satirical gross-out cartoons and sci-fi style illustrations from an artist who had not sold a work for over $100 until late last year. It was bought by Singapore NFT production studio and crypto fund Metapurse, with elevated claims that “This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday. This has the potential to be the work of art of this generation”. (The artist himself often refers to his illustrations as ‘crap’.) 

The response was mixed - and highly polarised. VCs and digital marketers praised NFTs as part of a shift to a “creator economy” of influencers, substacks, and self-productification. Tech-skeptics point out that NFT sales do not exchange ownership of the asset itself, only a link towards it - and are thus ripe for fraud and bitrot. People asked if the exorbitant ecological footprint of blockchain-based technologies was really what we want to be the future of creative production? Was it about art at all: or was it just an asset bubble: thousands of crypto-rich with unfathomable digital wealth seeking something - anything - to spend it on? NFTs weren’t the only strange asset bubble during the corona crisis, as - bored, stuck at home, and extremely online - a generation pumped penny stocks and frantically traded Pokemon cards. 

Anil Dash, who created one of the earliest non-fungible tokens, wrote that NFTs Weren't Supposed To End Like This - but of course they were long out of his control. 

"So who's winning the battle to define what NFTs mean?"

I got talking to the Audiense team about this question. So many competing narratives circulating - but what did this look like quantitatively? What communities were involved? 

We used Meltwater to collect English-language Twitter conversation for two time periods: 

Early adopters: 1 January 2021 - 28 February 2021 

Early mainstream: 1 March 2021 - 1 April 2021 

Then used the Audiense tool to visualise the communities present using social network analysis - and dig into their characteristics. Here’s what we found. 

The first creatives involved are visual artists (23% of the total). It’s a distinctively digital cohort: one community of self-defined “crypto artists”, a little older (age 25-34) who have been involved in crypto for some time - plus cohorts of videogame artists, graphic designers, and people working professionally in a design & illustration. 

The creatives aren’t a ‘contemporary fine art’ audience - with degrees from the RCA gallery representation and coverage in Frieze and Artforum and so on. Instead, their work has a distinctively digital aesthetic informed by videogames and sci-fi movies: neon-lit environments, smooth gradients, and pneumatic curves. 

The investor class is in the discussion from the start (17% of the audience) with two crypto developer & entrepreneur segments (one more bitcoin-focused than the other). The capital for the bubble to inflate is there early on. 

There’s also a substantial proportion of freebie hunters (27% of the audience), looking for “airdrops” (crypto giveaways). These audiences use #NFT hashtags but do not appear actively involved in making or discussing NFTs: instead, it’s a developing world audience (Nigeria, Indonesia, Philippines) looking to benefit from a wealth bubble. 

Overall the audience is very young (47% or nearly half age under 25) and very male (77%) 

By late March, the audience has significantly changed. 

There were 110,489 members in this online audience that we examined, and new communities had arrived: 

Musicians & Music Fans start talking about NFTs, following the entrance of some big names into this space in March (Calvin Harris releasing an NFT collection; Kings Of Leon generating $2M in NFT sales for their new album) 

Sports Fans also join the discussion. Sports collectibles have been another coronavirus boom sector, as trading cards sold for records of $5.2 million and $4.6 million - and NFT video highlight clips generated more than $150 million in sales in February alone. 

Contemporary Fine Art is now visible as a community - as a more ‘traditional’ art audience who follow institutions such as MoMA, the Tate, the Guggenheim, and art media such as Artnet, Creative Review, and artforum, join the NFT discussion. On 28 March, GQ publishes a feature on how “NFTs are here to stay and the art world is having to catch up fast” 

The international giveaway seekers have now exited the NFT conversation, perhaps not having found it as an efficient source of income. The Nigerian tech community present in this audience is a professional one, made up of people working in software, entrepreneurial & marketing jobs similar to the US-focused “Tech Biz & Marketing” segment. 

What really strikes me about the NFT conversation is how substantially it’s being driven by “indie creatives”. The illustrators and fan artists, the self-published writers, the animators and games artists. Their presence in the NFT conversation indicates that this possibility of finally being able to make real money from their creative work excites them. But is it really happening for them? 

