Marketing automation enables you to engage audiences with personalised and highly relevant conversations through campaigns, premium content and email marketing, helping build communication with potential customers.

What marketing automation also does it to mechanise those laborious and monotonous marketing activities, leaving you more time to focus on scaling growth and maximising the return on investment on your outreach campaigns.

At Vitale Digital, we use automation as an integral part of our digital marketing for the financial services and insurance sector. These tried and tested tips can help you to maximise lead generation within your sales strategies.

Defining your buyer’s personas

Before developing any outreach campaign, you need to develop your buyers’ personas, including their education, skills, industry, job title, key responsibilities, challenges and goals, along with demographic information and behavioural patterns.

When you understand your ideal prospect or customer, you can centre your marketing messages around real people that share those same values. Base your automation on their challenges and interests during their buying journey rather than focusing on clicks and email opens as a lead guide.

Moving down the funnel

The use of the best practice in marketing automation can help prevent the loss of leads too early in the buying journey. A new lead at the top of the funnel is generally not ready to buy and could easily be lost through over-zealous sales tactics. A programme of building trust and credibility through inbound marketing, high-value content and timing can help nurture potential customers along the sales funnel.

Monitor touchpoints

When using marketing automation, keep a monitor of benchmarks like how many touches a prospect has received, has the potential customer engaged with your marketing and, if so, where are they in the funnel? While moving prospects along the sales funnel, keep in mind the importance of continually filling the top of the funnel with new potential customers to prevent database fatigue.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring can help rank leads based on their readiness to buy. A number is given to each lead based on their receptiveness, which can then assist the sales team in knowing who is at the bottom of the sales funnel and likely to be at the decision stage. It can also help to make sure that you are targeting the right information to potential customers and not losing leads too early in the process.

Measure your results

The great thing about marketing automation is its ability to track how much you have spent on each prospect, (time, money and content), the length of time it took to make the sale and its overall value. By understanding the buyer’s complete journey, you will determine what works well and which processes can be refined for future leads.