Businesses that have a limited group of potential customers often struggle with generating leads. This usually comes down to people finding your product or service at various stages of the leads funnel. When you see that you have a lead in the 'decision' stage, your sales team acts quickly to secure a sale, but when your leads are still in the 'awareness' or 'consideration' stages, they often end up being lost. This means about 80% of leads are allowed to lose interest.
These lost leads don't have to be lost forever though. Through the power of marketing automation, you can nurture leads throughout the leads funnel and turn your 'cold' leads into 'hot' leads that are ready to buy. Marketing automation gives you the power to guide your leads from 'awareness' to 'decision', in a personalised way. Whether that's making sure they get content from their favourite author, only sending them information on the topics they actually care about or focusing on sending them content in a format they enjoy. They no longer become lost leads, but 'hot' leads and the sales team can be ready as soon as they are via real-time alerts.
Here are some of the great features of marketing automation software!
Marketing Automation Platforms allow you to design and create amazing Emails using pre-formatted templates or visual editors. These Emails will let you run A/B testing which will allow you to see which kinds of Emails work best, you can view rendering reports, and you can test how your Emails deal with anti-spam filters. Your Emails can be sent directly or scheduled to be sent at predetermined times. This allows you to optimise you team’s workflow and allow your marketing team to work on more generating more leads. You can also use marketing automation platforms to track the success of an Email campaign by recording the ROI.
Through the use of forms such as contact us forms or content forms, you can quickly and easily get the information of any lead at the 'consideration' stage. When they fill out a form the marketing automation software automatically records their information and stores it ready to be used in a campaign. This is how you can start to send personalised content to leads. The landing pages go hand in hand with forms and they place the lead on a page with no distractions from the form.
Marketing automation platforms allow you to set up personalised content for leads in the 'awareness' stage which will free up the time to focus on 'decision' leads without losing those early leads. This is very important for a niche business as you don't have many leads and need to make the most of every single one that comes by.
Being able to track what your leads are engaging with, allows you to find the content that will engage them the most and ensure their interest. It also allows you to know when to engage with them in real time.
Marketing automation allows you to track the success of your campaigns which is especially important to niche businesses as it allows you to clearly see what your target segment engages with and make sure you aren't losing crucial potential leads by using the wrong marketing tactics. Using this data will allow your marketing team to streamline their tactics and make their workflow faster and more effective.
Marketing automation will benefit any business, regardless of size or target market. It can be especially useful for niche businesses as your leads are harder to find and can't be left to go cold. They need to be nurtured over time and secured as a customer or you'll miss out on the important sale. There are lots of marketing automation platforms to choose from such as Hubspot, Salesforce Pardot, Infusionsoft or many more.
For more information or help with your marketing automation, contact the JDR Group today.