The Secret to Successful Lead Generation
As the customers’ buying process have changed with the advent of the internet, many companies are now searching for the secret to generating high quality leads effectively and at the lowest possible price per lead.
Enter “inbound marketing” and “marketing automation”. Both are new terms for many marketers let alone businesses executives. While both individually offer many promises to generating large amounts of leads, marrying the two together provides the most effective results. The most effective is to marry the two.
The old approach to marketing relied on sending out mass messages to as many people as possible in as many forms as possible. While this may have worked for the 3% of buyers who might actually be searching for that solution, for the 97% of people who were not in an active buying mode, and who were not engaged, they often marked the message as spam. The pure lack of response from these prospects can attest to the fact that old methods just don’t work anymore.
An inbound marketing system turns this all around by using remarkable content that attracts prospects to come knocking on your door. From there, marketing automation makes it possible to nurture the 97% who are not in an active buying mode, so that when they are ready, they call you first.
Companies that have effectively married these two practices have seen the following results:
- 200% increase in website traffic
- Conversion rate increases by over 250%
- A decrease in the average cost of lead acquisition by 60%, as compared to outbound marketing approaches. The average cost to acquire a lead is 60% less compared to outbound marketing approaches.
If these numbers seem unbelievable to you, consider that 92% of business-to-business buyers start the search for a solution online. So getting to the #1 spot on Google can expose you to 58% of buyers who are searching for your product at that very moment. (Google’s 70% market share X the almost 90% of people who click on the 1st results X the 92% that start their search online). When you marry this 58% with an effective lead nurturing process, many companies can achieve 40% market share.
In order to get this 40% market share, you need to implement an Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation process that works well together. When done right, this process is far more effective than the sum of its parts. When you map this process to your customers buying process, many companies have achieved over 60% market share.
The Components of an Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation Process
- Your Content
As any internet marketer will tell you “content is King”. Remarkable content will make your website the destination of choice for people interested in your market place. A great inbound marketing system depends on the quality of the content you share. This is the area that has the greatest effect on your success online. The following tools help display it, disseminate, promote and catalogue it.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Tools
Search Engine Marketing includes tools for Organic Search (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC). There are also tools to help devise Keyword strategies and others to assist with advertising campaigns; score your website, analyze its traffic share, determine your Search Engine Results Page ranking, assess incoming and outgoing links, etc.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM) Tools
With Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter being all the buzz these days, SMM tools are a must to manage all of them. The tools help find authoritative or influential blogs and websites for your area. Others help with Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and the many social media platforms. A search for any of these topics on Google will result in a long list of articles and tools, and our blog covers the subject too.
- Content Management Systems (CMS)
A great way to manage your content is with a CMS. The benefits of a CMS is that whole content of a webpage will be incorporated into a database, where a non-web administrative staff with little knowledge can manipulate the whole content easily with less hurdles within a smaller time frame.
- Marketing Automation Software
It’s great to have all these prospects coming to your sight, but you also need to have a plan on how you are going to nurture them into a sale. Enter marketing automation software that can nurture your prospects from a general browser to paying customer.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
After your Marketing Automation has tracked your prospects and determined which prospects are HOT; leads are fed into your CRM system, allowing your sales team to conduct timely sales calls with prospects who are in a buying mode.
The Process in Action
Imagine visitors arrive on your site, attracted by your keyword and SEO strategy and all that Social Media Marketing you’re doing. They find that your site perfectly matches their keyword phrase (because you created your marketing strategy and keyword phrases correctly, and then built a website optimized for these same keywords). The site is such a perfect fit to their expectations that they begin exploring and don’t bounce away.
They register to get your remarkable content. They read it and return for more. Because they have given you their name and email address, they are assigned to the first of your drip-email nurturing campaigns and are now automatically nurtured and cared for, according to your best sales and marketing practices encoded in your system’s Business or Automation Rules. Your prospects are cared for flawlessly, repeatedly and 24/7. Each automated drip-email element provides just the right response to nudge this person to the next step in their buying cycle.
Once they have entered a buying mode (as determined by you and monitored by your Marketing Automation Software) your sales people get a notice (in your CRM system) to call this prospect. Complete with a full history of this buyer’s behaviour and a targeted message, your sales person signs them up that day.
This may sound unbelievable but this is the exact system that many successful companies are using. Their marketing people are released from the drudgery of managing leads and responding to routine inquiries, thus freeing them to create new campaigns with remarkable content. And sales people concentrate their efforts on the hot prospects who are ready to buy now and leave the “just looking” leads to the automation system. This is how the marriage of inbound marketing and marketing automation increases your revenues while lowering your costs and thus boosts profit significantly.