When used properly, it may help companies grow organically and profitably while forging closer bonds with their leads.

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile

To draw in potential leads, you should enhance your LinkedIn profile. Playing the “role” becomes crucial because this is a professional platform.

Simply put, you need to optimize your profile for engagement:

• A relevant title that concisely describes your position with the organization and your area of expertise should be included with a clear headshot.
• Make sure your job description is compelling, useful, and informative.
• Ensure that your profile is quickly found by the proper target audience, make sure your “About” summary emphasizes your skills, expertise, and accomplishments and is keyword-rich.
• Use LinkedIn’s “Featured” section to highlight significant projects, works of literature, blog articles, etc. and attract new clients.
• Last but not least, present “social proof” by requesting genuine recommendations from coworkers, friends, etc.

2. Join LinkedIn groups

LinkedIn groups, which are specialized spaces for professionals of all levels to share their opinions and experiences or ask questions about the group issue in one place, can be searched for leads.

Fundamentally, you should participate in LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your industry or niche. You can position yourself as an authority in your field in this way. Also, this may draw potential customers that are interested in your goods or services.

Find the groups that your buyer persona would be in. Join those communities and use them to generate leads for LinkedIn by contacting the group’s members or looking for posts that show a buying signal or intent.

3. Share valuable content

Make an effort to provide your LinkedIn connections with informative content. It should offer insights and solutions to the problems your target audience has, such as blog posts, articles, and infographics.

This will increase your trustworthiness and draw in new customers.

The most effective strategy to draw in the leads you want is to publish content on LinkedIn as a thought leader – that is, as someone recognized as an authority in your field.

As you start to see responses, you can either collect all of the LinkedIn profiles in one place and manually reach out to them, or you can utilize LinkedIn automation and email tools to do it automatically.

4. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid feature that enables you to locate and contact potential leads. It provides sophisticated search criteria that enable you to focus your search and identify leads that fit the profile of your ideal client.

LinkedIn tracks accounts that have connected with your business on numerous levels. It then categorizes them based on your level of interest and suggests some to you.

It is the ideal method for generating leads from individuals who have previously expressed interest in your business.

5. Engage with your connections

Comment on your contacts’ posts, share their material, and send them individualized notes to engage with them. Relationships and trust will be formed as a result, potentially opening up business chances.

Being a thought leader is great. You won’t succeed, though, until you utilize social media for what it was meant to be used for: connecting with others and fostering genuine relationships.

Reach out and strike up a discussion with someone in your network if you want to develop a relationship with them.

6. Make Use of LinkedIn Tools

If you are in the business of leveraging LinkedIn to generate leads, there are a ton of solutions available to make your life easier.

What you need to understand is that tools like these are highly useful and desirable, but rather difficult to choose from due to both benefits and drawbacks.

The following tasks benefit from using tools:

• Automating common tasks like connecting invites, follow-up messages, requesting that individuals follow a firm’s page, endorsing connections.
• Launching automatic marketing campaigns.
• Automating the process of sending invitation requests and follow-up messages, enabling you to create a list of ready gen leads.
• Quick lead processing and information gathering about lead sources.

You also need to consider any potential negative effects:

• Due to the variety of tools available and the fierce competition, finding the correct automation tool for testing that can optimize value can be difficult.
• Because some of the sophisticated automation technologies are expensive, it might become an expensive endeavor.
• While limiting the alternatives, caution should be exercised because not all tools are secure to use.

Conclusion

Time and time again, LinkedIn has shown to be a reliable and strong platform for generating high-quality leads.

It takes more than just collecting the first and last names of your leads to use a LinkedIn lead generator.

The goal is to establish a stronger relationship with your leads using natural and sustainable methods while spending an optimum amount of time and effort in nurturing those leads.

You can learn more about quality methods of managing your LinkedIn connections on this link. The article will help you get a better overview of your connections and help you generate more leads by better organizing your network.

Nevena Rogar is a freelance content writer at LeadDelta. You can follow her on LinkedIn and read more of her articles on LeadDelta blog and on Clippings.

