How Marketing Automation Facilitates Lead Management

Marketing automation is an approach that automates the management of timing, target and content of outbound marketing messages. Effective marketing automation is made possible when timely and appropriate outbound messages are delivered in response to prospects’ online behavior. This is also the very essence of lead nurturing. However, with the ever-increasing bargaining power of customers, effective lead management and nurturing also require understanding and responding to a prospect’s position in the buying cycle. 

But given the increasing size of the target market, understanding and responding to their needs and changing demands cannot be achieved manually. Therefore organizations need to employ a software platform which can not only deliver timely, targeted communication to prospects, but also track their reaction and responses. Here’s how:

Marketing automation software tracks, interprets and analyzes the digital body language of prospects and enables organizations to understand their position in the buying process. It also studies their interest levels and intentions in visiting a website. These details help you understand whether a prospect is ‘purchase-ready’ or not. And based on the prospects’ position, it also helps you decide whether they have to be further nurtured or can be passed on to the sales team.

The means to successful marketing lies in delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. For instance, an IT team may respond to different marketing messages than the HR team. Hence, marketing messages have to be personalized to the prospect’s role in the buying process. And this is made possible by sophisticated marketing automation solutions available in the market today. 

‘Lead scoring’ is another key feature enabled by marketing automation software. This feature is immensely helpful in lead nurturing because, based on the lead score, marketing teams segregate prospects and categorize them depending on their readiness to buy. And those leads which are not sales ready are ‘nurtured’ with suitable messages until they decide to buy.

Today, prospects around the world have easy access to information. They use search engines, discussion forums and other social media to discuss products and make the right choice. They also compare the products and prices offered by competitors and are very well informed about market trends. Hence, in most cases, by the time the sales team gets in touch with prospects, they have already made their purchase decision. And this is the reason why marketing messages have to be timely and should reach prospects and get their attention before the competitors’ messages do. Marketing automation software plays a crucial role in this process. Starting from lead generation to scoring, nurturing and overall lead management, marketing automation tools possess a wealth of features that can optimize campaigns and maximize ROI.

Know More: lead generation, lead intelligence

Marketing Automation Software- A Valuable Marketing Asset

Every organization is trying to come up with marketing strategies that guarantee success. With this aim, marketing teams implement lead generation processes in order to generate quality leads.But these techniques are often based on assumptions about customer intent. Hence, in most cases they do not yield the desired responses.

Since no two prospects are the same, marketing teams cannot expect great results by employing a common strategy for all prospects. Each prospect has to be dealt with individually based on accurate information about their intent, interest level and readiness to buy. And this is possible only by automating the entire marketing process. Marketing automation is based on a software platform that helps marketing teams in generating quality leads by personalizing content, and automating the timing and delivery of marketing messages.

What Prospects Want From Marketers

In the pre-Internet era, consumers had limited or no means to verify the quality of a product or compare it with competitive products. But today they have access to a wealth of information over the Internet, and are very sure about their preferences. They make no compromise in choosing products that suit their requirements. They believe in finding answers themselves, and so they research extensively to understand the different choices available. Therefore, by the time marketers approach buyers, most of them have already made a decision.

Buyers no longer need the advice or support of marketers; what they need is timely information that can help in decision-making. And this is where marketing automation comes in handy.

How Marketing Automation Software Can Help

With marketing automation software, marketers get useful insights about buyers’ likes, dislikes and preferences. Marketing automation software can help by observing and analyzing buyers’ online and offline behavior. By tracking and understanding their digital body language, automation tools come up with details that help marketers comprehend the actual intent of buyers. And by employing lead scoring techniques, which are part and parcel of every marketing automation platform, marketers can categorize and prioritize prospects according to their positions in the buying cycle. This helps marketing teams to decide whether a particular prospect is ready to be passed on to the sales team, or should be held back and nurtured further with personalized messages until the time is ripe for sales reps to take over.

Marketing automation software is therefore the most valuable asset for marketing teams, as it can not only help generate quality leads, but also close deals faster.