Conventional marketing tactics that are impersonal don’t interest the modern-day consumer too much these days, making leads ever harder to come by. Whether it’s just general social media ads or marketing emails, if they are not personalized or relevant, today’s consumer is very unlikely to respond.
However, despite the ineffectiveness of these conventional tactics, marketers continued to deploy them for lack of a better alternative, but the rise of marketing automation is helping change all that, giving better ROI through stronger leads in a lesser amount of time with the same amount of investment.
Marketing automation is not just a way to automate your time-consuming marketing practices, but it’s a process through which you can reduce redundancy and increase relevance like never before, allowing you to approach the customer just at the right time.
When applied, it doesn’t change the medium or the tools but the approach, increasing effectiveness phenomenally. For e.g. everyone knows that great content always works and you need to push it through all of your social channels and email lists, but if pushed at the wrong time to the wrong audience, even the greatest blog you just compiled will amount to zilch, resulting in a very low number of leads.
And that’s exactly where marketing automation is stepping up. It will push that blog post to those who will find it highly relevant; thereby increasing the chances that they’ll latch on it and enter your sales funnel as a potential lead.
But still, 33% of firms aren’t using it yet because there is a lot of ambiguity on how exactly marketing automation helps revamp lead generation processes.
Through this guide, we’ll walk you through the ways on how marketing automation is helping revamp the lead generation industry through its different facets and advantages:
Marketing Automation constantly pulls updated data
Data is of no use if it’s outdated and that’s likely the case as far as most email lists and other similar collaterals are involved. A consumer can give its email address or contact details but there is a high chance that these details change if that consumer changes his company or moves and if you don’t have his updated details, you are foregoing off a potential lead.
For sales professionals, who work tirelessly on generating leads, this is disastrous. But marketing automation can help them here if integrated with CMS systems. For e.g. Pardot is a B2B marketing automation software that updates data from Sales force’s CRMs once every two minutes, allowing sales pros to gather relevant info on leads in a much more streamlined manner.
Other such marketing automation tools can cull similarly updated data from a lead’s social profiles as well, so if you have one integrated with your marketing, you will be a step ahead of others in knowing how to contact a potentially solid lead.
Marketing automation helps convert dead-end leads
According to a study, just 23% of B2B leads are ready to engage meaningfully and as for the rest, they are often a dead-end that most marketers don’t exactly know what to do with. But you can just let go of 73% of your leads just because they are not interested a lot. What you need to here is to nurture these leads in order to make them sales-ready.
Marketing automation tools these days give you the unwarranted power to not just nurture these leads via targeting them with different relevant campaigns tailored to meet their requirements but they also assign a score to them. Once you have this information, you can then align your priorities and specifically target those that are the closest to convert.
Marketo by Adobe can deliver exactly these account insights powered by AI and match you up with the best leads that just need a little working on. If you are not using such a tool, you just don’t know how many leads are there in your funnel that can convert with just a little nudge in the right direction.
Marketing automation increases the power of content
Despite the rise of audience engagement tools like podcasts and videos, content is still king. A powerfully compiled blog post can really empower your leads to take the jump and engage with you but how exactly can you get them to that point?
Marketing automation tools also offer content automation services, targeting a vast array of platforms including social media, emails, etc. But that’s not the best part because they also push it just at the right time when a consumer wants a content piece like the one you have the most.
It does this with practices like social selling that allow marketers to get powerful insights into ongoing needs and how they can best harness them to generate leads.
Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Social Port, Nimble and others have gained significant traction among marketers who want to amplify the power of their content. This removes the problem of old content becoming useless because if you have it saved on your cloud or elsewhere, you can always push it to someone who needs it just by tracking the way it satisfies their current needs.
Influencers like Neil Patel and platforms like Hubspot are constantly trying to push the idea of using your content through marketing automation techniques as a way of gaining significant leads.
Wrapping things up
Marketing automation is fast becoming an indispensable commodity in the lead generation industry because of all the factors listed above. But even though its utility is great, you are not absolved of your duty as a marketer or a sales pro in utilizing it in the best possible manner.
It does automate tasks, simplify things and offer significant insights but in the end, it’s you who needs to be putting all of these advantages to use in the right way to gain the kind of leads that will help grow your business.