Automated Lead Generation: Strategy to Have Lead Generation Work in Autopilot
Lead generation is always a never-ending yet crucial task for business owners. Even the most successful marketing managers and business owners face trouble finding leads for their company every once in a while. This is because it is dependent on one of the most dynamic and evolutionary aspects of business – people.
It is indeed difficult to keep up with a fast-changing business audience along with a faster-moving business environment, not to mention, the complex technological changes looming wide and large. The trick is to embrace the changes and turn things to your advantage using smart tools and strategies and automate repetitive tasks.
To understand how to automate your B2B lead generation process, it would be worthwhile to start with what it entails.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is the process of finding new prospective customers for your business and turning them into paying customers using various marketing and sales techniques. It involves attracting new people to get interested in your products and services, sending them useful, valuable, and engaging information, and giving them favorable offers or deals ultimately leading them to make a purchase.
Now the process of lead generation involves everything from gathering basic customer contact information through lead capture forms to analyzing behavior to creating strategic marketing campaigns and designing irresistible calls to action.
It is important to stay on top of each of these aspects of B2B lead generation in order to effectively generate high-quality leads, nurture them and convert them into loyal customers.
However, it can get quite overwhelming and difficult managing each of these activities along with managing the more cognitively demanding activities in business, such as coming up with scaling strategies and brainstorming product or service ideas.
This is why companies resort to lead generation automation.
It involves setting up technological systems and processes that allow you to generate more leads without you having to put in a lot of manual effort. It means that you get to generate a consistent and regular set of high-quality leads without spending too much time sourcing them manually.
Why do you need to automate your lead generation process?
For starters, as much as 80% of marketers are known to use some kind of automation software to generate more leads for their business.
Falling into the unequipped 20% would simply render you incapable and far behind in the competition, ultimately at risk of even losing your business.
Secondly, lead generation automation helps save a significant amount of time by speeding up repetitive and redundant tasks that demand a lot of time. It allows your marketing team to concentrate on more important tasks that mandatorily require your personal touch and creativity, such as speaking to customers and creating strong relationships, drawing up plans for campaigns, and coming up with new products.
According to a study conducted by Aberdeen Group, 90% of established organizations that deploy automation for their business are likely to generate almost 15% more of marketing revenue as well. This is not only because of the efficiency of automation software but also because of the amount of money it helps save in terms of workforce and other resources.
Lead generation and nurturing automation strategies
Hyper personalization
A pleasant and good experience is what’s going to multiply into good leads and loyal customers. And, an excellent customer experience depends on how much value you gave them along with how valuable you made them feel.
Personalization is a long-known concept that has been proven effective in appealing to customers. However, this is the age of hyper-personalization, which means you’ve got to take it up a notch and offer unforgettable user experiences to grab customer attention. Install intelligent website user analytics software to monitor visitor activities, set triggers for interactions and events, and develop smart campaigns to provide content that they can surprisingly resonate with. Also, offer interesting offers and deals to tip their decision in your favor.
You can segment your leads into cohorts and serve them dynamic content based on their characteristics. For example, you can identify leads who are from the Hospitality industry and have a company size anywhere between 50 to 200. Contact us on Salespanel to know more.
Retargeting
Retargeting involves reaching out to customers with the same product or service that caught their attention and reminding them of its amazing qualities or features that they are likely to miss out on if they don’t make the purchase. It is a strategic move that makes use of specific customer information gathered over time, related to their behavior and purchase patterns. It is in fact another form of personalization in application. Retargeting emails, messages, pop-ups, and notifications can be set up to be sent out on the performance of certain trigger actions, such as when the customer downloads a case study on your website, or tries to book a call with your sales team, but doesn’t complete the form.
Learn more about personalized retargeting here.
Chatbots
Chatbots are perhaps one of the most useful pieces of technology that has become more relevant now than ever. With multiple channels of communication available for customers to reach out to you, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Email, etc. there is a pressing need for you to be available and accessible for them across your digital presence. Social media channels especially have become places where customers feel comfortable reaching out to companies. It would practically be impossible for you to be available in all places at all times. This is where chatbots will help you. They help immediately address concerns and allow customers to feel valued in being attended to. This gives them a good customer experience which automatically leads them to becoming leads and ultimately paying customers.
Drip campaigns
Drip campaigns once again are trigger and event-based marketing channels that help reach out and influence customer decisions, at the best times. Thoughtfully designed email drip campaigns can have automated messages crafted with powerful words and irresistible offers, personalized and ready to be sent out to suit each individual customer based on their profile and actions performed by them, as well as their general user behavior. For example, if a customer spends a lot of time reading a particular blog on your website, you can set up an automated email to be sent out suggesting more blogs of the same kind, talking about the same product for them to read. It banks on the chance of an interest expressed by the reader and uses it to push the product until they make the move to purchase it.
Bottom line
Setting up the above-mentioned strategies to work accurately will allow lead generation and engagement to work on autopilot for you. However, you must make sure to augment these strategies with the right messages and thoughtfully created campaigns. You can make use of efficient automation technologies to design and craft appropriate messages that will give your customers the much-needed push to turn into customers.
Sell more, understand your customers’ journey for free!
Sales and Marketing teams spend millions of dollars to bring visitors to your website. But do you track your customer’s journey? Do you know who buys and why?
Around 8% of your website traffic will sign up on your lead forms. What happens to the other 92% of your traffic? Can you identify your visiting accounts? Can you engage and retarget your qualified visitors even if they are not identified?
