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How Marketing Automation Finds Qualified Leads

How Marketing Automation Finds Qualified Leads

What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?Marketing Automation

I have never heard sales or marketing say they wish their job was harder. But with all the noise in the digital space getting a prospect attention has become increasingly harder. The solution … Marketing Automation. Marketing automation is an automated lead generation and nurturing program which uses a variety of personalized content and tools to convert prospects to qualified leads and qualified leads to customers in a faster and more efficient way and with greater ROI. By obtaining more sales qualified leads through marketing automation, businesses are able to pass leads with a higher interest and knowledge level onto sales.

According to research cited by 20 Stunning Inbound Marketing Statistics, “Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.” This drastic increase happens because marketing automation nurtures a prospect through the sales cycle. No longer will a sales team be sent leads that aren’t interested. Instead, leads that have been digitally identified, tracked, and scored on their interest and interaction level based on quantifiable data will proceed to sales. Marketing automation’s process allows sales and marketing to work together to achieve success by having a potential customer primed to buy by the time sales interacts with them.

 

What is the Automated Marketing Process?

When preparing a meal, a chef wouldn’t start cooking a dish without first prepping the ingredients. And they defiantly would not serve it up without making sure it was fully cooked. Like cooking, there is a process a lead must go through before being ready to be served up to sales. Marketing needs to do the right kind of prep work at the right time to make sure a lead is sales ready. Marketing automation makes sure that happens by taking each separate ingredient in marketing and optimizes it to work with one another to achieve maximum conversions. This allows marketing and sales to have the right type interactions with a lead at the right time in the sales process. Marketing automation is made possible through a 4 step funnel.

1) Awareness of the product is at the top of the marketing automation funnel. At this part of the funnel, marketing automation generates demand by implementing a series of tools to make a potential lead aware that your business offers what they need or want. The awareness of your brand is generated through tools like:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
  • Content Marketing
  • Event Webinars
  • Social Media
  • and Content Syndication

2) After a potential lead is aware of your business, they proceed to the interest portion of the funnel.  In this portion of the funnel marketing automation help identify and profile a lead. This is determined through previously established buyer persona and identification of a lead’s digital habits and interactions. The tactics used by marketing automation at this stage of the funnel would be:

  • Gated Content
  • Email Marketing
  • Content Personalization
  • White Papers
  • Case Studies
  • and Surveys

3) Once a lead is confirmed as interested, marketing automation moves them onto the consideration portion of the funnel. It is now time to nurture the lead. Lead nurturing with marketing automation gives you quantifiable data on your lead to support the lead nurturing process. Guide the New Buyer’s Journey With Marketing Automation  cites that research shows that “Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.” Marketing automation’s nurturing program helps your company increase nurturing efficiency and value by automatically delivering the lead individualized:

  • Product Comparison
  • Buying Guides
  • How To’s
  • and Webinars

4) Now that you’ve got the lead considering your product or service it’s time to see how intent they are on buying. Knowing how likely your lead is to start the buying process is key to knowing if they are a sales qualified lead. By acquiring quantifiable data through lead scoring you can understand how qualified your lead is. At this step in the process, marketing automation will send them:

  • Company Information
  • Get Started Information
  • and Promotions

By going through the marketing automation process, a business can insure qualified leads are coming out the end instead of just a large quantity. This saves sales time and money since stage four has a lead recycled if it has an insufficient lead score. Once a lead has worked its way through the automation funnel and come out as a qualified lead it can be transferred to a sales representative. The lead will then continue down the sales funnel to be evaluated and sold to as a primed and informed consumer.

The Software Behind Automated Marketing

To start the marketing automation process your business will need marketing automation software. Marketing automation software integrates all of your marketing efforts into one system that monitors, implements, improves and corrects them. Marketing automation software can do a variety of things for your company, including:

  • Showing what campaigns are driving the most sales
  • Showing provable ROI through the use of metrics
  • Tracking the sales cycle from beginning to end
  • Merging with your third party CRM program to allow a two-way sync of data
  • Allowing sales access to critical information and data to close a sale
  • Identify the best sales representatives and where there is room to improve
  • Understanding why sales close and why they fail
  • Identifying interested prospects through lead scoring based on interaction with your page, tracking, fit, and more
  • Automating a lead nurturing program
  • Redefining and improve your PPC strategies
  • Using workflow to automatically engage a lead with text and emails at the right point in the buying process
  • Dynamic list building that updates contact lists as they meet a certain criteria
  • Using behavioral based tracking to understand your customer’s motives
  • Tracking each type of device used to interact with your webpage
  • Allowing you to choose specific industries you want to target along with what level of professional within a company
  • Letting your company specify certain pages of your website that are most important and would add more to a lead score
  • Knowing when a lead opens an email
  • Creating a timeline of events for leads based on tracking information collected from their digital movements

This and much more can be achieved through the implementation of marketing automation software. But while marketing automation software is great for businesses to obtain more quality leads, increase conversions and ROI, it does take a lot of work and effort to maintain. Here at Biznet Internet Solution we can help implement and manage your marketing automation software to achieve your desired results. Take our free “marketing automation health check”  today and get started on the path to growing your business.