For any organization, their sales numbers depict their longevity and survival in the market. If sales don’t bring in more clients, leads, or customers, your business will be as good as closed as open. However, when it comes to B2B lead generation strategies, there are massive hits and massive failures. With the cut-throat competition, it isn’t as easy to retain old clients than to bring in new ones.
So, how can you boost your lead numbers?
The trick is to work smarter, not harder.
And that smart decision for your business, especially for lead generation, is investing in a marketing automation tool.
Marketing automation is a technology that helps you automate, streamline, measure, and analyze your goals, tasks, and workflows. By embracing the intelligence of marketing automation, you spend less time and effort in tediously managing your lead generation campaigns and more time focusing on how to turn your prospects into customers.
With marketing automation doing the heavy lifting for you, you’ll achieve much more than quality leads- a steady clientele.
How marketing automation impacts lead generation?
In a marketing funnel, lead generation is related to lead nurturing- a step that requires you to nurture leads and maintain positive relations with them until they are ready to turn into an actual customer.
This is where marketing automation comes in.
It allows you to personalize your lead management and nurturing campaigns, convert website visitors into prospects, increase sales, and make the brand look more customer-friendly.
From a visitor landing on your website to structuring email campaigns to nurture them for sales and eventually converting them to customers- a marketing automation tool supports you throughout the lead generation process.
Want to know more about how marketing automation impacts lead generation?
Improves lead effectiveness:
The best part of using a marketing automation tool is that it allows you to personalize your interactions with your leads based on their personal information and the current stage in the marketing funnel. This personalization makes the lead generation process more targeted and appropriate. Then, you can design campaigns using marketing automation for the relevant customer base, making the lead generation workflow incredibly powerful. The automation part of the process takes over all the repetitive tasks, keeping your leads engaged and active during the entire sales cycle.
Know your visitors better:
Marketing automation allows you to gather online customer behavior, actions, and interests. Using all these details, brands can gain deep insights into a customer’s demographic, their background, and preferences and facilitate their connection with them.
What is their preferred channel?
What is their preferred content type?
How frequently do they open their emails?
What type of marketing message should you pitch?
At what point in the marketing funnel do they convert?
You can answer all such questions and more using the customer information collected by an automation tool. Ultimately, marketing automation helps you learn more about your customers than you ever could before.
Test copies before pitching them:
Marketing automation includes A/B testing and multivariate testing solutions to optimize content copies and garner conversion-oriented responses from the audience. Such testing takes into account an email’s design, subject line, headline, CTAs, offers, discounts, and content flow. It allows you to personalize and tweak your emails so that they address the pain points of your customers. With more responsive emails, brands not only boosts their engagement rates but improves campaign results monumentally.
Using a marketing automation tool, marketers can restructure their previous lead generation campaigns to derive better and improved results.
Improve the connection between marketing and sales:
To generate efficient and effective leads, you need a proper mix of sales and marketing, from sharing data to executing strategies. With the correct customer data, your marketing campaigns can quickly turn leads into sales. In addition, marketing automation prevents data duplication between the sales and marketing teams by aligning their goals for lead conversions and ROI improvements.
With better alignment between the sales and marketing departments, prospects can be nurtured by the marketing team until the time they are ready to convert, at which point, they will be sent to the sales team and vice versa. This results in deeper customer insights and accelerated visitors to customers conversion.
How to Automate Lead Generation Strategies Using Marketing Automation?
The following are the top practices that boost lead generation via marketing automation.
Way #1: Dynamic Landing Pages
Dynamic landing pages are a great way to turn leads into customers without first capturing them as a lead. This way, you get to connect with prospects interested in your products or services.
Using marketing automation, you can design landing pages specific to an audience group or a particular consumer. These dynamic pages showcase different content, website designs, messages, or CTAs for other users based on their preferences, interests, and online behavior.
Personalized landing pages help PPC campaigns more than organic searches since the variables are small, and the campaigns are precise. It allows you to address customer pain points and show them exactly what they want.
Way #2: Automated email campaigns
When it comes to lead generation, email campaigns are the most powerful. However, there are two different types of emails you can automate:
Trigger emails: These include event-based emails that you’ll send out on special occasions. Gradually, it becomes an industry standard to follow up those emails. Over time, customers expect such emails to derive useful information, which eventually improves brand-customer relationships.
Drip emails: These emails are the ones that turn subscribers into actual leads. They are pre-programmed and designed to be sent during a stipulated time frame, like after a visitor lands on your website page and subscribes to your services. Throughout the lead nurturing process, marketers engage in drip emails to share details about their business or materials that they might be interested in. The idea is to establish a personal connection via emails and address every single customer.
Once you’ve nurtured a visitor/lead, they might feel more interested in buying your products or services. In fact, marketers have witnessed an increase of 20% in sales when implementing personalized solutions to their lead generation campaigns.
Way #3: Script dynamic content
Over 50% of customers read 3-5 content pieces before they connect with the sales department. Consistently, over 95% of B2B customers like interacting with thoughtful and high-impact content forms that result in a thought provoking action.
Statistics aside, every organization knows that customers today buy experiences and not products. The content that engages your potential leads is what will encourage them to convert and become your customers. That is why you must personalize every content piece you share to make it more marketable and relatable. Set up dynamic landing pages or write user-friendly emails using all the details you’ve gathered about your customers. Remember, mass emailing doesn’t reap high-growth business results in the modern landscape.
Way #4: A/B Testing
So, you’ve designed your landing pages and set your lead generation campaigns in action, so what to do now? You need to test whether your strategies and campaigns are working or not. A/B testing of your landing pages and emails allows you to review the content, headline, or images to provide the best customer experiences. Once you have the data you need, you can customize any lead generation campaign you want. The more you know about your audience, the more relatable content you can share with them, and the more likely they are to turn from leads into customers.
Way #5: Automate with Chatbots
Organizations can use chatbots for marketing, sales, lead generation, customer service solutions, and more. And customers find it appealing too. These robots restrain any friction that might arise from a lousy customer-business interaction.
Since the time businesses employed chatbots, they’ve experienced increased lead flow and improved customer engagement and revenue growth. They are great at collecting customer information, which marketers can use later to personalize lead generation experiences. Chatbots would do all the repetitive tasks round-the-clock- creating, optimizing, and automating emails and landing pages for potential customers.
Conclusion
When the going gets tough, the smart start automating!
Leads, conversions, and ROIs are the indicators of how successful your business is and can be. The more the number of leads, the better is your conversion rates and higher is the return on investment. Introducing marketing automation to your lead generation efforts makes lead targeting easy, quick, and efficient. With a marketing automation tool in action, you connect with customers quicker and earn better business results that drive your business towards digital transformation and future innovation.