If you plan on converting leads into customers or buyers, efficient lead targeting and segmentation must be at the core of your marketing strategy. Whatever business you’re in, your target consumers will be a diverse group of people with varying wants, which will alter as they progress through the buying process and get closer to making a purchase. 

You should segment your leads at the time of capture and on an ongoing basis as their relationship with your brand changes. This will allow you to offer messaging to each of these prospects, meeting their individual needs at each stage of the sales process.

What is lead segmentation?

In order to efficiently and effectively target leads, you need to properly segment them first. In a nutshell, lead segmentation is the process of dividing your database of leads into smaller groups depending on their behaviors. This, in turn, will allow you to send more persuasive marketing communications – one of the core objectives of an efficient E-CRM.

For example, you have people that have only visited your homepage and left, but you also have people who have browsed through your website, even looked at some of the products. And, hopefully, you have the ones who have added items to the cart but abandoned the purchase, and the ones who have made it all the way to the end and made a purchase. 

Knowing this, you have the freedom and advantage to send different messages to specific groups of visitors. For those who have only visited your homepage, you might want to engage them by pointing them to product list pages. For those who have already browsed some of your products, it may be a good idea to offer them similar products or discounts.

Why is lead targeting important?

When you know your potential customer’s behavior, you can motivate and entice the cart abandonment segment with some promo code or discount – for instance, one that is time restraining in order for them to make a purchase in the next few hours or days. These specific contents and messages are much more effective than sending generalized promotional offers. 

Without lead segmentation you are not addressing specific needs, nor are you demonstrating which problems you’ll solve for them, that is, providing any incentive for customers to choose you above the myriad of other companies offering a similar bundle. According to Venture Harbour CEO, Marcus Taylor, lead segmentation resulted in an 89% sales uplift and 58% increase in average order value for one of their ventures.

How to efficiently target leads

Segmenting and targeting leads using traditional marketing methods can be very time-consuming and often is not so efficiently organized, specially if you are dealing with thousands and thousands of leads. However, today, there are a number of marketing automation tools like Mautic that enable you to automate those tedious tasks and give you more time to focus on creating a successful marketing strategy or on other processes and tasks.

Mautic’s solution provides detailed contact tracking and automates the process of finding and nurturing contacts through landing pages and forms, email campaigns, text messages, web notifications, and integration with your CRM and other systems in a smooth and easy way.

Nikola Radenkovic is a Techical Specialist at Sales Snap. You can follow him on Linkedin and read more of his marketing tips on the Sales Snap blog.

Although Mautic is still young, we’re amazed at the community that we’ve been surrounded by. As we seek to foster this growth, we thought we’d share some key themes for how to develop a vibrant, connected community.

Change Your Language

When we set out to develop Mautic, we started with an idea. We wanted to change the way people looked at marketing. We wanted to level the playing field for every business and help them connect with their audience in a meaningful way. But we knew it was going to take a special group of people who felt as connected to the vision as we did. This is true of any brand. But it had to begin by changing our language. How often do we talk about “converting leads”? Whether we like it or not, we are conditioned as marketers to consider our buyers as potential leads, instead of individuals who are part of a community. It may be semantics, but if your brand wants to build a true community, you will see them and describe them differently. It will also change the way you interact with them.

Would you rather be considered a lead or a guest? Disney has built a culture and a brand that seeks to interact with people in a different way. It permeates their brand and the language they use everyday. In the book Built To Last, Jim Collins describes the terminology that Disney uses to build the voice of the Disney brand.

• Employees are “cast members.”
• Customers are “guests.”
• A crowd is an “audience.”
• A work shift is a “performance.”
• A job is a “part.”
• A job description is a “script.”
• A uniform is a “costume.”
• The personnel department is “casting.”
• Being on duty is “onstage.”
• Being off duty is “backstage.”

These simple changes to their language reinforces the message they seek to communicate. It also greatly impacts the customer or “guest” experience. If you’re like Disney and your central message is “making people happy”, you will not call your guests, potential leads.

