Marketing Automation for Demand Generation & Lead Nurturing

The art and science of managing the timing, target and content of outbound marketing messages automatically, is Marketing Automation. And when this is done in response to prospects’ online behavior, it becomes efficient marketing automation. For effective demand generation and lead management/nurturing, it is essential that an organization understands and responds to a prospect’s position in the buying cycle. And given the increasing bargaining power of consumers, this is all the more crucial.

However, truly understanding and responding to each prospect’s needs is something that cannot be achieved manually. And therefore, organizations require a software platform that can help accomplish this by enabling customized content and timely, automated communication. This in turn can help in better demand generation and lead nurturing. Here’s how:

Marketing automation software enables organizations to understand prospects’ position in the buying process by studying and interpreting their digital body language. By doing this it gives a clear idea about the interests of the prospects, their intentions in visiting a website, their readiness to buy a product etc.

Secondly, ‘Lead Scoring’ is a key feature enabled by marketing automation solutions. This allows marketing teams to carefully categorize prospects depending on whether they are ‘ready to buy’, or need to be further ‘nurtured’ with suitable messages until they decide to buy.

Also, when it comes to marketing, the key is to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. For example, a HR team may respond to different marketing messages than an accounts team. Therefore, marketing messages need to be highly personalized depending on the prospect’s role in the buying process. And this is enabled by today’s advanced marketing automation tools.

Buyers today have the ability to self-educate. They use social media websites, discussion forums and other online means to learn everything about a product. They visit multiple websites, including yours and those of the competitors, and compare products, their features, benefits and prices. Hence, by the time they get in touch with you they have already made their purchase decision. This means that your messages have to be timely, and reach your prospects, and impress them before your competitors’ messages do. Therefore in order to guide buyers to consider your product/service, and motivate them to buy it, you need a marketing automation solution that provides precise information about prospects’ needs and preferences.

So it’s time to shift from bulk outbound messaging to a facilitating approach, wherein you understand and guide your buyers in their decision-making process. Engaging prospects is therefore crucial, and this is made possible by sophisticated automated marketing solution  that deliver the right message to the right target at the right time!