How Does Marketing Automation Help Lead Generation?

This may surprise you, but if you’re conducting lead generation without marketing automation tools, you’re wasting a whole lotta love, time, and money—only to come up short. 

Anyone who thinks marketing automation and lead generation are two separate strategies that exist only in their own realms is nothing short of wrong. 

Marketing automation and lead generation are the perfect couple. They cooperate, collaborate, complement each other’s strengths, and carry each other through their weaknesses. They are both committed to their craft of creating conversions. 

Okay, enough “C” words…Let’s move on. 

We here at Big Leap want to talk about what lead generation and marketing automation each bring to the partnership. Then we’ll dive into the reasons why and benefits of having them come together to give you the happily-ever-after resolution you crave.  

Lead Generation and Its Benefits

Lead generation is any strategy, process, or action taken to attract your audience to your business, with the end goal of converting them into customers. In other words, lead generation “warms up” potential customers to the idea of getting to know what you’re all about.

Facts:

• The top priority for marketers is to generate leads.
• In 2021, 78% of marketers say their demand-gen budget will grow or remain the same.
• Generating traffic and leads is a top challenge for 47% of marketers.

The Benefits of Lead Generation

1. Builds visibility and awareness, capturing the attention of potential customers
2. Helps you expand into new markets, building a community of target audience members
3. Benefits the seller, increasing their opportunity to get the product they need or want
4. Grows your revenue, increasing sales and profit ratio

Example:

Sherami Law wanted to connect with her website visitors with the goal of gathering their contact information and turning these visitors into qualified leads. To accomplish this, Sherami installed a chatbot on her home page. She now generates up to 10 new leads each day.

4 Tactics for Lead Generation

Expert marketers the world over rely on five important tactics for lead generation. Why are they so important? Because each of these tactics has a high success rate on its own. But when used in combination, leads have a tendency to slide down the marketing funnel with ease and in record time.

1. Lead Magnet/Lead Forms

Usually, in the form of a gated content offer (but also sometimes for landing pages), a lead magnet is an item or service that’s given away for free for the purpose of gathering a lead’s contact information. 

Every website needs to give a positive, painless way for leads to tell an organization their interest. Leads do this by providing contact information in exchange for information or a conversation.

Fact:

• In 2020, email collection forms were the most successful at converting viewers with a 15% conversion rate.

Case Study:

iMpact Utah came to Big Leap in 2020 and we looked at their content from a lead gen perspective. Great content attracts new leads that convert into sales, so we wanted to leverage it. First, we created content that was truly unique, helpful, highly relevant, and evergreen. This ensured our client could repeatedly use it in future promotions. Second, we put this valuable content behind a lead form. 

This ideal tactic resulted in their website traffic being consistently better in 2021 when compared to 2020.

2. Landing Pages

Whether it’s for selling a specific service, asking leads to fill out a form for a free estimate or consultation, landing pages are where leads “land” after clicking on a button in an email or ad.

Fact:

• Only 17% of marketers use A/B tests to improve their landing page’s conversion rates.

Case Study:

Big Leap’s client CORE wanted to maximize its digital footprint with a minimal budget. One of the strategies we came up with was to create personalized landing pages that served each of their three main audiences—government, healthcare, and higher education. The goal of this was to ensure each industry’s key questions were answered through a seamless experience. 

After implementing this and a few other strategies, CORE’s site impressions increased by 1,431%.

3. Personalized Website Experience

Repeat visitors are greeted with personalized website experiences that are directly relevant to their interests, concerns, and desires. This is to provide value, build trust, and increase the likelihood that a lead converts. 

Fact:

• 65% of marketers are marketing internationally, with cultural differences, exchange rates, and localization being the top three biggest challenges.

Case Study:

To improve our client’s (American Roofing Company) reach, we knew that increasing engagement was key for our focus. Big Leap looked at the cities our client serves, then found the customers who would most benefit from roofing services. At that point, we created a particular content plan to resonate with and engage this newly defined audience. And? 

The client saw a “Like” increase of 33% on their business page.

4. Drip Campaign

A series of linear emails that gauge a lead’s interest is called a drip campaign. Sometimes this is considered a lead generation tactic, but it depends on when you believe someone becomes a lead (as soon as they give you their contact information versus later on in the funnel).

Facts:

• Email and social media list growth is a top challenge for 19% of marketers.
• Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 more responses than standalone email blasts.

Case Study:

Redmond Life realized they needed Big Leap’s help with an automated email drip campaign because their team wasn’t experienced enough in this realm to know what to do or how. We stepped in and quickly implemented several email flows, including series’ for new customers, abandoned carts, browse abandonment, and win-back. 

These implementations contributed to over $300k in revenue.

Lead Generation Tactics Without Marketing Automation

Each tactic of lead generation is a necessary piece of the pie, but they do come with some pain points when not combined with marketing automation.

