Discussions about marketing theory are fascinating, but translating them into reality is what matters most for your bottom line. Lead generation is only part of the story; you also need to convert those leads eventually. Because this week’s all about applied knowledge, we’re focused on how you can take quick, direct action to increase your lead gen ROI.
Find Better Leads
All leads are potentially valuable, but some pay dividends sooner than others. You and your MARKETING AI® must be able to differentiate between new arrivals, nurtured leads, and sales-ready prospects. To sort and score leads, the system has to have experience with past customers. The demographic, firmographic, and behavioral differences in buying histories give you and your marketing automation consultants insight into where you should focus your lead gen efforts.
Effective lead scoring also allows you to eliminate non-leads from your marketing efforts. Non-leads, including competitors, bots, and incidental traffic, have characteristic behavioral signals that your MARKETING AI learns to recognize and remove from your prospect pool. Because you no longer waste effort marketing to non-leads, you have more resources to allocate to active lead nurture programs.
Streamline Your Sales Funnel
The prospect who first encountered you yesterday has a longer buying journey ahead than one who’s spent the past two months researching and is close to making a decision, so pinpointing where a lead is in the buying journey is vital to knowing what your next steps should be. Once you know where leads are, you’re able to prepare the path ahead of them.
The sooner you can bring a new lead to sales readiness, the better your cost-per-lead ratio becomes. Reduce friction in your sales funnel and streamline the passage of prospects through it to shorten the decision-making window, and you benefit your prospects too; who doesn’t want an easier time making key business decisions?
Coordinate Content
The problem leads face is rarely one of too little information; instead, they’re dealing with a constant barrage of it. If you want to help them find their way through the torrent of information, you need to have a cohesive, coordinated message. Relevant content that meets leads’ needs at just the right time is like a signpost on the buying journey, giving leads guidance and pointing the way to the next stage.
Marketing automation technology makes it possible not only to send the right message at the right time, but also to link it to relevant messaging on other platforms. Your new leads will see entry-level content aimed at familiarizing them with the scope of the problem and the solution you offer. As they become more knowledgeable, the content you provide evolves too, and they see offers of more in-depth content such as white papers and webinars to meet their changing needs.
Analyze and Take Action
Your leads aren’t the only ones whose knowledge base grows; your MARKETING AI is learning too, gathering data for analytics that fuel future the success of future lead gen activities. A centralized marketing automation hub puts all the data, including information from your sales team and CMR, into an accessible, actionable format. With analytics that tell you about your total cost per lead, cost per sale, and ratio of leads converted in real terms, you and your marketing automation consultant discover what works so you can build on successes.
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