As Kimberley Parker pointed out on Medium on 19 April, it’s crucial not to get distracted by the big Beeple numbers: “Most artists are not making money off NFTs.” Noting the lack of robust transaction data from the main NFT marketplaces, she scraped data from OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace, to find out what was really going on. “Most NFT sites will recommend you set your sale price at 0.5 ETH,” she reports, “which was about $894 USD on March 19th. The number of Primary Sales that ended up selling for the recommended price was a whopping 1.8%.” 

Instead, a third of NFTs sell for $100 or less, and 76% sell for under $500. With transaction fees easily coming in at the hundred dollar mark, the margin of profit is tiny. Her analysis also reveals that the prospect of making art “collectible” is also over-sold: a substantial majority of transactions are first purchases. 

For Parker, this is political: “These numbers do not show the democratization of wealth thanks to a technological revolution. They show an acutely minuscule number of artists making a vast amount of wealth off a small number of sales while the majority of artists are being sold a dream of immense profit that is horrifically exaggerated. Hiding this information is manipulative, predatory, and harmful, and these NFT sites have a responsibility to surface all this information transparently. Not a single one has.” 

In a gold rush, the vast majority of miners never strike it rich. The money’s in selling them shovels. 

But it depends of course what “success” means for these illustration and fanart communities. If lured in by the hope of achieving Beeple-like riches, they’re almost certainly be disappointed. But that may not be the case. Fanart communities have long operated as active and closely-knit groups on Twitter - facilitated in part by the platform’s more tolerant approach to NSFW content! They already had a micro-economy based around commissions and tipping: artists would draw you a custom user icon, or an illustration of your favourite TV or anime character. Price-points are typically at an affordable, <$200 level. 

Has this activity just moved online? Is the volume in the NFT space coming not from transformative contemporary art, but sexy pictures of anime girls and humanised animals? Our audience analysis suggests this is likely. 

The influx of new crypto money into digital art, then, may not transform the art world in quite the ways that people are expecting. Obviously, it is undeniably impacting the fine art world - particularly galleries like Christie's, who are needing to adapt quickly to sell this new asset class. (Investment and speculation have long been driving forces in the fine art market, of course). But it also seems likely that a lot of volume is occurring in a parallel but quite separate digital art market: one of the individual creators making character-driven digital illustrations and fan-art adjacent work. As on Substack, very few creators may be making a living from it, and only a tiny handful getting rich. But thousands are likely making a few hundred dollars a month. Is this a monetised side-hustle or can it grow into a full ‘Creator Economy’ with a digital middle class? That’s the open question.

Jay Owens is a research director and strategist who works particularly on audience insight, trends and innovation. She works as a freelance consultant helping brands and audiences navigate the volatile media landscape, and leverage emerging consumer needs, behaviours and passions.

Audience Report: Who's Driving the Chatter Online Around NFTs?

Social Media is booming. Since the world went into lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, consumers have understandably been spending more of their time online and brands have redirected more resources to marketing on those channels. 

But as social proves to be a lucrative channel for brands, they increasingly need help from agency partners in this space, because they lack the in-house resource or skills to deliver social campaigns at the scale and pace required. 

There exists, therefore, a growing opportunity for agile agencies to position themselves as trusted partners, providing brands with the support and consultancy they need to refocus their marketing efforts on social media. 

These are some social media services that your agency should be offering to clients:

It’s surprising how often brands don’t have a clear picture of how they’re performing in both owned and earned social. In fact, the bigger the company, the greater the chance that it has a sprawling network of social channels managed in different silos with no clear reporting lines. 

This is where you can help. It’s sometimes easier for an external agency to do a complete audit of an organization’s social channels and create comprehensive one-off or regular reports on how those channels are performing.

Right now, brands are flying blind in a rapidly changing world. They desperately need to get their hands on reliable insights about consumer behaviors and attitudes, and social data is currently one of the best sources of those insights. 

Agencies can help with deep-dive analytical reports into specific topics that the client needs to understand better, whether they’re looking for new market opportunities or just seeking to get a clearer picture of what’s happening in their industry.

If you want social to be a serious marketing channel for your business, then managing it needs to be somebody’s full time job. Unfortunately, the practicalities of making that happen in a business can sometimes be difficult, so it often makes sense to outsource to an agency which has the right experience and skills to bring the company’s social channels to life.

Understanding how to plan, create, and activate successful campaigns in social media is a high-value skillset. Well executed marketing campaigns on channels such as Facebook and Instagram can deliver great returns, but to get the best results you really need to understand how the platforms work, what kind of content performs well, and how to optimize campaigns on the fly. 

Even if your clients don’t need your help with ongoing management of their social media profiles, there’s always scope for a well-crafted creative campaign.

A key element of ongoing social media management, as well as ad-hoc campaigns, is the ability to generate creative, social-optimized content at scale and speed. Few but the biggest brands have this kind of capability in-house, and agencies which can earn a reputation for delivering high quality, engaging social content, are likely to have clients beating a path to their door. 

For agencies, there are economies of scale at play. If you have people who are skilled at social media management, content creation, analytics, and so on, all equipped with the right tools to do that work effectively, they can service multiple accounts profitably. 

Working with a technology partner like Meltwater means you can scale as required when you win (or, regrettably, churn) clients, and not worry about being locked into expensive software licenses that are not helping you generate revenue.

Profitable Social Media Services for Your Agency

Every business’s most valuable asset is its customers. If you want to better understand your customers and manage and grow your customer relations, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a must-have tool. 

Finding the intersection of customer and company success has always hinged on a company’s ability to discover the fine details about their customers. What do they buy? How much do they spend? How did they find your company in the first place?

When you know what makes your customers tick, you can build on those successes to acquire new customers and grow existing accounts.

Before CRM, uncovering these little details was based largely on guesswork or disparate sources of knowledge. But as your business grows – and competition increases – it becomes more essential to see the data behind the customer lifecycle and store it in a single location.

Now, you may have heard of customer relationship management before, but you may still be wondering what the literal CRM meaning is – and we'll cover that first along with how can a CRM system do all of the above to amp up your sales, marketing, and PR. Let’s take a deeper dive. 

What is Customer Relationship Management?

The literal CRM meaning is simply Customer Relationship Management. This encompasses everything from purpose-built CRM tools and software to the actual processes of managing customer relations.

When many people think of CRM, they envision a customer database that serves as a central source for all customer interactions. This database includes, but is not limited to:

Customer details, such as name, company, address, phone number, and email

Average order value and lifetime account value

Interaction history, such as phone calls, emails, and chat logs

Engagement metrics, such as email clicks or website visits

Personal information, such as hobbies, interests, fears, motivations, and family details

Purpose-built CRM tools integrate some or all of these data points right out of the box. Many CRM tools are customizable so you can create your own fields and workflows. This helps you capture the information that matters most to your organization. 

When your fledging marketing or PR agency acquires its first customer, it’s easy to get to know more about them and remember the fine details. But as you start to grow, client relationship management becomes more challenging.

Maybe you branch out your social media marketing and start getting clients from different channels. Or maybe you start testing an email marketing strategy and want to find your most engaged clients and prospects. Whatever the case, CRM systems are designed for client relationship management at scale.

CRM software supports scalability by systematizing your approach to client relationship management. Many CRM tasks can be automated to make it less hands-on for your sales and marketing teams. All your customer data is available with a simple search and can be aggregated into custom reports to help you form important insights.

No matter how quickly your organization grows, your CRM scales with you. The processes you implement in a CRM strategy accommodate every new client on a consistent basis.

Your customers benefit from a better experience. You have all the important data you need to serve them quickly and accurately

You can uncover untapped opportunities to grow accounts. Repeat your past successes with lookalike audiences.

You can improve your definition of customer satisfaction and deliver better experiences. Look at engagement metrics, feedback, and interaction history to make positive changes in your business.

Teams have better communication and are more productive. Essential customer information lives under one “roof” instead of disparate systems. Data is available in real-time to keep business progressing.

Most importantly, customers go from being treated as accounts to becoming deeply rooted relationships that build customer loyalty and customer retention. How your customers feel connected to your company has a direct effect on revenue and retention, and both loyalty and retention can be improved when you prioritize good relationships.

Sales, marketing, and PR professionals are on the front lines of business growth. These roles are often considered the face of the company. They act as an initial point of contact for new customers and help to shape ongoing perceptions.

Because first – and ongoing – impressions carry so much weight, building relationships is key in driving business performance.

CRM tools take the guesswork out of maintaining strong relationships with your clients. This is a critical piece of any marketing strategy because selling to existing customers is easier and less expensive than acquiring a new customer.

In fact, the success rate of selling to a current customer is as much as 70%. Selling to a new customer has a max success rate of just 20%.

Using CRM for small business, companies can improve sales and marketing productivity and overall business functions by focusing on their best opportunities. For example, your CRM strategy might include reaching out to your most frequent buyers with new offers or special discounts.

