How Does Marketing Automation Help with Lead Generation?

Personalization and relevance come together to make your l ead generation strategy more robust and successful, and marketing automation can help garner even better results.

When creating content, successful marketers touch upon the reader’s pain points and provide valuable information on ways to address them. According to PWC, 73 percent of users say the customer experience is important in how they engage with content. DemandMetric found that 90% of customers found custom content useful.

What goes into a content experience that drive leads?

Personalization and relevance that help make the content something the audience can use or take something of value away from (for both B2B and B2C)
Strong creative, easy-to-read and easy-to-understand layout
Made as simple as possible and avoiding overly complicated ways of engaging with the content

How can this content reach its intended audience? How can it be delivered?

That’s where marketing automation comes in.

Marketing automation enables tighter collaboration with sales

Every marketing campaign starts with customer data. It tells you who your audience is, what they’re looking for, their preferences, and what problems they’re experiencing. This data informs your content, the right time to send it out, and on what channel.

Marketing automation tools are not only helpful for collecting actionable data, but they can also help foster closer alignment between marketing and sales. Higher quality data translates into higher quality of marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Sophisticated tools allow marketing and sales to set a wide range of criteria on which to evaluate and score leads.

These tools also allow teams to calibrate the filters to allow just the right amount of leads to get delivered into the sales workflow. Automation is also key to delivering these leads into a CRM for sales as quickly as possible. Lastly, marketing automation can provide sales with insights on all of the customer touchpoints and exactly what content they engaged with in order to ensure their conversation is relevant when the timing is right.

The better the data, the better chance marketing has of sending a more qualified lead to sales.

How marketing automation delivers content that generates leads

Marketing automation can help reach out to prospects and customers with:

Email campaigns

Email still delivers a consistently high average ROI ($42 for every $1 spent.) An automated email campaign serves many functions:

Make a relevant offer
Give a valuable tip
Invite someone to a webinar
Let someone know of a new whitepaper or analyst report
Tell the reader about a product update

With email, you can reach out to new prospects, nurture leads, keep in touch with existing customers, offer cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and more.

Landing pages

One of the most important aspects of your website is driving traffic to it and using it as a place to provide answers to prospect questions, including what products and services you offer and testimonials from happy customers. Various landing pages can be used to make interacting with various assets easier and keep viewers from needing to leave your landing page. Landing pages can be personalized and also used for forms and used instead of pdf that need to be downloaded.

Testing and optimization

The list goes on and on of what you can test and optimize for websites and emails.

Copy and design
Subject lines and headlines
Offers and CTAs
Send time
Send frequency

A/B and multivariate testing give you insights into what’s working with your campaigns and what isn’t. It tells you what to tweak, improve, and drop all together in order to optimize.

Chatbots

Many websites use chatbots to help visitors navigate around the site and help make their queries. The more chatbots interact with visitors, the more intelligence gets generated, which in turn can help enhance both the experience on your site and give you insights into your website visitors and the content that interests them.

The difference marketing automation makes with lead generation

Marketing automation replaces manual processes, enabling you to collect the necessary data to identify the best leads and engage them with your most relevant and valuable content. It also replaces the manual tasks marketers cannot effectively carryout at scale with the necessary precision, such as delivering content in a variety of formats on a variety of channels. Marketing automation platforms brings efficiency and speed. Even brands with smaller marketing teams can outperform those with more headcount and resources when the right tasks are replaced with automation.

For more information about marketing automation, please read: