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Lead generation is an important tactic for bringing in a constant supply of new potential customers. Automating this process means it works while you’re running the business.

When you leverage the right automation Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, they will help you segment your audience based on demographic, behavioral, or firmographic data. Some good examples are HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho and Pipedrive.

With an effective marketing automation package, you can:

• Expand awareness of your brand through consistent messages across multiple channels, which will ultimately bring more clients and customers to your business.
• Scale your marketing so that as your business grows you can handle a larger volume of leads without sacrificing the quality of your marketing materials.
• Save yourself time and resources by streamlining your lead generation process, allowing you to focus on other crucial aspects of your business.
• Personalize your marketing communications, so the interactions are more relevant to individual users, which increases the chances of conversion.
• Get data into your audience, their habits, and their preferences, enabling you to refine your marketing strategies and increase your profitability.

You can set up a schedule of when and where certain content will be posted to your website, blog, social media platforms, and potential customers’ email accounts.

Create lead magnets and landing pages

A lot of marketing automation uses lead magnets to gain a qualified lead, where a person has agreed to register or login to receive a piece of useful content. Some types of lead magnets you might consider using are:

• Guides or reports that have value-led content, the results of research or certain insights that a person can only access by downloading your documents.
• Videos to demonstrate a new product or service, case studies, customer stories or how your business runs.
• Free trials of products, often used for software or applications where the delivery cost is zero.
• Webinars or podcasts that highlight your expertise and give your audience valuable insights.
• Sign-up for your newsletter.

Once you’ve created this useful piece of content add it to a landing page on your website.

Email marketing

A useful automation tool lets you set up trigger-based workflows so you can leverage opportunities to nurture your leads. For example, some triggers you could utilize include:

• Welcome emails by thanking any new subscribers to your blog or e-newsletter and give them a preview of the kind of content they’ll get.
• Lead nurturing after a potential customer has downloaded your e-book or white paper. Automated emails sent to their inbox suggesting what they do next, perhaps downloading a paid-for piece of content.
• Sending emails when a customer has abandoned their shopping cart. This needs to be done delicately to avoid a hard-sell approach with the aim of encouraging customers to go through with their purchases.

Any call to action to encourage your potential customers to take the next step on the journey toward a purchase is valid.

Promote

Lead generation works better if you have a budget to promote your lead magnets. For example, you can automate social media, allowing your posts to go up at optimal times, further increasing your reach and engagement. HubSpot is a good example of being able to schedule and automate social media posts across platforms.

Automating your paid ads can drive more traffic to your website and capture leads more efficiently. Popular options include Google Ads, Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads to automate retargeting of ads to reach visitors who didn’t convert on their first visit.

Additional automated lead generation tools

Websites can be optimized to include their own lead generation and conversion tools, which in turn can help your business. You could implement:

• Sales representative notifications. For example, if a lead goes through a few steps and views your pricing page, automatically advise your sales team so they can follow up.
• Retargeting ads, which display to users who have visited your website or otherwise engaged with content you’ve produced.
• Automated referral programs offering discounts or other rewards in exchange for successful referrals.
• SMS campaigns where texts with updates, promotions, or reminders are sent to people who have given their phone number.

Some automated lead generation tools are designed to expand your reach whereas others are meant to help you build your relationship with the leads you have. It’s important to find the right balance between the two, so you are consistently bringing in new leads and nurturing existing leads.

Contact us if we can help your business take the next step.

“Serving Cornelius, Huntersville, Lake Norman, Mooresville, and Surrounding Area Small Business Owners since 1996″