Manufacturers value efficiency, automation, and the ability to forecast orders, sales, inventory, and other important elements of their business. Considering these values, it’s perhaps a curious thing, or maybe not so curious, that many manufacturers use their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for customer relationships management (CRM) activities, or else they don’t use any solution for CRM at all. Considering the myriad benefits of CRM functionality—from lead and opportunity management, contact and account management, data analysis, automated marketing campaigns, event management, branded landing pages and forms, email creation, and so much more—it’s a wonder how a business could get by on the limited customer relationship functions a typical ERP provides.

Adding a CRM solution to your manufacturing business’ tech stack helps you better understand customer needs and gives you the tools and insight you need to reach them in the best way possible at every touchpoint, whether they’re at the very top of your sales funnel or about to place a repeat order. Dynamics 365 Marketing is a flexible CRM solution that helps businesses in any industry create, manage, and analyze the results of a wide variety of materials to help even marketing beginners create high-quality, engaging content that speaks to your prospects, leads, and longstanding clients. Here are some ways manufacturers can benefit from using Dynamics 365 Marketing to engage prospects and drive revenue.

In marketing, “effective” can mean different things based on the company, team, and even individual. But the core of marketing is intrigue—to get potential customers or clients interested in what you do. The products you sell, the services you provide, your unique brand. That’s a very general, high-level goal, but each company will also have their more specific desired marketing outcomes, as well as their own ways to achieve it.

A cohesive brand is one that is consistent no matter what or where it is. Visually, your brand can be differentiated by the colors, logo, fonts, and other defining characteristics unique to you. Keeping your brand identifiable across all touchpoints your customers encounter boosts brand recognition, which increases reach and effectiveness of your marketing content.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of cloud-based business applications of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Data-driven and inter-connected, these apps sport modern and aligned interfaces, robust built-in capabilities, and highly customizable development. Whether you use one or many of these apps, there are many build-in features that allow you to create brand-specific content.

Acquainting yourself with all the apps and technology required to perform your job responsibilities is a hefty task, let alone using your tech stack with peak efficiency. That’s why it’s so beneficial when applications work together to help you do your job. Enter Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 applications. Built to seamlessly and natively integrate with each other, these business and productivity apps make it easier to transition from one to the other throughout your workday—sometimes without having to actually open another screen.

Social media is a hotbed for marketing these days: everyone is on it, every business needs to take advantage of it, and there are many strategies to engage your audience across various platforms. Marketers work hard to create strong content for their business’ social media accounts—from witty, thoughtful, or research-backed posts, to content from their own website (like blogs, infographics, and whitepapers), to engaging advertisements.

So, when most of the hard work is done, how do you ensure that those efforts are as effective as possible and return as much on your investment as it can? Believe it or not, it’s often simple steps that lead to immense shifts in social media likes, clicks, website visits, and leads.

Plans have been released for the 2022 Release Wave 1, the semi-annual feature upgrades for the Dynamics 365 suite of business applications. These feature releases keep you on the forefront of technology with improvements based off user feedback – so you can always count on quality updates that really make a difference in your workday.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new, standout features coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing with Release Wave 1:

The Dynamics 365 suite of cloud-based business applications are always being improved as user needs are identified and the cutting edge of technology advances. The coming upgrade is Release Wave 1 of 2022, scheduled from April through September. Some of the foci for these updates across applications include leveraging data, AI, and ideal timing to create better experiences throughout the sales and marketing experience, simplifying onboarding, increasing productivity, optimizing collaboration, and improving connectors and integrations. Here’s an overview of what’s coming to Dynamic 365 apps—Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and Business Central—for this release wave.

Things like real-time customer journeys, recommended actions, SMS messaging, and using natural language to create targeted segments are exciting (and relatively new) features that can help you connect with customers in the ways that matter most. Now, AI has been harnessed in Dynamics 365 Marketing for a new, imaginative feature called Content ideas.

Here’s how to use Content ideas to quickly generate on-message content to create personalized customer experiences:

A cornerstone of achieving web conversions is strategically placing landing pages as the first point of contact with your website. Landing pages are a bit different from your normal web page—having a smaller scope and narrowed down objective—although still an extension of your overall web presence. When done right, both you and your visitor gain something from this initial point of contact, and it can generate even more web engagement and repeat visitors in the future.