Make Community Sticky

In their book Made to Stick, the Heath brothers reveal the key elements to making ideas stick. These core tenets are vital to not only growing ideas, but communities as well. They are: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Stories.

• Simple: If your mother doesn’t understand your core message, start again. Your central value statement should be simple and easy to interpret.
• Unexpected: How do you get someone’s attention? You must be willing to do something that is out of the norm. How about giving away powerful software for free?
• Concrete: No business speak here. Your message must not mince words. You must say exactly what you mean, and mean exactly what you say.
• Credible: Does your message backup your value? How can people determine this? Are there reliable sources? Can your community test your product or service?
• Emotional: This often makes people in business feel uncomfortable. Research shows us again and again that we are driven by emotion or feelings. Don’t be afraid to get real.
• Stories: Who in your community uses your product or service? What are they using it for? Is it changing their life in some way? These stories will serve to further connect and fuel your community.

Mautic is filled with individuals who have gravitated to these principles. Leaders like Takuro Hishikawa in Japan, Rodrigo Demetrio in Brasil and even more in Europe, Thailand, the US and around the world. These individuals jump in and help others by equipping them with translated documentation. They gather their network to share common ideas and solutions. They take their free time to assist those who are trying to setup and troubleshoot. This is community.

Everyone who has contributed to Mautic has engaged and participated because they believe in one or more of these “sticky” principles. It connects them at a level that is deeper than simply intrinsic value. It’s a feeling.

Feelings and Idea Flow

In addition to the key elements above, when a community is developed, it must not remain stagnant. There is a flow that naturally comes from collaborating with others as we move toward the realization of a common ideal. In the book Social Physics, Alex Pentland highlights this with the concept of idea flow;

“Synchronization and uniformity of idea flow within a group is critical: When an overwhelming majority seem ready to adopt a new idea, this convinces even the skeptics to go along. A surprising finding is that when people are working together doing the same thing in synchrony with others— e.g., rowing together, dancing together — our bodies release endorphins, natural opiates that give a pleasant high as a reward for working together.”

It feels good to be part of a team that works together to realize a vision. This is not simply research. This is a physiological fact. When you feel connected to a community that is aligned around a common goal, your body engages. It gives you that sense of accomplishment, a sense that provides feedback in the form of emotional satisfaction.

The Right Kind of Community

We’ve highlighted some key elements to developing your community online. But we must be careful to grow the right kind of community. It is not simply a “group of people that share a similar characteristic”. This is more about facts and figures than principles and ideals. True community is a “feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.” This definition is what makes our communities sticky. Promoting this concept and designing an idea flow by helping each other achieve our goals, is what will truly connect us.

This translates directly to how we market and sell. When we recognize that sales creates customers and that community creates advocacy, it changes the way we interact. We will make efforts to connect with them using a different language, on a higher level and with a common purpose.

This approach works. Over the last year and a half Mautic has seen tremendous growth. We have used these principles to grow a simple idea into 10,000 communicators who have used Mautic and a community of over 4,500 individuals who consistently interact with and share the vision of a marketing solution that thinks differently.

As you seek to reach your audience and develop your brand, what are other principles you’ve discovered to help your community grow? Share them in the comments below!

Marketing automation is a powerful process and can produce tremendous gains for your business or organization; that is…when it’s used properly. Any strong marketing campaign requires the same basic principles: objective, strategy, optimization, and implementation. The rudiments of marketing most definitely still apply when utilizing a marketing automation platform, in fact they are even more important when we consider the number of “moving parts” involved in a well-built automation campaign. This leads us to the first step in addressing the learning curve.

1. Sharpen Your Marketing Knowledge.

Marketing is a catch-all term for the fields of study, processes of engagement, and creation of interest surrounding the message and image of your products, services, and information. It’s all about getting your message to the right ears and drawing interested customers to your brand over your competitors.

