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"Four out of five U.S. adults are involved in a social network," Band adds. The result: Businesses are increasingly trying to follow their customers' social networking updates. It's a logical extension of CRM, which is designed to help businesses broaden their understanding of customers' interests, needs, and concerns. Many business relationships today begin on the Internet, as customers increasingly find businesses from Google searches, Facebook fan pages, and Website visits, adds Brent Leary, a CRM and small-business technology analyst. So it makes perfect sense to track and build those relationships using cloud CRM services, especially if they offer social network monitoring.

• Highrise is a cloud CRM system that many small businesses like. Along with its CRM features, the system provides various third-party customer service applications, such as MailChimp, an e-mail marketing campaign service. Highrise offers a free plan for two users with up to 250 contacts. Beyond that ceiling, monthly plans start at $24 for up to six users.

"Our study finds that the mere presence of social media icons on a Web page where we shop appears to cause us to feel as if our purchases are being watched by our social network, and we adjust our buying decisions accordingly," said Claudia Townsend, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Miami School of Business Administration, in a statement. "Marketers should be aware that the placement of these symbols in their Web design strategy could have a major impact on buying behavior."

First, you may already be using data from customer relationship management (CRM) tools and market research to inform campaigns. But a wider array of data signals is available, from analytics on your brand's website (that could tell you your most popular products, for instance), to audience data (that could give a glimpse of age, gender, or interests), to contextual insights about which device, location, or media type delivered the most success for a campaign. The trick is to know all the sources of data available, and figure out which can fuel smarter creative.

Too often, the creative agency and production shop are brought into the campaign process after the media strategy has been decided. By informing the creative agency of all the data from the outset of the project, you can work with the agency to build more relevant creative strategies for your target audience.