How to leverage marketing automation to generate more leads

Marketing teams of every business, whether it is a start-up or an established one, strive to generate more and more customers who genuinely show interest in your product or service. This is known as a lead generation where through transparent means of communication you develop long-term relationships with customers rather than chasing them randomly for one – time sales. These long-lasting relationships with customers help you secure new leads too as they keep you updated on your strengths and weaknesses. Such honest feedback or results make you realize the manner in which you can improve your business opportunities and know honestly, whether your current strategies are working or not.

Although this does not mean that you stop engaging yourself in efforts to attract new customers yet you should focus on gaining customer insights and gain extra information on whether your product or services are up-to-the-mark or not. Keeping them impressed will also ensure that they share their experience further with other people which will ensure the generation of more leads.

What is Marketing Automation?

The process of lead generation is a tough one yet is necessary so that you do not waste further time on customers who do not care about your product or service and who will never become potential leads. The process may look tedious initially but reaps immense profits in the long-run by converting these leads into your loyal customers. To avoid excess manual interference and reduce costs, businesses use various software that automates the process of lead generation. These digital marketing automation tools attract more leads, help to keep them engaged and updated with your products and services, and ultimately, improve the quality of your leads and accelerate the sales targets of your business.

Being one of the most widely used methods for lead generation, it becomes pertinent to understand the meaning of Marketing Automation before using it. SearchSalesforce gives a proper definition for Marketing Automation; “the use of the software for automating the marketing processes like customer data integration, customer segmentation, and campaign management. Using marketing automation helps make the processes much more efficient, which would otherwise be performed manually; it also makes newer processes possible. Marketing automation has lately become an integral component of CRM.”

Hence, it can be seen clearly that Marketing Automation is not merely software but a method altogether to make the manual efforts much easier, productive, and cost-efficient without any involvement of humans. Research reports by various institutions like Hubspot confirm that using Marketing Automation increases sales up to 50 percent at almost 33 percent fewer costs. It provides a plethora of benefits to marketing initiatives such as improve customer experience through better customer-business relations, improve efficiency through cost-effective methods, use of customer data available from various channels, increased number and better quality of leads who tend to stay loyal to your brand, better communication, and cooperation between marketing and sales teams in a business, etc.

However, most companies face issues with gaining optimum benefits through Marketing Automation either due to poor market research or half-hearted efforts by businesses who do not realize its importance eventually leading to many risks. So, here are a few tips on how to leverage Marketing Automation to generate more leads:

Prioritize quality over quantity

Marketing Automation tools generate a pool of data. However, it will be your responsibility to keep a check on the quality of content that you publish. The aim should be to generate quality leads rather than a large number of leads. The quantity of leads proves to be fruitless when they do not end up buying your products or services. Therefore, you should ensure that your automation tools keep a check on your leads and determine their intentions before putting in extra efforts. Your marketing, as well as the sales team, should decide a criterion by which you can bifurcate between customers as to who are quality leads and who is not.

Use rewards to entice customers

It is very important for your customers to realize their importance in your business. This helps create better customer-business relations. For long-term growth, it is important that you identify customers who are loyal to your business and offer them rewards or coupons. Such efforts on your part will improve your impression with customers and also build up your publicity.

Focus on nurturing your customers

Your customer base offers you a plethora of opportunities to turn them into leads. It is much more feasible to nurture your customers into becoming leads rather than finding new ones. Your current customer base has still made efforts towards generating loyalty towards your product or service, therefore, if you keep them happy and content with your other services and constant communication, then they will automatically turn into loyal leads. You can segregate such customers and then guide your automation tools to send them tailored content as per their needs and demands.

Use segmentation

Using lists or segments to differentiate between your target audience is one of the most common methods to be applied while using Marketing Automation. These lists help you to segregate customers on the basis of their intentions, demands, behavior, the products or services they acquire, geographic data, etc. You can divide your customers as potential leads, existing prospects, or existing customers. This will help you take tailored steps towards such customers in order to coax them into becoming leads.

