Unless you are a company called Tesla, you probably spend a considerable amount of time and resources in your marketing. The final objective is essentially to bring in as many qualified leads as possible, and, when all is said and done, have enough of them convert. Eventually, a good number of those conversions become absolutely enamored with what should be a fantastic, life-changing experience with your company, and become brand evangelists. Provided your product is good and you continue to deliver a high quality of service, they recommend you to others and the cycle continues.
The issue many companies encounter is that they very quickly become victims of their own success. As volumes grow, management of relationships becomes difficult, the marketing department gets snowed under, disillusioned clients start to spread the word, and your marketing effort quickly goes into a tailspin.
Avoiding this problem is precisely why companies turn to marketing automation. In this article, we unpack the main ingredients of this secret sauce so that you can use it to your advantage too.
What is Lead Generation Automation?
The process of lead generation generally involves building a relationship with a customer. This means communicating with the client at different points of their journey and responding appropriately to their actions at every stage.
For example, in a physical store, passersby looking at your storefront might be encouraged to make a purchase by offering them an initial purchase discount. If they walk in, you might offer them a higher value combination of goods, and at checkout, ask for their contact details so that you can offer them loyalty bonuses, special offers, and so on.
Lead generation automation is a replication of this process in the digital space. Armed with the right tools, you can set up a finely tuned system that carries out a series of actions based on the behaviour of prospects and leads.
How Lead Generation & Management Automation Works
Using a technology stack of various tools like CRMs, AI, and machine learning, you can set up a system that analyzes each lead and triggers certain actions based on their responses, profile, and at what stage they are in the buyer’s journey. The interaction history is stored and organized by CRM software. This also provides a store of data that can yield insights that enable the system to identify what kinds of leads are most likely to convert. Machine learning and AI can make predictive analyses that enable you to make further enhancements to improve your success rate. Properly set up, lead generation and management automation will give you an autonomous system that helps you ensure only high-quality leads end up in your funnel.
Benefits of Using Marketing Automation for Lead Generation
From the company’s side of things, you want to make sure you are spending your resources on the right prospects. You do not want to waste your time and resources on prospects that have little chance of converting. From the customer’s perspective, their interaction with your business should feel timely, worthwhile, and relevant. By using lead generation and marketing automation, both sides benefit.
Better Analysis And Tracking Of Leads
As your marketing operation begins to scale up, tracking and scoring of leads becomes a challenging effort. With lead management automation, you not only remove the need to perform repetitive tasks, you eliminate human error, and improve the customer experience.
Optimized Lead Nurturing
When communicating with a lead, time is of the essence. You have to provide them with the information they need, when they need it. By automating lead management with things like autoresponders and predetermined mail sequences, you can be sure that whether it is by email, or on other platforms, your leads are getting the messages that they need in order to move down the funnel.
Accurate Filter for Leads
By leveraging the power of AI, you can proactively identify which leads you should focus your resources on, improve your conversion rate, and maximize your marketing ROI. Lead management automation enables you to automatically score your leads to ensure high quality in your funnel.
Get The Most Out Of Your CRM Data
In tandem with marketing automation, lead management ensures your staff are able to get impactful insights out of your data. For one thing, automation helps you get more leads into your funnel, giving you a larger sample to work with, and better insights.
Improved Reporting
You also get better, more informative reports that grant staff across different departments improved access to information and a better perspective of your operations, further improving the efficiency of your business organization as a whole.
How to Automate Lead Generation & Management
Your approach to the automation of lead generation and management will depend in a large part on the structure of your marketing strategy, what platforms you are present on, and so on. Generally however, here are some of the steps you might implement:
To start with, you want to ensure that the data from all the platforms you are active on is combined in a single system that gives you an overall view of your entire business. This means that all your lead generation platforms are pouring their data into one single platform from which you can draw your insights.
Once you have this actionable data, you can start to make tweaks that help ensure your process is optimal. For example you can improve your landing pages so that you correctly identify promising leads and capture the information necessary to take the relationship forward. This might mean better designed forms, calls to action, and the structure and arrangement of elements on your landing pages.
Next, you want to improve the quality of your engagement with your new lead. This means personalized emails with relevant responses, as well as subsequent messages in response to the lead’s engagement and following a logical predefined set of steps. These could be as simple as thank you emails, ebooks or any other material you deem necessary. The aim is to keep the lead engaged. On other platforms, this might mean using chatbots to assist users on your landing pages.
The data you get from these interactions can be used to create customer profiles and adapt some of the steps in order to offer your clients even more value and improve customer satisfaction.
Marketing Automation, Lead Generation Components
The details of how your automation is deployed can take many different forms depending on the infrastructure and strategy you use. These components could include:
Email integration: to help you keep emails engaging and useful for the users. Lead generation to ensure the leads you are targeting are likely to convert based on statistics and their behaviours.
Lead management: to help you keep the leads engaged and provide them with the information they need during their journey.
ROI reporting: to help you track how your resources are being spent and help you optimize further.
Sales alignment: data that comes from lead generation and management can help your sales team as they convert the lead into a sale.
Content strategy: historical data will enable you to analyze performance and make the necessary changes to ensure the content you put out is effective at attracting leads and keeping them engaged throughout the process.
Conclusion
Every business, however they package their vision or mission, is about getting leads to convert. But as your mom-and-pop grows into a full-fledged enterprise, staying on top of these interactions can become quite a handful. However, with the right expertise you can create robust, scalable solutions that ensure both you and your clients stay satisfied.