Identifying the Hottest Leads You Should Be Calling Right Away

Email marketing is an extremely powerful tool in converting your leads into loyal traders. It is not only a means of sending out promotions and waiting …

Identifying the Hottest Leads You Should Be Calling Right Away

Beyond Email: Use Multi-channel Marketing Automation to Generate and Nurture Leads

While marketing automation is a hot topic across industries, many marketers are daunted by the complexities of combining customer journeys, content strategies, and dense technologies. Marketing automation technology allows marketers to generate and nurture leads with sequenced, segmented, and automated campaigns that deliver content at scale, with minimal intervention. Automation can be used to dynamically change content; test messaging; and sequence messages and notifications. As with any marketing initiative, the goal should always be focused on providing content that benefits your customers.

Here are some of the simplest ways to use automation to generate and nurture leads now.

Email

Email is the granddaddy of marketing automation. It’s the best documented and most mature automation channel, and is the gateway to automation for many marketers. There are several types of emails that can be automated:

• Lead nurturing – Lead nurturing is an integral part of a successful marketing strategy, and it builds relationships at scale. Craft content that guides a potential customer through the purchasing process, incorporating third-party reviews, purchase incentives, a sense of urgency, and strong calls to action.


• Existing customer programs – Encouraging repeat purchases increases the lifetime value of your customers. If your product has a typical expiration or consumption rate, you can automate emails reminding customers to make their next purchase. You can also automate product recommendations based on past purchase behavior, broadening the customer’s awareness of your products and services.


• Cart abandonment – If a customer adds an item to their cart, and then abandons their cart before purchasing, you can automate a retargeting workflow that triggers an email to the customer with a discount code or other incentive to buy now.


• Feedback requests – Sending a well-timed message requesting customers leave an online review of a recent purchase is an efficient way to improve product ratings and reviews while gathering important feedback that strengthens your connection with existing customers.

Social Media

While social media is expected to be Always-On, your social media manager doesn’t need to be ever-present. The advantages of social media automation are as much about consistency and optimization as they are about time savings and reduced demand on resources.

• Scheduling – Content schedulers allow you to manage your content by day, week, or month and can be set up to auto publish for specific times and dates. Social media automation tools also use algorithms to optimize posts to increase the likelihood of engagement. These algorithms look beyond general best practices, and consider the engagement behavior of your followers. There are tools to manage auto-paid social advertising, which is key for improving reach and engagement.


• DMs – There are several tools that can automate direct messages to new followers. However, while many marketers want and use this feature, there’s little evidence to suggest that it works.


• Multi-platform publishing – These tools allow marketers to manage their social media content for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more from a single dashboard. However, marketers should still customize the content for each platform and its audience.


• Analytics – You can schedule standard reports for your social media platforms rather than manually running the reports each day, week, or month.

Website

Website automation is the use of special programs and other tools to manage website information. As site visitors increasingly demand precise targeting tools, marketers turn to marketing automation to optimize customer experiences and improve conversion rates.

• Shopping cart – Marketing automation can be used to reengage consumers who have abandoned their purchase after they’ve filled their shopping cart. Using behavior data as an indication of purchase intent, automation software can personalize banner ads, emails, and landing pages to reflect the interest of an individual customer.


• Retargeting ads – By implementing a sequence of JavaScript on each page of a website, retargeting or tracking IDs create a cookie or pixel that follows visitors after they leave a site. Marketers can publish banner ads that reinforce brand awareness, promote content, or encourage a purchase. This technique is among the most highly adopted lead generation tactics in use today.

Mobile

Customers have come to expect a complete experience from brands that spans time, space, and devices. Mobile marketing automation has the added complexity of context such as location and environment, but it also presents an opportunity to deliver value to your customers when they are most captive and interested in hearing from your brand.

• Location-based marketing: With GPS, geo-fencing, and iBeacon technology, marketers can present messages based on a customer’s physical location.


• Event-based triggers: Marketers can send personalized push notifications based on specific in-app behaviors


• SMS: Use SMS or “short messaging service” to market loyalty programs and communicate with your most active and opted in customers. SMS can also be automated to deliver service alerts and to keep customers aware of product status throughout their customer experience.

Despite claims to the contrary, marketing automation doesn’t exist to make marketing easier – the value of marketing automation is that it makes programs better. Use automation software to deliver a more consistent message, better track results, and to be there for your customers when they need you. Automated programs should be kept in balance with a personalized and approachable marketing content strategy that makes it clear people are behind the brand. 