“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca

Without marketing know-how it is virtually impossible to get the word out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start marketing with what you do know. You’ve created something you think people will want, but why do they want it? What problems does your product or service solve, and what makes it different or better than the others? If you can answer those questions then you are well on your way to creating killer a marketing plan.

That’s just the beginning of your marketing automation journey, the next step is to educate yourself. Find marketing materials, take classes, read books and start simple with your marketing. No one starts off as a guru – we are all learning and growing. What that means to you is that the first step in writing a marketing strategy is to immerse yourself in marketing education, get back to the basics and hone your skills before you implement marketing automation. No marketing campaign, automated or not, can succeed without a thoughtfully written educated strategy.

2. Learn The Basics -What Is Marketing Automation & How to “Do” Marketing Automation

Before you can understand how marketing automation fits into your overall marketing plans, you must first understand what marketing automation accomplishes. Familiarize yourself with the basic principles and features of automation and put that in context with what you already know about marketing.

Generally, marketing automation is a means of taking the tedious or repetitive tasks, like monitoring leads or sending emails, and automating them. While marketing automation includes many other functions such as: social media tracking, lead behavior tracking, scoring, and 1:1 real-time marketing, it is primarily a smarter, faster, and larger means of reaching specific individuals with an automated series of event triggered communication workflows. Of course, you will learn all about the details and how to make the process more effective, but for now check out marketing automation education materials to learn more.

If you choose to do marketing automation research by visiting service providers sites, don’t let persuasive sales reps push you to make a decision, lay out all of your options for your marketing solutions before you commit any of your budget. Find out what features your business requires and determine what means you will use to achieve their implementation. Whether it is you or an employee who will be focusing on marketing automation, training is the most vital element in your future success.

3. Invest in Training

Your real primary investment should be in training and the development of your general marketing skills, alongside marketing automation education. No matter how much money you spend on the capabilities of your marketing automation software, your campaign is only as good as your ability to effectively address every detail of your marketing strategy.

If you do not have the staff to invest in marketing automation training, you might have to find a different course of action. This could mean hiring specialized marketers, increasing your investment in training, or outsourcing your marketing automation to professionals. Regardless of what course you choose, learning the processes is a must.

Whatever your experience in digital marketing, development, or automation, you should make every effort to seek out education through training materials and hands-on development. Some marketing automation providers offer access to learning materials and user group meetings, but only if your pay their exorbitant service rates. Free training resources are available through a nonprofit organization. Mautic is an open source marketing automation community, whose goal is to create community support for marketers, educational resources, and training courses to support their free marketing automation software.

4. Build Your First Campaign

Once you’ve learned the basics and gone through some training, it’s time for you to put it all together and build your first campaign. This is an exciting time as you finally get to put your new skills to work. Start with the most basic of your campaign building skills; the key points of your strategy. From there you can further develop each of your campaign points in the framework of marketing automation. Just remember to start simple.

• Create your campaign strategy
• Define your elements
• Design simple emails, landing pages and forms
• Build your workflow
• Measure your results.

Remember, it’s your first campaign, so it may not be perfect, but it can become much better if you learn from the experience and use the data you get to make your next campaign even better. With this approach, continued learning, and a positive attitude, you are well on your way to becoming a marketing automation professional.

5. Analyze Your Campaign Results

The feedback you get from your campaigns is what drives marketing automation progress and leads to long term development and success. The most powerful brands utilize the data from every measure of a campaign’s activity and engagement. Metrics help marketers to design better sites, landing pages, keywords, email subjects, and any other measurable factor. These metrics allow brands to interpret engagement and consumer behavior in order to consistently improve every detail of their campaign’s design, content, and delivery. The goal is to achieve an optimal level of engagement, by separating your market from the crowd, meeting your leads wherever they are in the customer lifecycle.

As you continue to develop your marketing automation skills, and the ability to interpret your campaign reports, you will find more ways to collect valuable data. One such strategy is that of “split campaigns” or A/B testing. By creating two slightly different campaigns and comparing the resulting analytics in defined element fields, marketers can quickly adapt their content or design to their customer’s preference. These unconscious influencers make all the difference with marketing automation, where customer behavior triggers exactly the action you need to drive your message home and to start turning leads into conversions and revenue. Developing your marketing automation skills even further makes you that much more powerful as a marketer and yields stronger growth, so what’s next?

