You may ask yourself, why is lead generation with marketing automation important for your business? Whether you’re a B2B company or sell your products or services to B2C markets, your business will not have the opportunity to convert prospects into customers without leads. With recession knocking at the door, the importance of keeping your lead generation pipeline full is necessary to maintain the growth of your business.
Lead generation is the first step in getting people interested in your business. If you want to increase conversion from leads to customers, marketing automation will help you achieve that goal.
This blog is just the tip of the iceberg of what lead generation and marketing automation can do for your business. So, let’s start.
What is Lead Generation, and why is it important for your business?
First, let’s define what lead generation is. There are many definitions of lead generation, but the most important is that lead generation is the process of getting people interested in your business and converting them into customers through nurturing.
What is evident from the definition of lead generation is that it can help your business continue to grow and expand. It enables you to reach more prospects and generate interest in your business.
Lead generation usually includes a combination of tactics — SEM, SEO, Social Media, and Display Ads.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the process of using software to automate marketing campaigns and activities throughout the entire buyer’s journey.
Also, software helps your business to automate and simplify tasks.
With market automation, you can provide an individual personalized experience for specific leads within your business. You can tailor every interaction based on customer data to create ongoing journeys through every business touchpoint.
How does market automation software work?
Software collects data through lead interactions: emails, demographic data, engagement data, and so on. This data helps create a whole and real-time view of each lead.
Using lead data automatization software enables you to create different segments and push personalized messages through different channels. Also, it lets you implement digital activities without having to manually press “send” on each and every email, message, campaign, or post you create.
Good automation software helps you identify your business prospect, define right content, define right content, and automatically trigger action based on lead behavior.
The more you know about your customer, the better. The main goal of automation is to scale. Scale your conversions on-site, scale your lead generation, scale your email marketing, and so on.
How to create a Lead Generation Strategy
As with everything in business, it is crucial to start with strategy and plan. With a lead generation strategy, you will ensure a steady inflow of people interested in exploring what you have to offer. Of course, every business owner or marketing executive has the same goals as you. That is why a good lead generation strategy is very important for the success of lead generation and marketing automation activities.
Important: copying other business lead generation strategies will not lead you to the same results. The strategy should be tailored to your business.
Within a lead generation strategy, it is important to define:
- Goals and KPIs for each customer’s journey
- Different triggers for capturing the lead
- What is for your business: MQL, SQL or PQL
- Advertising plan
- SEO
- Measurement plan
- Marketing automation flows
- Plan for testing
- Your business resources
- Activity timeline
Keep in mind that you should capture activities from getting leads through nursing leads to your customer to provide activities for cross-selling and/or upselling and customer engagement.
How can lead generation with marketing automation help your business?
There are at least 8 ways to generate leads using automation can help your business. Let’s delve a little deeper into the 8 ways your business can benefit from using lead generation with automation.
- Activate cold leads – Many businesses have leads that they lose contact with or leads that were once active. To activate cold leads, your business can approach leads with marketing automation. Your business can provide specific content regarding their situation and warm the leads up.
- Increase sales productivity – According to the studies, marketing automation boosts sales productivity by 14.5%*. With automation, you can provide more information about the benefits of the service/product, how to use the product, or eliminate all concerns users might have. With more information, leads are more likely to convert.
- Better user experience with your business – User experience is the sum of individual personalized experiences with your business. With marketing automation, you send personalized messages uniquely created for a specific lead. With personalization, you provide relevant information to the lead, and with this approach, your business provides a better user experience.
- Improve lead quality (MQL, SQL, PQL) – Marketing automation improves lead quality by providing leads with more valuable information regarding products/services. Also, marketing automation is helping leads to go more deep in the funnel to MQL, SQL, and PQL. When leads engage more with relevant and helpful content, their quality increases since, with more information, they are more likely to become customers.
- Increase the number of total leads and sales/close deals – According to VB Insight, 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase. Since marketing automation is helping improve lead quality and sales team, a business will increase the total number of leads and sales/close deals.
- Save time and resources – Instead of hiring additional employees, marketing automation can reduce many manual tasks. Also, existing employees will have more time to focus on more strategic tasks that are very important to the business.
- Increase ROI and revenue – Since lead generation with marketing automation is helping your business be more efficient, it frees up more of your time and resources (and reduces your cost), in turn increasing the number of total sales/close deals. The result is better ROI and revenue for your business.
- Better cash flow – Using lead generation with marketing automation, you have the opportunity to convert prospects into customers faster and more successfully. Supporting the sales team and improving lead quality business will have a positive influence on closing sales/deals.
In addition, automated marketing saves time and resources, which also contributes to improved cash flow.
Once your marketing automation activities are up and running and the first results start coming in, you can analyze and tweak your marketing plan.
The more you automate your lead generation process, the more organized and successful your sales funnel will be. With automation, you are increasing the number of sales leads and increasing sales productivity. Both of these benefits increase closed deals and revenue for your business – the main goal for the business.
To wrap things up
Lead generation and marketing automation are important for business growth. Without this combinatination, your business will have difficulty attracting new customers and sales opportunities.
Find out how we can help your business to grow, and contact us for a free consultation.
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