The past year has given us many challenges, and that’s true for people across the globe both personally and professionally. But there has also been a massive shift. The pandemic has changed the way we connect with others, including the businesses we interact with. Everything became online and has been important for marketers to connect with their customers online.
Marketing automation
The marketing team have to utilise a range of tactics from advertising to content and email marketing, with the goal of passing the leads generated to sales. Marketing automation is the method of leveraging software to automate repeated marketing tasks. Automation can save marketers time when they are examining leads and taking potential clients through the conversion funnel. you’ll be able to take an overview of the individual interactions with your marketing automation fuelled lead generation process in place, that go into nurturing your leads and make adjustments to enhance effectiveness.
However, a significant disagreement can occur between sales and marketing teams as to the quality of the leads that are passed from marketing to sales. With the sales team complaining that the quality of the leads being delivered by marketing are poor and the marketing team complaining that the sales team just isn’t being effective. This conflict comes from the absence of alignment between sales and marketing, luckily marketing aids to align the sales and marketing processes.
Automations develops effectiveness
The capacity to design a lead generation flow for your business is extremely powerful, but probably the most functional feature of marketing automation is that it enables you to personalise your interactions with each lead depending upon their personal details and current sales readiness stage.
The ‘automation’ area of marketing automation remains to scale your best responses to the activity your lead takes. This supports you to keep your leads engaged and actively advancing through your sales stages.
A few steps for generating qualified leads with marketing automation are:
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Transform a visitor to a lead
This part might be defined as ‘lead generation’ by some people but it’s actually the simplest part of the whole process. As it is based upon an initial conversion your lead could be 6 months away from being sales ready.
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2
Nurture your lead
Here, marketing automation really makes a difference to the process of generating good quality, engaged and qualified leads.
When your lead first changes using marketing automation, you may put them into a ‘lead’ stage. With the focus of re-engaging them with content and offers that are developed to educate them and help them become aware about the benefits of what you do and how you can resolve their specific problems.
Buyers will research the information they need to make a purchase as they are self-educated these days. The more hugely involved you are with their research the better chance you stand of closing the sale.
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Close the sale
When your leads have accomplished a certain level within your automated sales funnel they can be passed on to sales, as a highly qualified lead.
Lead generation process
A complete lead generation marketing component combines several basic mechanisms in order to develop a systematic process to generate and qualify leads over time.
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1
Landing pages
Landing pages and conversion forms are the factors at which your website visitor firstly converts into a lead and over the course of nurturing shares more details with you through the form fields that then populate both your marketing automation software and your CRM software.
The information which the lead provides you can be used to segment your leads for additional email campaigns, as well as delivering powerful sales intelligence.
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2
Email autoresponder campaigns
Landing pages are one of the mostly used marketing automation systems to trigger email nurture sequences or autoresponder campaigns. These enable you to follow up on any interaction with targeted campaigns that are personalised to the lead’s sales stage along with including merge tags that contain contact information.
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3
Sales funnel stages
Marketing automation will enable you to move your leads from one sales stage to another depending upon their activity and interactions. Stages may include:
- Subscriber
- Lead
- Marketing Qualified
- Sales Qualified
- Customer
How you utilise these stages will be based upon what marketing material, offers and steps you install to interact with your leads. If you are trying to work out what type of marketing material you may require to nurture your leads, a good first step is to describe buyer personas to clear your customer types.
Advancing buyer personas takes the guesswork out of what might be appealing or useful for your leads, and offers you a framework to develop and enhance the content and marketing you implement as part of your lead generation process.
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Repeat and improve
You’ll can take an overview of the individual interactions that go into nurturing your leads and make adjustments to boost effectiveness with your marketing automation fuelled lead generation process in place.
