How to Establish High Quality Lead Generation Using Marketing Automation
Are you looking to increase profitability by generating high-quality leads from your website? Do you feel like you are always pressed for time and struggle to fit key business development initiatives into your workday? The largest bottleneck to business growth is time, especially considering that every business has objectives to meet. Relieve that bottleneck by deploying a marketing automation tool to help reduce the time required to manage lead generation processes.
Many businesses focus on increasing the volume of their website traffic through either social media, SEO, or search engine advertising, but that is only half the battle. You could spend months and years increasing your website traffic, but it will only be meaningful if it helps you profitably grow your business. You must efficiently engage your customers throughout the buying journey, especially that it takes a typical customer seven interactions to get convinced they should do business with you.
To establish an effective lead generation campaign, you first need to define your targeted customer personas. To help you do this, you may want to consider running polls on social media and by interviewing your customers. Depending on the exact dynamics of your company, you may have multiple services that appeal to different customer personas. Your buyer personas only can help your company improve its brand messaging, and become more engaging with its ideal customers. We recommend that you focus on your top 3 or 4 customer personas, which represent 90% of a company’s sales, according to a study by Mark W. Schaefer. Then, prioritize your personas so that your company dedicates a higher level of resources to ones with higher growth potential.
Build a landing page that conveys your specific value proposition in a manner that is most relevant to your defined customer persona. Build a form that collects a user’s contact info in exchange for free content that would be delivered via an automated email. Allow the user to download the content through a link on the email. Be sure to place the inquiry form in a place such that a visitor does not need to scroll to see the form. Afterward, you can then engage the user by placing a call to action that moves them forward in the buying process.
Don’t forget to send lead nurturing emails to remain top of mind and continue building a relationship with your prospects. Of course, you ultimately would want the prospect to purchase your service. Though, you would want to ensure that you do not annoy prospects by just sending out a link to buy your offering. Instead, offer additional content that is of interest to the prospect, introduce complementary offerings, or advertise a limited-time promotion. Once you have additional content that enhances your emails, you can then place a call to action below that content to make it easy for your prospects to buy your service at any time. Lead nurturing becomes powerful particularly when you leverage the data you have collected to personalize these emails, which drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.
The real power of marketing automation then shows up when lead scoring is leveraged to dynamically prioritize your CRM. Lead scoring comprises of website interactions, social media engagement, and email campaign engagement of each individual user. The tracking is triggered by a customer providing their information on a landing page, or clicking on an email that they have received. Since contacts with higher lead scores are more likely to have purchasing intent for your product or service, your sales team can effectively prioritize their efforts on prospects who are most likely to convert.
We recommend strategically following this process using a reputable marketing automation tool. This is because it is easy to achieve ROI as the savings from improved productivity almost always exceed the cost of the software tool, even if your company has as a sales team as small as one employee. Using a marketing automation tool will allow you to more proficiently strengthen your lead generation strategy over time, and will only increase the chances that your business will remain prosperous for many years to come.
