How to use Marketing Automation for Lead Generation
Marketing automation generates leads by capturing visitors through landing pages and lead magnets, then nurturing them with triggered emails and personalized content until they’re ready for sales. It also scores and routes leads automatically, so marketing and sales agree on when a lead is ready and nobody lets a good one go cold.
Building a client base for B2B businesses takes marketing and sales working together, and friction between them usually comes from misalignment: poor-quality leads or slow follow-up.
Marketing automation fixes much of this.
Marketing automation, also known as lead generation software, can play a significant role in getting marketing and sales teams on the same page. This solution helps marketing teams move a lead down the funnel and pass it on to the sales team once it’s ready. The data captured by the marketing automation software can then give the sales team insights about each contact.
In this blog, I will talk in detail about how you can effectively use marketing automation for lead generation.
Managing Evolving Marketing Channels
The way digital content is perceived these days is completely different from 5 years ago. It can be argued that the elements involved change radically due to some phenomenon. Consider the pandemic for example- it led to a sudden surge in digital content consumption. People started relying on online channels for entertainment, seeking information, shopping, and several other purposes. This rise in content browsing gave marketers a chance to target an increased number of people.
Similar trends can be witnessed during occurrences of different events such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. The point I am trying to get at is that the digital industry, and marketing channels by extension, is in a state of constant evolution, which marketers should thoroughly consider when they think of building lead generation strategies.
The US Marketing Automation Software industry is an estimated $12.3B market in 2022, growing 20%+ annually. According to Salesforce.
Today, the need is to make effective use of social media, email marketing, content marketing, campaigns for lead generation, SEO best practices, and landing pages to target and nurture audiences for eventually converting them into clients. Partnering with a B2B email marketing agency can further enhance these efforts by implementing strategic email campaigns to engage prospects and drive conversions.
Now, the problem with multiple channels is that their management requires different software, thereby leading to a scattered approach altogether. Hence, in order to generate quality leads, this is the foremost issue that marketers need to deal with. The lead generation process can be simplified extensively by combining the efforts of all marketing channels and having multiple data points in a centralized software. This is where marketing automation comes in.
How Marketing Automation Binds Lead Generation Processes
Marketing automation is essentially a one-stop-shop solution that unifies your lead generation processes. If you look at any marketing automation software, you’ll notice that it is an amalgamation of different tools that allow you to take care of all the processes involved in lead generation.
For example, you consider the people who visit your website to build the right audience base. Some will exhibit the accurate intent for you to take the conversation forward. You’ll know this when you start nurturing these leads through different email campaigns and how they engage with them. Those who show further interest in your offerings will become sales-qualified leads and can be handed over to the sales team.
Hence, the process is multi-staged, and it’s only natural that you’ll require different tools for every stage. Marketing automation provides you with all those tools in a single platform for a hassle-free experience.
Automation for Enhancing Efficiency
‘Automation’ is undoubtedly the major aspect of marketing automation. While fundamentals of lead generation remain the same, which mostly includes email campaigns, it is improved scalability that marketers are after these days.
We are looking at trends such as personalization and hyper-personalization in the digital industry. On top of this, user intent cannot be taken for granted. If you are not approaching a prospect in the right manner and with the right service/product/offerings, someone else is bound to.
Therefore, to remain ahead in the game, use automated workflows. Such an arrangement will help you personalize the content to target prospects effectively, let you know which prospects to prioritize, and provide detailed insights about each lead’s journey.
Nurturing leads is where marketing automation plays the most vital role during the entire lead generation process. Automated processes take effect at this stage, when your visitors have become leads. What you need to do next is to keep them engaged through your content, educate them about your niche, and eventually loop them in conversations about your products. All this is achieved through sending informational content to leads after determining their lifecycle stage.
Spending for Marketing Automation tools will grow vigorously over the next few years, reaching $25.1 billion annually by 2023 from $11.4 billion in 2017. According to Forrester.
Now that we are done with the basics of lead generation and marketing automation, let’s look at the elements involved in lead generation automation.
Marketing Automation Lead Generation Elements
Landing pages
The lead generation process starts with landing pages and the conversion forms you place on them. A visitor with the right intent will convert into a lead when they fill out a form on your website (a subtle hint about how important landing pages and conversion forms are for your business).
If you have done a good job with the form, the visitor will likely share their information, which will be added to your CRM. Now, you have specific details about your new lead, depending on the information you requested in the form. This information about leads is crucial, as it allows you to run additional campaigns and personalize content. Therefore, you need to ask for all the essential information on the forms while ensuring they don’t get overwhelmed with the number of fields.
Autoresponders and triggered email sequences
If a visitor fills up a form to download a guide from your website, you ideally need to keep them engaged through further conversations. One way to do this is through autoresponders or triggered email nurture sequences. For example, once they submit a form, they will receive a ‘thank you’ email, and you could also include a PDF version of the guide or ebook in the mail. This can be set up using marketing automation tools.
Triggered email sequences are also essential because they ensure the delivery of content personalized for each contact and based on their engagement. The automatic lead generation process is heavily dependent on such tools.
Funnel stages
Automated lead management relies on sales funnel stages. Marketing automation tools help you strategically move leads down the funnel until they are ready for a demo call.