Another key benefit: user productivity. CRM solutions help to systematize how your team connects with your customers.

Martech notes that 50% of CRM users have improved productivity by using mobile CRM applications. In addition, 65% are reaching their sales quotas.

When you bring new people into your flock, these systems can help them to quickly onboard with your company. They will pick up with your customers where others left off.  

Combined, the revenue growth and the efficiency savings can strengthen your bottom line and improve every customer interaction.

Building relationships with customers is the foundation for providing an optimal customer experience. When you can demonstrate that your customers are more than just another account to you, they feel valued and appreciated. It is becoming more important to understand and embrace this concept in marketing, as product and price alone are no longer enough to confer a competitive advantage.

Customer expectations for a great experience continue to climb. What’s more, 86% of customers say they are willing to pay more for a better experience.

However, meeting these expectations isn’t always easy. Chaos ensures when customer data lives in multiple places and multiple people on your team are interacting with them. It’s difficult to keep track of conversations and activities. You may feel like you don’t really know your buyers as well as you’d like. None of the above makes for a customer-centric experience.

CRM can flip the script on customer experience simply by providing a single thread of customer data. 

With the right data, you are better able to:

Identify and respond to your customers’ needs

Provide a personalized, customer-centric approach to doing business

Every action and conversation is connected to the customer and accessed in the same location. This gives you a 360-degree view of every buyer.

Tipp: Use consumer insights tools like the Meltwater consumer insights platform and consumer intelligence suite to get access to the necessary data.

Now that you hopefully have an idea of what CRM systems are, let's look at what is CRM marketing. 

So, what is (the role of) CRM in marketing? It all boils down to data.

Sales is the intersection of making the right offer to the right person at the right time. It’s up to marketing to find this intersection, ideally without costly trial and error.

Data supports better marketing because it allows you to better understand your customers. This includes the people that already buy from you and prospects who have shown interest in buying from you.

You have the benefit of seeing what campaign(s) they’ve responded to and comparing it to other marketing campaigns. Use this data to build on your previous wins, such as running social media ads that have performed well in the past.

A CRM initiative can maximize your data by segmenting your audience. Some ways you can segment include account value, location, lead source, or specific behaviors, among others. From there, you can develop a targeted marketing campaign that speaks directly to those customers.

CRM Drives Customer Relationship Marketing

CRM data supports customer relationship marketing on a one-to-one basis. What is relationship marketing, you might wonder?

Simply put, relationship marketing aims to encourage repeat purchases. The goal is to connect with customers beyond surface-level transactions.

Some relationship marketing examples include loyalty programs, phone calls to solicit customer feedback, customer-centric communities, and brand advocacy programs.

Deeper customer relationships take more time to nurture. But the long-term payoffs can make them well worth the time and effort.

For starters, loyal customers have higher lifetime values. And if they’re members of loyalty programs, they generate 12-18% more revenue than non-members.

Highly satisfied customers will become advocates for your brand. They will tout your products and services to family members, friends, and colleagues. In turn, this can help to reduce your marketing and advertising spend. Your customers are marketing on your behalf by sending you steady streams of referrals.

To transform your customers into brand advocates, you must help your customers feel connected to your company. They want to feel that your company values them and has their best interest in mind.

You can create these feelings when you know more about your customers and their needs. Data positions you to demonstrate why they’re more than just another transaction.

A CRM platform provides end-to-end customer support for small businesses and enterprises alike. This includes ensuring a good experience before, during, and after the sale. 

Even best-in-class brands need to handle customer complaints from time to time. When you’re using customer relationship management to address these complaints, customer service teams can turn complaints into helpful opportunities.

For example, let’s say a customer called into your business because the dress they ordered doesn’t fit. Since customer satisfaction is your top priority, you can log the experience in your CRM and ensure a new dress is sent out right away. You can also save the tracking information under the customer’s account and let them know when the dress will arrive.

You might take this experience a step further by reviewing your size charts. Make the appropriate changes to ensure a better experience for customers moving forward.

Most importantly, customer complaints shouldn’t be seen as threats to your business. Rather, they can be chances to improve your customer service.

Aim to provide a relevant, timely, desirable outcome. The way you handle a complaint can ensure customer success and actually help you build good customer relationships. 

Your sales team depends on marketing’s ability to target relevant customers that are most likely to buy. When marketing teams are empowered to do their best work, sales should naturally follow.