6. Specialize & Optimize Your Marketing Automation Skills

Once you have acquired a good understand of the things we have just discussed you will find that each campaign element can be more effectively tested and designed. You may have found what you are already good at, whether it’s landing page design, content writing, customer cycle “drip flow” campaigns, or email campaigns, but what about the elements that could be better?

The key to improving individual campaign elements is in optimization. Whether it’s SEO (the ability to influence the visibility of your website or web page to a search engines parameters or “organic reach”) or Content Optimization (understanding the way that keywords influence search result, as well as meta-descriptions, alt-tagging, and increased credibility), understanding optimization tactics is crucial to continued development of your campaigns.

One powerful tool that marketing automation provides is the ability to personalize your campaign content. Whether it’s a list, segment, or individual, personalization leads to conversions. Meet your customers with content that applies to them, addresses their unique needs, and caters to their particular buying process. With campaign personalization, you content reach and conversion will see their highest possible levels. So keep collecting that data, continually adapt your content to fit your target’s needs, and never stop looking for opportunities to optimize.

Whether you’re a small business owner, enterprise, nonprofit, marketer or student, learning the skills needed for marketing automation has tremendous power and value. The results you can produce with the right help and a strong strategy will make any and all effort worth your investment.

Find the resources you need to understand marketing as a whole and build a solid foundation with core principles. From that point you can approach marketing automation with context and direction.

Make sure your investment in training matches that of your expectation. Learning the principles and practices of marketing automation is a worthy and attainable goal.Don’t throw all of your money at a service provider if you can do it yourself. Use free open source software to develop your skills, it’s much easier with the right resources and a strong community to offer support.

• Start building campaigns and practicing your marketing automation skills.
• Send your “baby” on its way and make sure to analyze the valuable data you from your campaign
• Specialize your marketing automation skills through optimization techniques and campaign testing
• Keep learning!

Nothing worth having is easily attained, but don’t make it harder for yourself. Use your new skills to work smarter, automate your marketing, increase your reach and achieve measurable growth. Marketing automation isn’t a system you will perfect in a day, but it is well worth the effort. Tackle the learning curve head on by investing your time, not your budget, and see what do-it-yourself marketing automation can do for you.

If you’re looking for more detail about lead management then be sure to check out this far more comprehensive step-by-step guide.

Transcript

These are the four roads that will lead to a better sales funnel. Not a comprehensive sales lead model but should get you started in the right direction.

1. The Right Technology

   • Know Your Needs: Before you can select the right technology you need to fully understand the problems you want this technology to solve.
   • Prepare to Scale: Don’t select the marketing software you will use based on your current situation. You expect to be successful; plan for the future.
   • Identify Your Costs: What you spend on the right technology is an investment in your future; identify what you will spend implementing marketing tech.

2. The Right Beginning

   • Sales Team: Sales teams and marketing teams must work together to create the best strategy for customer growth.
   • Marketing: Marketing begins when your business begins. There is no such thing as too early to begin marketing.
   • Audience: The identified target audience dictates a sales and marketing focus from the very beginning.

3. The Right Campaigns

   • Timing: Campaigns need to be bold in sharing the right information at the right times with your leads.
   • Repetition: Campaigns should always have a clear and distinct purpose or goal to be accomplished.
   • Purpose: Campaigns should be organized to execute at the ideal times.

4. The Right Reporting

   • Lead Tracking: Right reporting focuses on lead activity: such as time spent on page, pages visited, and social sharing.
   • Engagements: Reporting should include engagement activity between company and lead.
   • Conversions: Right reporting identifies which pages and forms provide the best conversions.

Need help with your lead management or other marketing help? Then Mautic is here for you! Just Download Mautic or Launch Your Demo.

How good is your lead management?

