This is the blog transcript of our video “How to Use Marketing Automation for Lead Generation”. If you’d like to see more of our videos, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
Marketing automation can help you generate leads. And it can help you generate better quality leads than most other marketing tools can. So how does it work?
Hey everyone, I’m Ian Campbell, CEO of Mission Suite. Before we jump into today’s video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos.
I’ve been helping clients build up their marketing automation efforts using Mission Suite for the past 10 years. In that time, I’ve learned that a lot of people don’t really know just how they can use marketing automation to actually generate leads. As a result, they question why they should invest the time into marketing automation.
I get that – if it’s not really going to bring in new leads then why bother?
So in this video, I thought I’d dive into the different ways that marketing automation can help you generate quality leads from the people you already know.
Start With The People You Know
Chances are, even if you’re brand new to business, you have some sort of a list of people that you know who are somewhere in your target market. If not, check out this video about ways you can be prospecting as a new business owner. It’s here in the info card and there’s a link to it in the description of this video as well.
Regardless of whether you’re starting from scratch or using a list of 50, 100, 1,000, or 5,000 people, you’re building a database of people who could potentially be great customers or clients for you. But then what?
Now you start marketing to them.
Oftentimes in this scenario, you’re going to be using a combination of email marketing and inbound marketing techniques to get this going.
Start out by putting together a newsletter. Any marketing automation tools worth their salt (like Mission Suite) have an email marketing capability with email templates that you can use as a starting point.
Use those as a way to get started and start putting something together. Whether it’s weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc, you have to start somewhere. And if you don’t know where you’ll come up with the content, use articles or content from other sources that you respect. Grab an article snippet and drop it into a newsletter with a link to the full article and let people know that this is an interesting article from a resource that you trust.
Don’t overthink it, just make sure that it’s something that actually applies to your industry, the problem you solve or the solution that you offer. Otherwise, it’s not really worth much.
The key here is to get people used to seeing your name in their inbox and to get them to start interacting with something that your marketing automation system can use to start identifying people who might be interested in eventually having a conversation.
Come Up With Something to Download
Next, come up with some sort of downloadable content – something that only real leads would be interested in checking out. Maybe it’s a whitepaper, some sort of infographic or reference document that can be easily consumed.
Again, this doesn’t necessarily have to be something that you create from scratch. Is there something that you’ve found particularly helpful? Share that!
At the end of the day, this is going to help you find a group of people who are interested enough in the problem you solve – and more specifically the WAY you solve that problem – and the people who are downloading the content you can give them access to will help you find those people.
Quick note on this – make sure you’re not sharing something that the original creator is charging for. If you had to pay for that whitepaper or report that you want to share with people, don’t just offer it up as a download for free. Instead direct them to where they can purchase it themselves.
I’m certainly not a lawyer, but I’m sure there could be legal ramifications to something like that. But more importantly, it’s just a jerk move and you don’t want to be that person – at the end of the day it’ll hurt more than it helps.
We’re about to dive into some of the more in depth aspects of marketing automation with lead scoring so if you have questions, I want to hear them so that we can get them answered!
Drop any questions that you have in the comments and we’ll do our best to respond!
Find the Leads that Are Interested
What we’re building here is an elevating interest level. It takes a lot less of a “commitment of interest” to click on an article than it does to actually download something.
But if we can identify the people who have done both, now you’ve got someone who might be interesting to talk to. So how do you identify those people?
Now we’re getting into the magic of marketing automation because you can actually identify those people and lift them to the top of the pile using lead scoring.
I know that this can get a little more advanced but we’ll keep it basic for the purposes of this video.
At its core, lead scoring allows you to identify people who have interacted enough with your marketing to justify more personalized and intentional interaction (like a phone call or a personal email). And it does so by ranking or scoring those interactions.
So let’s say that every time someone clicks on a link in your email newsletter, it’s worth 1 point. And then when someone downloads the content that you offered them, it’s worth 3 points.
Lead scoring will identify the people who have made those interactions and assign them the relevant point values. So, for example, if someone clicks on two links in your email and then downloads the content then they’ll accumulate 5 points.
Now you get to decide just how engaged they need to be with you before you want the system to alert you. Is 5 points (or two link clicks and a content download) enough? Or do you want someone who’s shown even more interest. Maybe you want them to have downloaded 2 pieces of content and clicked on 10 links in your newsletters.
Whatever you decide, you’ll be able to use that threshold (whether it’s 5 points for the first example or 16 points for the second example) to trigger a notification that someone is ready for a personalized outreach.
And the beauty of marketing automation is that all you need to do is set up the rule and let your system send you an email alert when a new lead is ready to be called.
Your Turn
Obviously all of this requires an effective system to be able to manage it effectively. If you want to see how Mission Suite can help you manage your marketing automation efforts then check out one of our demo webinars using the link in the description of this video!
Hey I hope you got something out of this video. And if you did, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and maybe a share so that others can see it too. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos and while you’re at it, check out these videos too!
We’ll see you next time around!