Some buyers are naturals. They’ve done the research, compared the benefits, found all the answers to their questions, and go straight to your sales department seemingly without effort on your part. They’re not common in the B2B world, though, and companies can’t count on these proactive prospects to sustain them. Most leads need a little help to become customers – help that a marketing automation system provides.
Pinpoint Sales-Ready Prospects – Then Stand out of Their Way
One of the greatest mistakes companies make is in continuing to market to people who are already set to buy. Marketing is about helping your leads make buying choices. If that lead has already made a choice, further marketing just muddies the water. It can even delay a sale if a potential customer decides to hold out for better discounts or discovers something in the marketing copy that raises a new set of questions. With a system in place that scores leads and automatically routes sales-ready leads to someone who can make the sale happen, you avoid the pitfall of providing too much information.
Automate Lead Qualification
Once your sales-ready leads have gone to the head of the line, who’s left, and how do you sort them? Lead scoring and ranking trace the trajectory of a prospect through your sales funnel and pinpoint that lead’s location so you can deliver the right content at the right time. With automation, this process comes from looking at demographic and firmographic information to grade leads, analyzing a prospect’s behavior to assess interest, and developing metrics for qualification. No company can afford to invest in leads who don’t pay off, and automated lead ranking shows you where the money is.
Listen to Your Leads
Lead scoring isn’t just a benefit for you; it also gives visitors to your site a better, more customized user experience. Marketing automation lets you have conversations with your leads even when you can’t listen to all your prospects directly. By paying attention to non-verbal, behavioral cues such as time on site and most frequently visited pages, marketing automation systems hear what your visitors are telling you even when they aren’t saying a word. Add in the content leads seek via downloads or click-throughs in email, and you have a good picture of what this prospect needs to become a buyer.
Consistent Content
Content is the fuel that makes your marketing automation system function, but “content” is such an all-encompassing word that it’s all but lost its meaning. The information your prospects toward the base of your sales funnel want is dramatically different from the entry-level knowledge your newest visitors need to know. You need enough information to satisfy all their needs, so content creation is a never-ending process. Automation makes content creation simpler, but it doesn’t replace the ingenuity of a great content marketing team.
Develop Nurture Campaign Tracks
You have thousands of visitors, but they all have different needs. You’d need a staff of dozens of marketing experts to cater to these needs individually, but software solutions now let your marketing company automate the process, routing each lead through a pre-set flow of content. These nurture campaigns allow entry at any point, but they organize content so prospects who come into them get carried in the current to the logical end-point of any campaign: the sale. All you and your marketing team need to do is create the content and set it to go out to leads as they’re ready for it.
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