Use Lead Scoring

This is another viable method that is used by many to leverage automation software. Lead scoring is the method by which you can assign a particular value to a customer depending on their likelihood of converting into a lead. This is highly important as it will determine which customers are ready to be passed on to the sales team. Lead scoring is essential since it will help prevent you from wasting your time and efforts on people who do not have any intention of becoming prospective customers.

Top Marketing Automation Tools

Marketing Automation Tools help serve the purpose of leveraging automation to a greater extent. So, here are a few of the top marketing automation tools that help in lead generation:

HubSpot

One of the most widely used automation software by businesses to enhance their lead generation is HubSpot. This software is a boon that allows you to track the behavior of your customers through their social media, emails, etc. It generates tools like email marketing, calls to action, social media marketing, etc. which are automated. A major advantage of this software is that it gives you a plethora of other methods for marketing like live chats, pop-ups, email follow-ups, website forms, etc. The HubSpot CRM feature permits you to keep a check on how your leads are behaving towards your strategies, how active they are on your website, and the degree of their interaction. It is an integrated platform where you can easily combine both your data and growth statistics to produce better results. Hubspot also comes with an easy-to-use visual platform which makes it easier for customers to adapt to this software. From blogging, emails’, landing pages, to social media, calls-to-action, and ads, Hubspot ensures to leverage your number of leads through its marketing automation techniques.

Mailchimp

This software tool helps in building email campaigns for your prospective leads with the appropriate content as well as look so as to attract their attention. This assists in the creation of landing pages so as to produce leads with adopt-in boxes. The forms generated from this software can be customized to collect relevant data from the leads. Discount offers, tests, toolkits, coupons, etc. through this software are a major reason why businesses prefer Mailchimp over the other tools in the market.

Drip

This automation tool through its finest technology will assist you in segregating your lists into segments depending on the products or services that your customers enlisted for. This will help you further by sending personalized and relevant content to each of them. Its program called Drip NetSuite Integration provides you with ideas as to what your potential leads want or need. Through their buying patterns, browsing history, etc. you can easily determine the filed of content they would get attracted to which can be delivered by you via emails, social media platforms, blogs, etc.

Zendesk

Another widely used operation tool, Zendesk focuses on handling your customer support conversations which prove to be highly useful to generate leads. These conversations with customers via emails, phones, or messaging will help you to understand the needs and complaints of your customers and they can spark the probability of sales too. This tool works in close coordination with your support and sales team. Their feature known as Zendesk Sell allows instant information to be passed on to your sales team as soon as a lead shows interest.

Nimble

This digital marketing automation tool is another way you can effectively improve customer-business relationships. This particular tool uses CRM software to help build relationships and improve social interaction. This marketing automation software uses social data of customers like birthdays, anniversaries, job changes, future goals, etc. and then successfully reach out to them on such special occasions through personalized messages. Such insights into your customers’ lives help you understand the algorithm as to when to reach out to prospective customers and how to reach out to them. You can easily integrate Nimble with other digital marketing automation tools to get access to emails and other contact information via other websites too.

Conclusion

Marketing is not an easy job, yet it remains one of the most essential parts of a business. Marketing automation is just one of the ways in which this tough job can be made a tad bit easier. Proper lead generation can make your business grow excessively well. With the dawn of technology, where most businesses have started using even artificial intelligence to improve their work, marketing automation is a boon. The number of possibilities has increased ten-fold with such marketing automation software. However, it depends entirely on business as to how and up to what extent they are willing to use this technology for their benefit.

Rafiqul, a techie/engineer by profession is adapting his lifestyle driven by the passion to be a blogger and an author at LINKoPR.COM.

He enjoys blogging more than his day job since he is his own boss here and he is establishing his .com lifestyle in this limitless earning potential online platform. He is a goal achiever and is punctual in all his chores.