Marketing automation software can make you feel like you’re being pulled in a million different directions, but if you know the five essential elements to drive lead generation, you’re halfway there.
1. Carefully crafted emails
Marketing automation revolutionized the email campaign and made it easy for marketers to segment their lists of thousands of email addresses into targeted groups based on demographics, interests, size of company and more.
Email can be used as a lead generation tool to reconnect with older customers who haven’t been opening marketing emails. By offering perks and small discounts through drip campaigns, marketers can get a better idea of what generates leads that have previously gone cold. Drip marketing campaigns also help generate new leads from previous customers who have already made a purchase. Renewing interest or introducing new products can be effective in generating more leads.
Marketing automation gives marketers all the tools needed to start and track great email campaigns. After creating the email and choosing the list of recipients, marketers can time their emails and ensure that they’re sent out at the right time to the right people.
2. Strong landing pages
A good landing page combines all the best elements of lead generation marketing to attract visitors and get them to click the call-to-action button, thereby handing over their email addresses.
When designing landing pages, marketers have all the tools needed at their fingertips. All of their ads will have accompanying landing pages that provide the right amount of information and give visitors good reasons to subscribe or attend an event.
The best landing pages make it extremely easy for visitors to hand over their contact information in exchange for content or other perks. By asking only a few questions and making the process streamlined, marketers increase their chances of getting people to subscribe to emails or answer any other call-to-action found on the landing page.
3. Search engine and social media presence
Over the past few years, search engine and social media advertising have exploded, creating whole new markets through which to generate all types of new leads. Using Facebook ads and Google Adwords in an online lead generation strategy, marketers can now reach customers from all corners of the web.
With marketing automation, all of these tools are in the same place. You can monitor your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social media accounts all from one place, and you can set up your Google Adwords campaigns to attract the right audience and send it directly to your best landing pages.
4. Test and test again
One of the most helpful elements of marketing automation is that it helps you perform better split tests on nearly everything, from your display ads to your landing pages. Using the information provided, you can design ads that fit the needs and wants of your audience, honing your lead generation strategies and making them more effective overall.
To see which types of ads and landing pages generate the more leads, you need only perform a few simple tests. They can tell you a lot about how your audience reads landing pages and interacts with them. Create two identical landing pages and then change one important element (a headline, the text on the call-to-action button) on one page. Send both out and see which one performs better.
You can use split testing to make better landing pages, emails, ads and even social media posts. Your marketing automation software will track the success of your ads and help you see what your audience is responding to.
5. Data for the future
Marketing automation software keeps track of and houses so much data. If you were to look up just one customer, you could see when they first signed up for emails, how many of your emails the person has opened, which ads they’ve clicked on and whether or not they’re interacting with brand on social media.
You can use this information from your marketing automation software to better understand where your customers are, how they’re coming into contact with you and where you should focus your marketing efforts. For example, if you notice a lot of new customers are coming to your landing pages via Facebook ads, then you know that Facebook could be the best place to target your audience.
With this information, you can generate more leads by running similar ads to your targeted audience on Facebook. You’ll be more likely to generate leads and land more great customers.
Mike Bird is a co-founder of Social Garden.
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