Lead management is one of the most well-known struggles in all of the marketing and sales world. How a business finds, nurtures, and generates leads is the topic of many conversations and a source of constant worry within a company. The process of managing these potential leads and converting them into customers takes time and much work. In this comprehensive article we are going to uncover what many businesses may be missing. We’ll begin by looking at the current tools that most businesses are using in their lead management.

Existing Tools Being Used

Examine each of these three tools and recognize how they are used. Identify which you are familiar with and see if the description below is how you also would use them. There is nothing inherently wrong with each of these tools and indeed many businesses find success with them. There is however, something missing.

The Timeless Contact Form

There are very few businesses who do not realize the importance of the internet. This is a great starting point and one which has become quite well-known today. One page which exists on almost every website is of course the infamous contact form. This form is used as a way for visitors to easily send a request for contact to the company. This is the equivalent of an old-school open door to a business’s brick-and-mortar store. Only it’s worse. This isn’t an open door to an entire store, but rather an open door to a sales person.

Unfortunately many seem to think this contact form is a fantastic piece of the lead management process. How many customers would be interested in knocking on a door to ask for a sales person? Not nearly as many as most companies would like. Still the contact form is one tool currently used for lead management by most businesses.

The Infamous Company Newsletter

This next current marketing tool is another vestige of old-school marketing. The newsletter is similar to the old mailers sent out by companies to all their existing customers. Today this mailer has turned from advertising to existing customers to attempting to advertise to new customers. This is due in part to statistics such as this:

70% of email readers open emails from a brand or company in search of a deal, discount, or coupon.
The Social Habit

These types of numbers are the reason why so many companies rely heavily on newsletters for generating new leads. But sending a generic newsletter is not the key of a strong lead management process. Indeed newsletters (emails) are a fantastic way of building a brand and keeping in contact with leads and customers alike, but newsletters alone are not a lead management process.

The Cutting Edge CRM

Those businesses working with customer relationship management tools are indeed the most advanced of these businesses using existing tools. These CRM tools let the business collect and organize their customers, manage data about their customers, and keep detailed records regarding each of these customers. The CRM works well for existing customers, and for manually entered leads.

A CRM can increase revenue by a whopping 41%!
Track Via

Many of these businesses do great things with sales teams focused around their CRM and they do well in their process. They do well, but perhaps they are still missing something. Perhaps even still they are lacking something. There is something missing from their lead management process.

The Lead Sales Funnel

Before we identify this missing piece of the sales lead management process let’s next look at the typical sales funnel and define each of the pieces of this process and the role it plays in the lead management process.

This sales funnel is a simplified version of everything implemented in a typical business marketing strategy. But even in this simplified form we can see the main aspects of this funnel. Let’s look at each stage in this funnel.

The Leads Stage

In this introductory stage you are simply looking to reach as many potential leads as possible. This is the widest of the stages and most broad form of marketing available to your business. You are seeking here to simply spread your name and your presence to your potential target market. This target market is every possible lead who may be interested in your products or services either now or at any point in the future.

The Prospect Stage

This is the very large and generic middle piece of the sales funnel. This is the prospect stage or the stage where you as a business must seek to engage new leads and persuade them to continue in the sale process. This is a smaller group of leads than the original general stage of all available target audience leads.

The Customers Stage

This is the desired outcome stage for all leads. The greater this stage of the funnel the better the business does. These are the leads who have been successfully converted from lead to a customer. This is the smallest of the stages and the most desired. This conversion is the stage where businesses tend to focus their time and attentions (obviously due to the direct relation to greater revenues).

Now that we have identified the three rather general stages of a sales funnel we must look at what is missing. What is the missing piece in a lead management funnel? Where do businesses fail to properly funnel their leads through the sales process?

