Automating new lead generation

By accessing the right automation tools for your business, you’ll be able to spread your small business content across multiple platforms as and when you need to. There are many tools that can improve your digital presence, simply by leveraging social media, email and web services.

With an effective marketing automation package, you can:

• Motivate customers to start looking further into what you’re selling, and how it can benefit them
• Nurture leads. For instance, after a prospective customer signs up to your email service, you might immediately consider offering them a deal they can’t refuse
• Capture sales. Customers will realize that what you’re selling is what they’re looking for.

You can set up a schedule of when and where certain content will be posted to your website, blog, social media platforms, and potential customers’ email accounts.

Automate your business content

Automation involves being able to program your marketing strategies using powerful mobile apps and web services, or by employing the services of an inbound marketing software platform like Hubspot.

Regardless of the kind of business you have, you’re competing for every lead with large companies and small enterprises within your niche. You’ll have to nurture each lead along your sales funnel. As your lead numbers increase, manual lead tracking will become more difficult – automation will become the obvious solution to keeping up.

Marketing triggers

As a small business owner, email marketing is one of your most effective tactics to improve performance at every stage of your marketing efforts.

A useful email marketing automation tool lets you set up trigger-based workflows so you can leverage opportunities to nurture your leads. For example, some triggers you could utilize include:

• Welcome emails. Thank any new subscribers to your blog or e-newsletter and give them a preview of the kind of content they’ll get
• Lead nurturing. If a potential customer has downloaded your e-book or white paper, have an automated email sent to their inbox suggesting what they do next (perhaps downloading a paid-for piece of content)
• Sales representative notifications. For example, if a ‘lead’ goes through a few steps and views your pricing page, automatically advise your sales team so they can follow up
• Abandoned shopping carts. Some businesses will automatically send emails when a customer has abandoned their shopping cart. This needs to be done delicately to avoid a hard-sell approach, but with the aim of encouraging customers to go through with their purchases
• CTAs (Calls To Action) encourage your potential customers to take the next step on the journey towards a purchase. For example, they might read some of the content on your landing page and fill out your sign-up box to receive your e-newsletter.

Using lead magnets

A lot of marketing automation uses lead magnets to gain leads. Some types of lead magnets you might consider using are:

• Guides or reports that have value led content, the results of research or certain insights that a person can only access by downloading your documents
• Video to demonstrate a new product or service, case studies, customer stories or how your business runs
• Free trials of products (often for software or applications where the delivery cost is zero).
• You can also automate the advertising space on your site with ad services like Google AdSense.

Improve your customer reach

Being able to automate the release of related content can increase your customer reach on a certain topic, product or service – and encourage action from your customer base.

You could automate content through an online forum, as an e-newsletter, and on your website at set times to maximize the effect your content marketing will have.

Summary

By automating your small business content, you’ll enjoy a number of benefits such as getting the right messages and purchase triggers to your potential customers at the right time. You’ll also save time by automating leads, and generate more opportunities to up and cross-sell.