About two years ago, I began exploring the difference between an Audience Relationship Management system and a Customer Relationship Management system. I was in the marketing for a new tool because the one we had wasn’t providing the metrics and analytics we needed. I was actually looking for a CRM, but this new term, ARM, kept coming up.

Customer Relationship Management

You are probably familiar with this term. It’s all over the place. It’s a system for managing your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: improve business relationships throughout the customer lifecycle. Think Salesforce, Hubspot, and Marketo.

It gives you a clear overview of your customers. You can see their history with you, order status, and any outstanding issues. You can even include their social media activity, such as likes and what they are saying.

Audience Relationship Management

ARM is a technical and strategic approach designed to maximize audience engagement in real time. It allows you to develop new ways to grow your audience and create loyalty, unifies the audience data, provides robust data governance and management, and, of course, provides you with the analytics to activate audience data to increase revenue, create new products and provide long-term bottom-line impact.

Audience Relationship Management, per Omeda, consists of four key functions:

1. Acquire

Acquire new data on key customers from every interaction with your company ranging from website browsing to publication delivery.

2. Unify

Unify the acquired data with all content interactions, commerce transactions and even third-party data. This is the foundation for data-driven insights and analytics.

3. Manage

Active management and data governance is a job unto itself without the right tools. You need to manage communication fatigue, create efficiencies in spend and strengthen your relationships. This will result in an increased CLV/ARPU and improve long-term ROI.

4. Activate

If you are managing your audience well, they can be activated to create multiple revenue-driving opportunities. It might include event attendance, research opportunities, subscriptions, lead gen, digital real estate monetization and more. This is the fastest path to revenue growth and profitability.

The Break Down

For someone like me, who loves their data, the decision was a no-brainer. Although I can make decisions on the fly, I really prefer to have data to inform my strategies, develop CX experimentation hypotheses from, and manage my tactics. It’ll be ARM over CRM every single time.