As the new year rings in, many people make resolutions—new habits, self-improvements, changes for the better. Whether or not you ascribe to New Year Resolutions, here’s a change your business can make to kick off this year and build up your bottom line: invest in CRM. A Customer Relationship Management system is a tool that, when added to your tech stack, can return massive ROI by improving your sales and marketing performance and potential. In fact, in 2014, every dollar spent on CRM returned between $5.60 and $8.71 (Nucleus Research).

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, customer journeys are orchestrated to guide a prospect through a predetermined, flexible path toward a preset end goal. Whether this goal is buying a product, scheduling a discover call, or closing a loan, a customer journey is easy to create and personalize to the needs of a segment, which may be thought of as a demographic, or group, of people who share similar characteristic.

When creating a customer journey, you want the most value for your efforts. Here are six practices that can lead to more effective customer journeys.

Business to business (or B2B) marketing is tricky and made even more so if you are a B2B marketer in an industry that might be considered, for lack of better words, “boring” in the social media space. But B2B companies can no longer afford to coast with weak or absent social media. A whopping 60-84% of people consider mobile devices essential to their work, and mobile devices are the main vehicle by which social media is consumed. With their devices out, it’s more likely they will check in on social, and no matter the platform they are surfing, their personal and professional wires are likely to cross on social media. With that in mind, a company is remiss if they don’t leverage that.

The search is always on for how businesses can achieve more with the effort they put in. To achieve the goal of more results with less effort, the Dynamics 365 Marketing 2021 Release Wave 2 focuses on engaging customers across all touchpoints when that contact will have the most impact, personalizing customer interactions using their own data for a heightened sense of connectivity, and making the strong and speedy business decisions that are afforded to Microsoft customers through AI-driven analytics.

Looking for new business software can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to something that will hopefully be an all-encompassing solution, like an ERP or CRM system. No matter what kind of system you’re in the market for, there are quite a few options out there, and for such a crucial backbone to everyday business processes, understandably no quick decisions can be made.

If you’re looking to add productivity powerhouses like Dynamics 365 Business Central or CRM applications like Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing into your toolbelt, read on for some of the benefits you can expect when you join the Microsoft business application ecosystem.

Time is a valuable resource—make the most of it by utilizing smart automation functions for day-to-day tasks. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can easily automate email communications to customers, but did you know that you can also delegate send as permissions so others can send emails on your behalf—automatically? Sending quick reminders to check in and follow up have never been easier.

Get the most out of your team’s various marketing endeavors by using smart insights and analytics from Dynamics 365 Marketing. Using analytics is a simple, yet effective way to measure the successes and pain points of marketing efforts to clearly see what’s working well and determine how to fill in the gaps.

Know that you want to measure marketing analytics, but aren’t sure where to start? Here’s a brief look at a few of the things you can track using Dynamics 365 Marketing insights and how to use the data to make better, more informed decisions.

Throughout the entire manufacturing marketing and sales process—from initial contact, to lead, opportunity, and quoting—all the way to order processing, a manufacturer constantly strives to optimize their processes. This makes sense; the faster and better they do their job, the more competitive they are through lower prices and more customers with increased satisfaction. There are countless moments along the sales and production pipelines with the potential to increase efficiency, and utilizing premier business solutions is perhaps the largest area of opportunity. ERP and CRM solutions such as Dynamics 365 offer features and functionalities to optimize business processes and are highly customizable to meet the needs of any manufacturer.

Microsoft continues to expand the functionality of the Dynamics 365 Marketing to provide better tools for businesses to connect with their audiences. New to the armory of features is SMS messaging and push notifications for mobile apps. This gives new ways to take control of communication efforts all within the same system. Currently, these features are only in public preview, so they don’t quite have their full functionality. However, they can still be utilized to get a taste of their full potential and help to brainstorm ways a company could benefits from them.

Each business is its own ecosystem, with specialized needs for the customers they serve, the distinct services they provide, and their individualized business processes. You wouldn’t buy a suit without tailoring it to fit you perfectly; the same expectation should apply to CRMs. Companies are not cookie cutter and generic, and neither are the customizable abilities possible with solutions such as Dynamics 365 Marketing or Sales.