Regardless of what product or service a business is offering, they need to have a way to attract prospective customers.
Everyone goes about this differently, whether with cold calls, social media marketing, or television advertisements. There is no one way to reach the modern consumer, so businesses should be utilizing a diverse marketing strategy to target them. The process of attracting interest in the product or service that a company is offering is known as lead generation, and every business, big and small, needs a lead generation strategy.
Lead generation is time-intensive and requires a lot of businesses, but don’t worry, there are ways to simplify the process. Developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy is not easy, but there are platforms, such as StreetText, that can drastically ease lead generation. One way lead generation can be made much easier with these platforms is through automation. Let’s dive into why you should be automating your lead generation and how you can.
Why Automate Lead Generation?
Automation is a valuable resource for businesses because it allows them to implement their strategies without committing the same level of time. If you are automating aspects of your lead generation, you can free time for your team to work on other parts of the job. Automation lets businesses passively attract new potential customers or clients, which many successful businesses are utilizing.
According to Digital Marketing Institute, marketing automation is closely correlated with business success, with best-in-class companies 67% more likely to use marketing automation platforms. It is a process that allows you to have a high-functioning sales funnel without the need for constant hands-on efforts. Automation will help nurture leads that are already and place and bring in new ones.
Now that we’ve touched on the value of automating aspects of your lead generation strategy let’s look at how you can begin this process.
How to Automate Lead Generation:
Step One: Find the Right Medium
There are some areas of your business’ marketing that you won’t be able to automate, so figuring out what needs automation is a pivotal first step. Take a look at the areas you are currently marketing that take up the most significant amount of your time. Are you sending individual email messages to every prospective lead? Is your Facebook marketing campaign draining your marketing team of valuable time? Analyze your current marketing practices, and consider which ones could best be automated.
Step Two: Create Your Content and Prepare for the Long-Term
Automation won’t create custom content for you, and it will still require tweaks and adjustments throughout. It will just allow you to implement long-term strategies that you’ve already developed. The key to automation, and marketing in general, is reaching out directly to your prospective clients in a way that feels personal. When creating your strategy for the medium you’ve selected, whether it’s Facebook or email, try and find a way to make it feel authentic and not like a copied and pasted message.
The data on the importance of personalized marketing content is extensive. According to Forbes, 71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal. 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. Just because your content is distributed by automation doesn’t mean it can’t feel customized and personal.
Your automated lead generation content should be created for a variety of different situations. You should have different emails that respond to various customer actions, such as adding product to cart and then canceling or signing up for company updates, and more. These pieces of content should nurture leads of all varieties, from hot to cold. The marketing you automate should be built for the long-term, so the planning and creation process may take some extra time, but the time you save over the course of a more extended period will be worth it.
Step Three: Find the Right Automation Partner
Once you’ve found the suitable medium to automate and developed your content for it, you’re going to need to find the right automation platform to partner with. Many different platforms are built to help businesses automate their marketing efforts. Lead generation automation runs hand in hand with customer relationship management, or CRM, a booming market filled with major players.
In 2019, according to Stelaxius, the overall usage of CRM went from 56% of companies surveyed to 74%. This is a drastic leap showing the growth of automation marketing, and companies like MailChimp, SalesForce, and Oracle have skyrocketed to become significant industry powerhouses. Automation platforms like these provide essential analytics and business intelligence that companies can use to refine their marketing practices. The right partner for your automation is a pivotal step and will require you to research what your business needs.
If you’re looking to take your Facebook marketing efforts to the next level, partnering with StreetText can simplify the implementation of a high-quality lead generation strategy. StreetText provides a proven method to facilitate the creation, dispersion, and analysis of Facebook Marketing content. If you’re looking to utilize an all-in-one Facebook lead capture system to efficiently and cost-effectively attract new clients and consumers, StreetText may be the partner for you.
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