How to Achieve Effective Lead Generation through Marketing Automation

The sales funnel process is nonlinear. Hence, for effective lead generation, marketing automation plays a critical role beyond just generating interest. Lead generation is only effective when it converts to (returning) sales. Consequently, the nonlinearity of the sales funnel explains that marketing efforts are vital even in the latter stages of lead generation.

So, marketing is vital at the start and every other stage of the prospect’s lifecycle. Even after the first purchase, the cyclical nature of marketing needs to kick in. Your business needs more returning, referring, and ambassadorial customers.

Marketing isn’t limited to the start of the sales process. Marketing is involved in every stage, through to recurring sales. Irrespective of your marketing team’s size, these required efforts will be a lot.

Hence, it becomes vital to automate several marketing processes. This article teaches how; we start with understanding what automation in marketing is.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation uses software products to automate some of your recurring and monotonous marketing workflows. Some of the tasks you can automate as a marketer include; emails, social media publishing, and ad campaigns.

• Email Marketing Automation: As a marketer with the right tools, you can send timed or triggered emails to subscribers on your mailing list. Most tools even allow for email personalisation. Furthermore, email marketing isn’t limited to new prospects. You can leverage it to reach prospects at the decision-making stage. You can also reach past buyers, getting them to return or even refer. Finally, automation makes the email lead-generation maintenance cycle easier.
• Social Media Marketing Automation: Social media automation involves publishing marketing content, timed or triggered. With tools, you can schedule, republish, or re-share posts. In addition, some tools facilitate automated post engagements. Thanks to these tools, you can allocate more hours focusing on critical work areas.
• Ad Campaign Marketing Automation: Thanks to appropriate tools, you only need to set up a campaign once; automation handles trigger moments to get your messages out.

Thanks to the tools involved, marketing processes become faster, easier, and more efficient. So while automation is a must-do for B2C companies, it’s also vital to B2B marketing workflows.

When done right, marketing automation combines software, customer-centricity, and strategy. Combining these elements heightens lead generation, sales conversion, and recurring purchase count. As a result, marketing automation can be the ultimate success hack for lead generation for your business. Let’s consider more reasons you should prioritise marketing automation for lead generation.

Importance of marketing automation in lead generation

Marketing automation is vital through every stage of lead generation. As we’ve established earlier, marketing efforts should be deployed throughout the customer lifecycle. Furthermore, marketing efforts can be automated and integrated intelligently into your sales funnel. When executed correctly, marketing automation can result in the following.

Personalisation

Your prospects’ actions are data. These actions tell you what your prospects need, are looking for, don’t need, etc. However, as your prospect list grows, it’s impossible to manage and respond to these data manually. Hence, it would be best if you had marketing automation software.

Upon having the right marketing automation software in place, responding accordingly to data points with relevant pre-created content becomes easier.

Personalisation is vital because customers’ behaviour differs. Being able to warm up to prospects with the right content at the right time is essential. Also, you don’t stop at the first purchase. You should ensure adequate personalisation till you make prospects repeat customers. You can build loyalty in your leads through marketing automation.

Streamlining the Process

A company must be customer-centric. When automated marketing is at the center of your strategy, you facilitate a closer-knit in your company. Ensure that focus is towards developing processes that work across the board.

Breaking through silos and working together to breed an incredible customer experience promises success. From the first impression until purchase and return purchase, the experience should be top-notch.

With planned automated marketing efforts, all internal lead-generation-focused teams enjoy great workflow.

Data Integration and Analytics

Working with data is vital to 21st-century business. Hence, ensure you have systems that generate insight to enhance the marketing efforts. The data then optimises your automation efforts. In addition, having the correct data to inform appropriate content delivery at specific times brings prospects closer to purchase. Most tools also provide analytics that helps you know what’s working and what’s not.

Effective marketing automation processes for lead generation

Here is a breakdown of vital steps to automating marketing for lead generation for your business. Naturally, though, a combination of these (or beyond) may differ for your specific company needs.

Creating a Landing Page

You create a landing page when you have a product or service to promote. However, landing pages can function beyond one-time campaigns. Landing pages are essential to marketing automation. With an effective landing page, you can:

• Execute audience segmentation; showing different localised contents
• Lead prospects directly to the sales team
• Gather analytics

Creating a landing page is one of the least stressful marketing tasks.

Syncing Data for Improved Personalisation

To do customer experience right, you need data. Hence, if you collect data across different channels, ensure that you set up a syncing infrastructure. Having a central data hub is vital to the success of automated marketing for lead generation.

Emails

Your email chain must be carefully thought-out, curated, and created. Your email chain (called email drip campaign) can lead a prospect from nascence to maturity when you do it right. For a drip-email campaign to be successful;

• Content must be relevant
• Designs must be engaging and raise emotions
• You must use the right tools.
• Study, understand and leverage analytics to optimise the email drip.

Chatbots

You can’t be available all waking hours. Hence, integrate chatbots into your system to collect leads when you aren’t available. Don’t say chatbots are annoying; in the current age, most users expect the presence of chatbots when dealing with companies.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is called split testing, and it helps you see the resultants of varying outlooks of the same campaign. Split testing aims to see which campaign variation works best. For example, you can evaluate bounce rates, sessions, sales generation, etc.

Be Intentional About Customers

Customers can know when a company cares. If you’re in a competitive industry, maximise every lead you get. Nurture your leads to customers.

• Give them relevant information that keeps your company in their minds.
• Your automation systems should be there with relevant content for their problems.
• Engage better across the board

Conclusion

Marketing is a constantly evolving field. The rapid evolution is thanks to innovative connectivity and social products and tool. Hence, to make marketing automation for lead generation to remain effective, keep abreast of the ecosystem. Don’t stop optimising.