Beyond Email: Use Multi-channel Marketing Automation to Generate and Nurture Leads

Turning Likes Into Leads: Converting Your Social Community

2014 was somewhat of a breakthrough year for B2B social media marketing. Despite toiling away at what we were certain could be a great business asset since long before, efforts to generate tangible business returns from social media platforms and likes, paid or otherwise, had been largely unsuccessful.

So what changed?

Hubspot

Hubspot came to the forefront in 2014 and gave marketers a whole new level of real-time insight into all of their online activity, including social media. Detailed feedback on the effectiveness of individual tweets and paid social ads allowed marketers to take a more informed and strategic approach to the communications they were putting out through social channels.

Recommended for YouWebcast: Why, What, and How to Do Social Selling

Landing Pages

Although dedicated landing pages have been around for donkey’s years, 2014 seemed to be the year that the penny finally dropped for B2B companies. User-friendly platforms like Unbounce, Hubspot and Optimizely have given marketers the ability to create and test landing pages for their paid ads, emails and social activity without the need for a web developer, thereby increasing adoption.

Paid Social

The acceptance of paid social, combined with the above factors, has played a significant part in the success of B2B social media marketing over the past 12 months. The targeting options available through advertising platforms such as Facebook and Linkedin allow business to hone in on their audiences with accuracy, and although these options have been around since before 2014, this was the year that paid social came into its own.

So now that we know social can deliver tangible returns for B2B companies, here are some key tips to maximise lead generation from social media marketing.

Gate valuable content

By now everyone has heard of content marketing (probably more times than you want) and most businesses understand its importance to SEO, social media and establishing authority. However, just because content serves as SEO fodder, doesn’t mean we should give it ALL away.

Useful, industry-specific content such as white papers, surveys, informative videos and presentations can be effective lead generation tools. By gating these assets (only allowing members of your audience to access the content if they provide contact details via a web form), you can capture valuable data from potential customers who have already hinted at an interest in your area of business.

Promoting these gated assets via social channels, email marketing and paid advertising will maximize your data capture opportunities.

2. Use Webinars

Webinars can be a lead generation gold mine. Not only do they allow you to capture data from those signalling an interest in your products or services by signing up to attend, they also give you an environment free from competitor noise, to talk exclusively about your offering to a captive audience.

Dedicated platforms like GoToWebinar provide data around how many people sat through the webinar and the stage at which others dropped out. It also gives attendees the opportunity to raise their hand to ask the host a question, and chat with fellow hosts throughout.

One of the most valuable tools allows the webinar host to include an interactive poll which can provide valuable data about the attendee’s reason for considering your product, thereby further qualifying the lead.

You could gain more social media exposure by promoting a hashtag at the start of the webinar and encouraging attendees to use it to submit their questions via Twitter.

Pro tip: Sync your activity with your CMS.

Syncing your social activity with your CRM tool allows you to track which social platforms your leads have come from, which tweets, posts or adverts your leads have responded to and ultimately, how much revenue each social platform is contributing.

Both Hubspot and Salesforce, the two most popular CRM tools, sync seamlessly with the major social platforms and provide free guidance on how to nurture your social leads.

Quantifying the financial contribution of social media marketing has long been a problem for marketers and many have abandoned activity altogether after seeing limited returns. However, this approach should ensure that your social activity’s contribution is accurately recognised and easy to report.

3. Use dedicated landing pages

Directing your social traffic to dedicated landing pages, created specifically to capture their details, rather than including a link to your key benefits page or similar, is far more likely to generate leads.

What’s even more likely to generate leads is continually testing and refining your landing pages to optimize their effectiveness.

As alluded to at the start of this post, there are a number of dedicated, user-friendly tools that allow you to create and edit slick looking landing pages with minimal effort. Even better, sync your landing pages with your CMS so your newly acquired leads are fed directly into your sales funnel to be nurtured by your Business Development team. Again, Hubspot contains all of this functionality out of the box. Salesforce doesn’t but it does integrate perfectly with Unbounce, one of the most user-friendly landing pages platforms.

What works for one business won’t necessarily work for all but having seen these tips work well for a number of clients, I’m confident that you will experience similar levels of success by implementing them.

Author: Business.com

Business.com and our market experts are extremely passionate about providing tips and practical advice in these main areas: leadership, sales, marketing, finance, HR, technology and entrepreneurship. Our mission is to help business owners and entrepreneurs acquire the knowledge, products and services to help you run and grow your business…. View full profile ›

Turning Likes Into Leads: Converting Your Social Community

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