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.
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