Marketing Automation: The Missing Piece

Now let’s explore the missing piece of the lead management process. Marketing automation is a process which has been growing in popularity and usage. In fact, recently the statistic was shared,

“98% of all businesses are seeking to implement a dedicated marketing automation system.”
MediaPost

What an incredible percentage of businesses have recognized the power of marketing automation. This implies that the problem is not in failing to recognize the need for marketing automation but something else. Marketing automation, as stated earlier, is more than software. Marketing automation is a process. This is the missing piece of the lead management process. The implementation and execution of an automated marketing process is of utmost importance and requires a number of key steps. We will spend the next several sections looking at these steps and how to implement them.

New Visitors

The first area where marketing automation should be implemented involves new visitors. That’s right, the process of marketing automation begins even in the very top of the sales funnel (Leads/Target). Here is how marketing automation works with new visitors.

Contacting, Promoting & Marketing

The next part of the sales funnel where marketing automation helps involves contacting promoting, and marketing to leads and potential leads. Here we begin to filter down into the second stage of the lead funnel we’ve mentioned above (Prospects/Engage). This is the true power of marketing automation and the part of the funnel where marketing automation software and more importantly process is truly the missing piece for many. Here are a few ways this is executed.

Landing Pages

The landing pages are ways in which you can present relevant information to your leads as they visit your website. These dedicated landing pages are created for a specific purpose and with a specific call-to-action. We have written an article previously entitled, Landing Page Love, which gives details and examples of some great landing pages.

Forms

Remember when we spoke previously of the contact forms used by almost all businesses? These are in fact only one of the many types of forms which can be implemented and used by your marketing. These forms, rather than merely sending an email with the form submissions or collecting them in a single database, would serve to continue to fill-out the lead profiles for each of the visitors who submit the form. Dynamic forms that populate a lead profile are far, far more powerful than a mere submission-to-email form. These forms are also capable of building on top of each other and thus continue to build the lead’s profile as they fill out each form

Newsletters & Emails

The email and the newsletter is a powerful feature of marketing automation. Again, this involves much more than a stale monthly newsletter. As we now have established through the use of website tracking, landing pages, and forms to build a better lead profile we can now use that information to provide relevant information to each through the use of automated emails. More than just mail merge functionality however, marketing automation holds the power of multiple messages based on specific decisions and triggers

This is where marketing automation becomes dominant. This is the heart of the missing piece of the lead management process. This strategy involves multiple points of contact done at just the right time, and without direct involvement from your sales team.

Businesses who increase the number of times contacting a lead from 1 to 8 show a massive increase in contact ratios.
Ken Krogue

Integrate Everything

More than merely implementing a marketing automation tool the marketing automation process must be work closely with all the other aspects of your marketing strategy. As you should hopefully see, marketing automation processes should involve every stage of your sales funnel and work to provide a cohesive sales and marketing strategy. Being comprehensive means integrating marketing automation with the various other tools already in use in marketing. Here are a few ways marketing automation should be integrated:

1. With Your Website

Your marketing automation software and processes must integrate with your website. The reasons for this integration are many and can be seen in several ways above. Notice how the tracking pixel is integrated into the lead profile building process. Integrations with your website help make your marketing process a seamless experience for your leads.

2. With Your Forms

Again, as mentioned previously, integrating your marketing automation with your forms enables you to build robust lead profiles and continue the process of creating potential customers. Mautic helps in this regard through CMS-specific plugin which allow the dynamic insertion of forms directly within your website. These forms submit information directly back to the marketing automation platform.

3. With Your Email

Marketing automation must integrate deeply with your email marketing efforts. Integrating these two platforms has not been done often due to the silo that SaaS marketing automation tools employ. Mautic, as an open source platform, allows you to select the email marketing software of your choosing and integrate directly. This puts the power of your email within your marketing automation platform. This is a new level of integration and puts you firmly in control of your entire marketing process. Your lead management process begins to become complete.

4. With Your CRM

The final integration mentioned here is one which most marketing automation tools use and deem to be of high importance. A good marketing automation platform should integrate with your CRM. This is on the other end of the sales funnel. Marketing automation truly stretches the entire length of the funnel. At this end of the sales funnel and lead management process the marketing automation tool will finally integrate your now qualified leads with your CRM tool. Now, when your sales team opens their CRM dashboard they are greeted with a list of highly qualified “hot” leads ready to be personally contacted. You will notice this is the first time your sales team must directly contact potential leads. This marketing automation process must integrate with your CRM. Mautic allows you to integrate with any number of popular CRM systems and offers a powerful API for other integrations as well.

