As a marketer, your focus is probably on generated leads — but it’s not just about that: we, of course, want to generate quality leads! Let’s get right into how to generate qualified leads with marketing automation.
1. Inbound Marketing with Lead Magnets
Inbound marketing is all about attracting your potential customers to you; I often explain it as a magnet instead of the megaphone of outbound marketing. The focus here is on providing useful content and being relevant in the eyes of your ideal personas.
In Net-Results, there are a whole lot of amazing tools for lead magnets. First, store all your whitepapers, infographics, and designs in the Asset Manager, which comes with its own benefits. The advantages to having Net-Results host these files for you are two-fold:
- More reliable tracking – if we’re hosting the file, we definitely know when it is accessed, and by which Contact.
- Better reporting – an entire dashboard is devoted to showing you how many times your Assets were downloaded and by which Contact.
Another great thing? You can gate your content behind Net-Results forms, which easily send trigger actions like autoresponder emails, list populations, and campaigns qualification. This means that you can put Net-Results forms on your own site or on landing pages built in the Net-Results drag-and-drop landing page builder.
The best part: everything is trackable, reportable, and in one instance!
2. Nurture cool contacts
Another huge part of marketing is the nurturing of cool contacts: the ones that just dropped by your site for a quick visit, who downloaded a single content offer, or casually visits your blog from time to time. These cool or cold contacts are generally ones that haven’t shown any significant engagement.
Remember: we’re going for qualified leads here. Those qualified leads need to be interested in your product, and eventually ready to buy.
And here enters: lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your contacts. With Net-Results or another similarly robust platform, the options for lead nurturing are endless.
- Email marketing: sending emails is one of the obvious (for good reason) ways to nurture your contacts to become warm leads. Plus, with dynamic content, you can actually base
- Segmentation and Reporting
- Net-Results has a whole plethora of integrations and one of my personal favorites is text message marketing via our integration with Twilio. If you have a contact’s phone number that you gathered via a form fill out, it’s easy to send them relevant text messages with an educational or promotional tone, furthering your relationship with them.
3. Qualify leads automatically
It might seem counterintuitive, but a great way to generate more qualified leads is to improve the qualification of your leads.
Lead Scoring is the practice of assigning points to a lead in order to determine its fit. It’s most commonly used to automate and improve the system of passing leads between marketing and sales, allowing for easier lead qualification. It’s all about identifying the attributes, behaviors, and activities that determine sales-readiness in your funnel and assigning numeric values to them. That Score can then qualify contacts that have turned into leads and pass them via CRM sync to your sales team.
Here are some easy Lead Scoring examples:
- Add 12 points if the contact’s title contains “C_O” (CMO, CTO, CEO, CFO, etc.)
- Subtract 1 point if the CRM Account Industry does not match “Healthcare”
- Add 8 points if the Website Visit Duration is greater than 3 minutes
- Add 5 points if the contact downloads your company’s “Buyer’s Guide”
Note: notice that we also included examples of subtracting points because that’s possible too! Any behavior or attribute that takes away from a lead’s qualification can also be used to build an accurate and helpful Lead Score for your sales and marketing teams.
Interested in learning more about Lead Scoring? Check out our Lead Scoring Worksheets, which help you create, develop, and hone your lead scoring strategy.
And there you have it: 3 easy ways to generate more qualified leads using marketing automation.
