Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that refers to practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer life-cycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth (definition from http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/CRM). In simple terms, CRM is building and retaining relationships with customers by analyzing their interactions with your site or business. In this post I will be comparing the CRM efforts of BuzzFeed and CollegeHumor, two sites that share a similar target market.BuzzFeed launched their website in 2006 and since then the company has slowly been growing to be one of the most popular interactive news related websites on the internet. The company builds relationships with their customers by providing content that users actually want to see. While they cater to people of all ages, their main target market is around ages 18-35, with a lot of content that is targeted to college students. The website is easy to use with bright yellow tabs at the top to take you where you want to go. Users can see exactly what they want when visiting the site and their homepage features articles and posts from a variety of themes catering to everyone.
BuzzFeed provides a personal experience for users in that they don't have to scroll through a bunch of unwanted to content to find what they're looking for, but instead can go directly to the page or theme of their choice. The website also uses social media to its advantage allowing users to follow specific pages, groups, or themes to receive their content in various ways. The site not only acts as an interactive news and leisure source but also allows users to post their own content, personalizing articles, quizzes, and other media to be shared with friends or people of similar interests. This aids customer retention by creating a community feel to the website as well as allowing for customization of the user's experience.
One particular way BuzzFeed has used social media to retain customers is through the use of Facebook and YouTube to promote their videos. Each video is usually less than 5 minutes long and the site has separated each theme into a color so that users can easily find what videos they want to follow.
On the other end of the spectrum is CollegeHumor, which is similar to BuzzFeed in that it provides humorous content targeted to users of collegiate age and has a target market of ages 18-49. The site was founded by two high school friends, and delivers daily comedic content, including videos, pictures, articles, and jokes. Similar tabs at the top of their page provide easy access to the content users want to find. While BuzzFeed has more of a news feel to its homepage with basic color schemes and content set up in windows, CollegeHumor has more of a social media feel, having users scroll through for content that is mainly for humorous purposes.
The site also uses social media to their advantage by posting funny tweets related to their articles or partnering with other websites, tv shows, or products to help promote their site. Their Facebook page also provides similar content to their website with some of their top posts featured.
Their retention of customers stems from their knowledge of what their users want to see. By keeping the overall feel of the website light and upbeat, CollegeHumor builds a good relationship with customers who are looking to escape the somewhat dreary news scene that can be found on the internet. CollegeHumor also allows users to submit their own original content which allows for a personal experience with the site.
In my opinion, BuzzFeed has a more substantial website and customer basis. By providing a wider range of content, the site caters to more people and allows for more customization among users. It also knows how to target users who do not always have time to visit the site or users who want more content through its use of social media. Although CollegeHumor has a large following, BuzzFeed has been catching up or keeping up with its numbers. It also focuses more on the users instead of the content and many photos and articles or posts on the site are directly from users who have added their own original works. Both sites focus on the marketing portion of CRM, and it has clearly been paying off. In all, providing a good experience for your customers is the number one way to retain customers, especially in a technological age.
