Close the deal with Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is more than lead generation

At Leadfront, we've had the privilege of working with a wide range of organisations across a variety of industries, and in our experience, the overriding trend in Marketing Automation has been to focus solely on lead generation. As it stands today, it is not uncommon for companies to underestimate the benefits of implementing Marketing Automation in other processes as well. Instead, they are simply using the system to identify more website visitors to send information to via email, and to maximise the delivery of leads to their sales departments. The risk of a quantity focus in lead generation work is that it can lead to lower quality and increased administration time. Marketing Automation, in contrast to the above, should lead to the delivery of high quality, relevant, and sales-ready leads.

Is lead generation the answer?

Are you experiencing an increased number of leads, but not always higher sales conversions? The mistake is often in trying to process as many leads as possible, which can result in spending far too much time and resources on accounts that ultimately don't convert. This is also one of the symptoms of a disjointed marketing and sales department, where instead of working together and processing the customer jointly, they work in silos with their own goals and metrics.

Successfully integrate your outbound and inbound activities

We are advocates of creating a good foundation for the implementation of a Marketing Automation system in the form of a solid strategy focused on the ultimate goal > convert prospects to customers. In order to facilitate and increase sales conversion, you should be able to prioritize the leads that are most relevant and buy-ready. Of course, it is still important to have a healthy inflow of leads, but the real strength of the Marketing Automation system lies in its ability to integrate inbound (marketing) and outbound (sales) activities into a single platform.In other words, Marketing Automation gives us the technical capabilities needed to tailor outbound messages and content such as sales meetings or phone calls, based on insights from inbound activities such as what the user is doing on the website. In this way, they can help their most important potential customers move forward in their buying process, by staying relevant throughout the journey with the right information at the right time.

Fewer leads - Higher conversion

How do you prioritise your most important leads and personalise and streamline your communication with them? A well-established strategy based on concentrating your resources on your most important and potentially profitable customers is ABM >AccountBased Marketing. Before the era of automation, it was a time-consuming and resource-intensive strategy. Because the data needed to define your most important accounts tended to be managed by different departments and scattered across different systems, data collection was too often done manually. The data collected then needs to be compiled, which is also done manually in many cases, in order to tailor its dialogue with specific accounts and contacts based on these insights. The difference is that today, with the help of a Marketing Automation platform, we can exercise an ABM strategy on a much larger scale as it enables and facilitates the collection and harmonization of data from all channels.Below you will find five steps that can be performed more efficiently with the help of the right Marketing Automation tool:

1. Identify your target accounts - use the data collected to distinguish which accounts will best benefit your business
2. Find out how your buyer persona actually looks and behaves based on user data from different channels.
3. Produce the right content - tailor your message based on data-driven customer insights
4. Ensure a consistent message - succeed with a multichannel strategy by maintaining consistent communication across all channels.
5. Measure and optimise - a shared platform for both sales and marketing paves the way for common measurement criteria through cross-departmental targets and KPIs.