Sales funnel stages are:
- Subscriber
- Lead
- Marketing qualified lead (MQL)
- Sales qualified lead (SQL)
- Customer
Increasing sales revenue (53%), lead nurturing (43%) and customer engagement (37%) are the most important objectives of a marketing automation strategy. According to Marketo & Ascend2.
Funnel stages are also critical because they tell you the kind of content a particular lead is likely to engage with. For instance, consider an MQL—the content you target these leads with should range from industry-related information to services or tools that could be useful to them.
On the contrary, an SQL would have moved down from the above stages and would already be knowledgeable about the industry. Now, you need to educate them about your services and products, and explain why they should choose you over competitors.
However, you can only be this precise with all your leads if you know their funnel stages, which is exactly what marketing automation provides.
Automating the Lead Generation Process
We have discussed in detail why marketing automation is crucial for lead generation today and where it fits in the entire lead generation process. The next step here is to see precisely how you can automate processes to generate high-quality leads.
Automating personalization
Marketers have probably realized by now that without considering user intent, they cannot get very far, and certainly not build lasting relationships. User intent and personalization are connected: without accounting for the former, you won’t be able to deliver a personalized experience, which is necessary for businesses today.
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Marketing automation allows you to deliver exactly such an experience through various tools. We have already touched upon automating email campaigns, but personalization is worth mentioning again. By automating email campaigns, you wouldn’t have to worry about a lack of personalization. Marketing automation tools allow you to personalize the entire campaign for multiple contacts.
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In addition to emails, you can use chatbots to enhance the customer experience when they land on your website, further increasing the likelihood of generating better leads. Chatbots can be challenging to manage manually unless you have a dedicated team or a person to handle things. With marketing automation, however, you don’t have to worry about replying to every single message yourself or at least keeping a tab on conversations 24*7. You can set a time and let the visitors know when you’ll be available.
These smaller aspects go a long way toward improving the customer experience. If the visitor feels valued and gets answers to their queries right away, the chances of them converting are much higher.
- If you want to go further, you can also personalize the website experience for recurring visitors. This can be done by mapping visitors’ behavior and then categorizing them. Customer personas will further help you target visitors more effectively, allowing you to generate higher-quality leads. While managing all this data can be challenging, marketing automation tools can help you achieve it quickly.
Automated lead management
In the last section, we discussed funnel stages and saw why segmentation is essential for delivering the right content to the right contact.
Everything, from segmenting leads to lead scoring, can be efficiently done with the help of marketing automation software. Automated lead management can make things for you incredibly easy because it’s impossible to manually deal with large-scale data, especially when you have more important tasks to take care of.
Almost 40 % of those not yet using marketing automation are going to invest in it in the next 12 months. Only a tenth of the respondents don’t plan to invest in marketing automation within the next 12 months. According to Liana Technologies
With marketing automation, lead scoring becomes a piece of cake. Furthermore, you’ll know precisely how engaged you need to keep a lead for them to keep moving down the funnel. A lot of time, marketers miss out on important deals because their process is slow. They may have forgotten about a follow-up or didn’t find the time to deal with the lead at the right moment. Marketing automation tools are built to handle such tasks and ensure timely lead engagement.
However, it would be best to choose the right marketing automation software, as poor integration could cost you dearly. A reliable integration system is the backbone of automated lead management.
Lead magnets for automated lead generation
Building a marketing automation list is probably among the first steps in lead generation. However, it can be a pain to get details of quality prospects. A lead magnet, though, can help you solve this issue. A lead magnet offers free content or services to prospects, which may ultimately incline them to sign up for your product/service.
To engage prospects, you can offer eBooks, reports, free audits, or guides. This will also educate them about your industry. What you have to ensure is that any content or service you offer for free should provide value to the prospects; otherwise, what’s the point, right? Offering a solution to key industry problems could be a way around this.
Lead magnets primarily allow you to showcase your expertise in industry matters, which will further entice prospects to consider you when they are ready to buy your product or service. They are further an easy way to kickstart the automated lead generation process.
Start With One Automated Workflow
Start with one workflow: a landing page with a lead magnet that triggers a short email sequence and scores each lead by what they open and click. Agree with sales on the score that makes a lead ready, and route those leads to them automatically. Once that runs well, add chatbots, more personalization and more lead magnets.
Automation takes repetitive tasks off your plate so you can focus on the work that needs a person. It helps in these ways:
- Automated email campaigns free you from sending follow-ups and personalized messages, enhancing the customer experience.
- Lead scoring and automated lead management allow you to track the journey of every contact in your list.
- Marketing automation tools help you send relevant content to prospects, speeding up their journey through the funnel.
- Triggered email campaigns increase engagement.
- Salespeople can focus on building relationships with warm leads rather than spending excessive time on cold campaigns.
- Marketing automation efficiently manages your lead data and alerts you when and how to act on a contact to maximize conversion rates.
- Outbound Lead generation marketing automation gets marketing and sales teams on the same page, reducing friction between the two.
- Automating processes allows you to combine the efforts of different marketing channels.
Sources
- Salesforce: State of Marketing (2017)
- Forrester: Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, 2017 to 2023 (Global) (2018)
- Jumplead: Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success (2015)
- Liana Technologies: The Benefits and Challenges of Marketing Automation (2017)