PR is the least targeted type of communication: you only roughly define the target audience, depend on media outlets willing to cooperate, and have little control over when free publications will appear.

CRM marketing, on the contrary, is extremely precise: knowing the customer and being able to cluster them by specific product interest allows you to deliver answers to unspoken questions, nudging them toward the desired decision.

Is it possible to combine these methods — and what will it achieve?

If you’ve ever built a CJM or a sales funnel, you know there are stages where the customer gathers additional information, makes an internal decision, or, conversely, struggles to make one. What unites these stages is that the customer takes no visible action and does not communicate with the seller.

Funnel-building experts typically recommend “warming up” the customer at this moment by providing additional arguments in favor of your offer, using direct communication channels — email campaigns and messenger messages.

However, direct communication does not always work in your favor. Customers often feel pressured and become irritated, which leads to the opposite effect. This is where PR can help. Its key advantages are indirect messaging and the media’s investment in publishing their own expert content.

How exactly do you combine CRM and PR — and what does CJM have to do with it

It’s almost impossible to ensure that the right article appears in an authoritative publication at the exact right moment, so it's easier to publish such materials in advance as part of your general PR plan. You can plan these articles by analyzing the client’s CJM in the context of a dialogue: the implicit questions the customer asks and the answers the selling company provides.

If the CJM analysis shows several possible customer questions, additional profiling can be done based on a conversation with a manager, a chatbot interaction, or even clicks on certain links in your offer. Tracking such actions is easy to automate in a CRM. In practice, though, the number of such questions suitable for coverage in the media is usually not very large.

For example, a financial company offering investment products would start showing potential clients a compilation of the latest expert comments and opinion columns from its spokespeople immediately after adding them to the prospect list. As a result, by the time a sales rep called to schedule a presentation, most prospects already recognized the company’s name and reacted positively almost twice as often as during a completely cold call.

The key problem: targeting

To “deliver” the necessary PR messages to a potential customer, you can use targeted advertising — for instance, Facebook Ads or Google Ads — which allow you to target specific individuals by their email or phone number. Both platforms (including YouTube) have a minimum audience size of 100 matched emails or phone numbers, which enables you to effectively run ads to segments of 100–150 potential clients directly from your CRM.

You can add prospects to a segment via file upload or directly from your CRM, adding a client to the target segment at the right stage of the funnel. For example, Bitrix24 allows this to be done automatically using a sales funnel automation rule.

How to set it up

In our experience, it’s best to use systems that work with segments of 100–500 users, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter Ads (for the U.S.), while disabling AI options and auto-targeting whenever possible. We do not recommend LinkedIn Ads — despite excellent targeting capabilities, we have never seen the actual reach exceed 10% of the planned numbers. In other words, LinkedIn has everything, but the only people online are job seekers. In B2B, we recommend using mobile phone numbers, as corporate emails are often not linked to Google or Meta accounts.

The most delicate part of preparing this type of communication is segment planning. The smaller the segment tied to a specific question the customer is considering (e.g., comparing one feature with a competitor’s product), the more accurate the targeting and the more effective the communication — but the smaller the segment becomes. Additionally, even with relatively common questions, most B2B companies have only a few dozen clients in the follow-up stage at any given time.

As a result, you may not have enough target clients to meet the minimum segment size. In that case, we recommend adding those in the “long follow-up” stage — people who did not complete the deal within the expected timeframe but may buy next time or are relevant for ABM marketing. Try to ensure that the number of these "long" clients does not exceed the number of core targets in the segment. It's also useful to automatically target this group with all subsequent PR publications and even blog posts about new products or company metrics.

Finally, it is important to note that advertising networks such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads (especially) are known for having extremely high fraud rates. Although this is an unavoidable issue most marketers have learned to live with, you should still define a list of placements relevant to your business and target audience and blacklist everything else — for example, gaming sites.