Your sales team tends to spend more one-on-one time with your customers compared to your marketing team. Once customers respond to marketing and enter the sales process, your sales team’s priority is to take customer relationships to the next level. They will continue nurturing them, even after the initial sale.

According to Salesforce, 46% of leaders believe that deeper customer relationships are important for sustaining success. These deeper relationships are supported by CRM, allowing sales teams to: 

Explore customer challenges and priorities

Many of the tasks in CRM can be automated. Examples of CRM automation include setting appointments, follow-up reminders, and personalization. This helps your sales team to effectively manage their time and scale their efforts without sacrificing the quality of service.

Customer relationship management supports multiple business objectives in a single system. From marketing automation to creating a sales pipeline, CRM technology is a tool worth trying.

As you’re growing your marketing or PR agency, a CRM system can provide a consistent, reliable anchor for your operations. It also allows you to keep your most valuable asset – your customers – at the heart of everything you do.

Once you understand the  CRM meaning and the value of customer relationship management, your next steps are to select a CRM system and integrate your CRM strategy. Then, sit back and watch your customer relationships flourish.

How A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System Can Help Your Business Succeed

We’re big believers in the power of education here at Meltwater. All of our employees benefit from a generous training budget, to improve their skills and build their careers, and in Africa, we’re helping to train the next generation of tech entrepreneurs through our MEST program.       	

Today we’re proud to announce the launch of Meltwater Academy, an online training program for marketing professionals to develop their skills in social media marketing and data analytics. We’re offering a range of different training programs, and participants will be able to earn certification by completing each of the courses.

To begin with, we will roll out two separate training streams:

All marketing professionals regardless of whether they’re Meltwater customers or not will be able to participate in our general social media marketing skills courses, starting in June with a Social Media Management Certification.

Meltwater customers will have access to several courses designed to improve their skills to ensure they get the most value from our suite of marketing and PR tools. The first of these courses, available today, is focused on our Engage social media management tool, and will include these modules:

All certifications will be administered through Accredible, the Leading Digital Certification Platform. Each of these courses will be supported with additional resources, such as on-demand webinars and eBooks on related topics.

New courses will be added to the program each month, and it’s our intention to provide a comprehensive library of training resources that will enable any marketing or PR & communications professional to become fully certified in leading industry skills.

The PR and marketing communications industry has evolved significantly over recent years, and modern marketers are required to master a wide range of different disciplines and technology platforms. All too often they are expected to do so without any training, and can struggle to stay on top of the many fast-changing technologies that they need to use in their roles. 

As the marketing landscape grows increasingly complex, it’s no longer sustainable to expect marketers to “just know” how it all works, or to pick it up as they go along. We believe formal training and certification is the best way to address this skills gap.

Our goal is to empower our customers with the skills they need to excel in their careers by using our tools to their maximum potential. We also aim to help professionals across the wider PR and marketing communications industry keep their skills up-to-date for current best practices and platforms, by introducing widely recognized certifications in important skillsets that are available to everybody, free of charge. 	

Update Your Skills Through Meltwater Academy

With more than 160 million businesses having a company page on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, it is no wonder that brands and businesses are using Facebook to not only advertise their products and services but to generate leads and acquire new customers.

According to Facebook, lead generation is the process of building interest in a business's products or services. Naturally, this is something you want to make use of because generating leads on Facebook can accomplish a variety of marketing goals, such as getting a better understanding of your audience and moving some of your customers down the marketing funnel.

Your Facebook Business Page has great potential to generate high-quality leads through lead gen, and in this blog post, we'll walk you through what Facebook lead ads are, how to create lead ads that will reach your audience, and the tips you can use to ensure you become a lead magnet.

How to Create a Facebook Lead Generation Ad

How to Get More Leads from Facebook Lead Ads

3 Tips to Make Your Facebook Business Page a Lead Magnet

Also known as Facebook lead ads, these ads help marketers or businesses capture contact information about an audience by offering either a free piece of content or an opportunity to connect with the business. These leads are generated through the completion of the Facebook form that pops up when a user clicks on the ad. The form is similar to other landing page-like forms you've likely filled out to download an eBook or register for a business's webinar, however, the content in this pop-up form is pre-populated with the person's profile information on Facebook. The content of the form can be edited by the user  — and you can restrict the use of certain types of email addresses to ensure you're capturing their business email.

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