Automated lead generation is a solution to the question — How do you create a cohesive and manageable lead generation strategy for your business? This solution uses software to design a lead generation marketing flow, saving you time and money compared to a scattered marketing strategy. Automated lead generation is a critical marketing tool that allows you to control and analyze your lead generation funnel. Recent statistics show that, on average, 51% of companies are currently using marketing automation and that more than half of B2B companies — 58% — plan to adopt this technology.
What is Lead Generation?
A lead generation marketing workflow typically begins with consumer interest in your business’s brand, products, or services. Interested prospects are then nurtured through the marketing funnel and into your sales pipeline until they are ready to do business. If done well, your lead generation strategies will build contact lists for email newsletters, grow your audience, boost brand awareness, create everlasting relationships with qualified customers, and increase sales.
What Does Lead Generation Look Like in Action?
The formula to successful lead generation involves understanding who your audience is, what channels they’re active on, their interests, and their consumer behavior profile.
Automated lead generation tactics include the following four ingredients:
- Lead capture: How you collect a lead’s information, including their name, contact information, and high-value details about them or their organization.
- Lead magnets: Incentives — often free — to drive prospects to become leads.
- Lead qualification: An analysis of the lead’s information to determine how likely they are to convert to quality customers
- Lead segmentation: Divides your leads based on their personal information, activities, and habits.
Segmented leads offer assurance to your sales team that they’re only receiving qualified leads. This data helps you predict the lead’s future behaviors and help your business analyze your marketing campaign’s successes.
Top Lead Generation Strategies
High-quality content is currently the best way to prove your business’s industry authority and attract new leads. There are several other channels that, if optimized, can drive lead generation, including:
- Social media
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Website landing pages
- High-quality content
- Personalized email newsletters and campaigns
- Mobile-optimized websites
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a mix of proven, low-cost online marketing tactics that use non-paid search results from search engines like Yahoo and Google. Using specific local SEO techniques is essential to increasing your website traffic by ensuring your company makes it on those search results. In 2020, internet sales as a percent of revenues rose to the highest level in a decade at 13.5%.
Here are some of the most important SEO tactics that can boost your lead generation:
- Create a complete and accurate profile on Google My Business.
- List your website with several directories.
- Provide valuable content containing well-researched information and key phrases.
- Attain several high-quality backlinks.
Google is now practicing mobile-first indexing, which predominantly uses the mobile version of your website for ranking and indexing. This means that mobile SEO is a crucial tactic to consider when creating your overall lead generation strategy. Using responsive technology on your website can help optimize it for mobile viewing.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing can be an inexpensive and effective way to build connections with potential customers. By analyzing data from your email list, automation tools can help you personalize your messages while ensuring you’re bringing the right content to the right customer segments.
Benefits of Lead Generation and Automation
Today, businesses need to use social media, advertising, content marketing, websites, landing pages, SEO, and email marketing as lead generation strategies. Marketing campaigns must run and be refreshed regularly to attract, convert, and nurture new business leads. Your company may need an external marketing team’s expertise familiar with today’s digital landscape to provide and manage an automated flow.
Provide High-Quality Leads
Determining a good lead is more complex than just targeting those that sign up for a newsletter. Your sales team can’t lose time cold-calling dead-end leads when automated lead generation can intelligently help you refine the customers you target.
Provide Personalized Responses
An automated system can provide personalized responses to your customers, letting them know they are unique. If you have multiple sales verticals, setting up customer personas can also create individualized customer connections.
Instant Notifications
Another benefit of an automated lead generation system is its ability to provide a notification when a prospect is ready to buy or commit via email, text, or phone.
Getting Your Lead Generation Marketing Mix Right
The actual costs of lead generation — including time and talent — can severely tax your business’s resources. Setting up an automated lead generation system can greatly supplement two of the scarcest resources in most businesses’ arsenal — time and money. Finding and managing the right combination of strategies to achieve your business’s goals can be a lot easier if you engage the expertise of a professional branding and marketing company like Glint Advertising. Call us today to learn more.
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