Marketing automation has historically had a problem with poor integrations* (VentureBeat) and as a result has found a somewhat difficult time being truly successful.

By the way, Mautic offers dozens of integrations and the open source nature of the code ensures that an unlimited number of additional integrations can (and will be) created.

Don’t Give Up

It is at this point that a word of caution and encouragement should be offered. Proper marketing automation, lead management, and sales funnel completions take time and energy. Very few businesses find overnight success as a result of their lead management process. Remember this statistic,

“79 percent of marketing leads never convert to sales”
HubSpot

“Once it’s up and running, a successful long-term content marketing plan will pay lifelong dividends . If you don’t see those immediately, don’t despair. Just focus on providing your followers with the most engaging content possible.” Forbes

So, don’t lose heart. Don’t give up. Keep providing strong, relevant content and information. Trust in the process of your sales funnel and your marketing automation and continue to pursue your target audience. As the article above states, remember this is a long-term commitment and not a short campaign.

Refine Your Strategies

Now, while you should not lose heart, and you should continue in your efforts you should also refine your lead management strategies. You should focus your sales funnel and you should constantly seek to improve your lead processes. There are a number of ways in which you can be sure your strategies are most effective.

1. Implementing A/B Testing

Marketing automation platforms, like Mautic, allow you to create multiple page versions for landing pages and emails. These A/B tests help you to determine which pages are most effective in converting leads. If you are new to A/B testing, here is a short MauticMinuteTM video to help explain the concept.

It is not a difficult job and one which will lead to wonderful improvements in your return should they be handled correctly. Don’t neglect this opportunity to maximize your return on investments and ultimately improve your lead management and sales funnel.

2. Continue Improving

Once you have identified ways to improve your content, your marketing, and your sales funnel you must do everything you can to continue improving them. Don’t simply identify improvements – implement them! Always be seeking improvements and make the most of your marketing automation process.

Reviewing the Funnel

You have now covered the sales funnel from the broadest aspects of your anonymous, targeted leads all the way to your highly qualified list of hot leads ready for personal contact. You have seen how the marketing automation process is the missing piece of your lead management and how to remedy this problem. The solution lies not in finding the software solution but in implementing the best processes involving every stage of your lead management sales funnel. Remember these key steps:

1. Marketing automation improves lead management at the highest level of the sales funnel.
2. Marketing automation offers ongoing contact and lead nurturing in the prospecting stage of the lead management process.
3. Marketing automation seamlessly integrates with CRM systems to migrate leads ready for direct, personal contact.

Implement these recommendations for your marketing automation process into your sales lead management and you’ll find the missing piece to your sales funnel.

If you’re looking for a marketing automation tool which can support and grow your B2B marketing efforts we recommend you take a quick look at Mautic, which provides cutting-edge features, an intuitive interface and a solid platform to help you turn suggested marketing tactics into actionable campaigns, informative landing pages, and ongoing email marketing.

If for some reason you were unable to attend the recent Mautic Hangout: Hands on with Mautic – looking at leads, we have great news. You can watch the entire webinar any time at your convenience. You will find the video from the recent Hangout available on Youtube and embedded below. Grab the popcorn (or maybe a pen and paper for notes) and click play. Pause, rewind, fast forward as you need, whatever helps you learn! But most importantly – enjoy!

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing Campaigns Webinar

As you watch the video above you may also want to review the slides on their own. Below is an embed of the slideshare. Interested in printing them out or saving a local PDF? No problem, just click the link and view or download them directly on Slideshare.

Lead Generation Slideshare

Next Time

We hope you enjoy the video and presentation. If you have an opportunity to join us live on the next Hangout we’d love to see you! Visit our Google+ Community Page to stay in touch and find out about upcoming webinars.