Loads of Manual Work

Manually following up with leads is, slow, inefficient, and time-consuming, shall we go on? To speed things up, organizations are tempted to send the same emails or other forms of engagement to every lead. This treats all leads as if they’re all the same and of equal value—which they’re not.

Related: How to Calculate the Lifetime Value of Your Customer

Disparate Data

All of your marketing data is sitting in different places. This causes problems. Like, it’s hard to track who you’ve contacted, your success rate, and other key marketing metrics when you aren’t using automation.

Zero Optimization

It’s difficult to optimize landing pages and lead forms for optimal performance when you can’t refer back to solid data as a guide. 

Best practices include:

• A benefit-focused headline that resonates with visitors
• Compelling copy that speaks to the solutions of pain points
• A relevant and appealing offer
• A clear and standout call-to-action

How are you supposed to accomplish any of these best practices for landing pages and lead forms without fully knowing your audience and what they need?

Marketing Automation and Its Benefits

Marketing automation is a software/service that automates, prioritizes, and streamlines marketing efforts and repetitive marketing activities to successfully turn promising leads into customers.

Facts:

• Ninety-two percent of top-performing companies invest time, budget, and resources into marketing automation. 
• With marketing automation, lead conversion time has been seen to drop by 72%.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

1. Saves time, money, human error, and staffing needs, leaving more room for creative strategy
2. Sends automated personalized messages, content, and campaigns, nurturing leads one touchpoint at a time
3. Delivers the right content to the right people at the right time and in the right place, boosting customer engagement 
4. Makes the sales process more data-driven, increasing conversions and revenue
5. Fuels existing relationships, improving customer retention and maximizing ROI 
6. Aligns sales and marketing for a robust partnership, yielding higher revenue

Example:

Celestial Meditation sells a lot of day passes to her studio, but she wants to increase cross-sells of her meditation mats and upsells for her meditation weekend getaway package. To accomplish this, she implements marketing email automation strategies to build awareness and lead her new and potential clients down the funnel to a purchase.

Lead Generation With Marketing Automation

With marketing automation and lead generation tactics together, marketers can do their jobs better and in much less time because interactions with leads are managed automatically. This frees up marketers’ time for more thought-intensive problem-solving sessions and creative strategy scenarios.

Here’s what the two can accomplish together.

Lead Scoring for a Guided Workflow

Built-in lead scoring gives insights into which leads to prioritize. Lead scoring maps out your buyer’s journey, assigns scores based on actions and events, and sets up a marketing automation workflow to guide further actions.

Fact:

• Ninety-six percent of people who visit your site aren’t ready to buy.

The Benefits of a Guided Workflow

1. Eliminates or redirects unproductive leads, freeing up resources for qualified leads
2. Sends personalized messages to precisely the right people, enabling instant connection and rapport
3. Simplifies campaign management, leading to more success stories
4. Links revenue to specific marketing efforts, informing future decisions

Case Study:

Big Leap implemented a lead-scoring model for our client Roof Maxx. This model helped them earn a 200% increase in scheduled lead meetings. Additionally, it helped our client increase their email open rate by 38% and their email click rate by 14%.

Lead Segmentation for Personalized Engagement

Consumers are getting sick of marketing that isn’t personalized. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being sold products that don’t apply to them. Lead segmentation sorts your leads into groups based on demographics, interests, firmographics, or industry. The point of this is to engage leads in the most efficient and effective way. 

But be careful—don’t take personalization to the point that it begins to feel icky and uncomfortable.

Facts:

• Audience segmentation is one of the top three tactics used in email marketing.
• Companies that execute segmented campaigns generate up to a 760% revenue increase.
• Personalized CTA buttons can lead to a conversion increase of 78.5%.

The Benefits of Personalized Engagement

1. Aligns the brand’s value proposition with the audience, making an emotional connection
2. Builds trust, giving your brand authority over your competitors
3. Starts a proactive conversation, teaching you what your customer actually wants
4. Shapes customer interactions, helping them through their purchase journey

Case Study:

Big Leap established a segmentation strategy using our client’s master contact list to create customized email campaigns based on different groups and engagement histories. 

The strategy worked, winning a 144% increase in revenue for our client Hemplucid, achieved through a 52% increase in their overall email open rate.

Centralized Data for an Omnichannel Experience

There are plenty of times when a person fills out a form in multiple places (like a landing page and a social media platform). Marketing automation can combine those data points into a single contact to give a centralized, omnichannel experience for both the customer and the business. 

The Benefits of an Omnichannel Experience

1. Supplies a seamless user experience, boosting engagement
2. Aligns data and information across all channels, making marketing efforts pay off more
3. Highlights the customer journey, keeping marketers abreast of when customers enter each level of the marketing funnel
4. Automates strategy, giving a higher ROI

Case Study:

Our client, Cascade Collision, needed to provide lead flow for their new location while maintaining strong lead volume for their established locations. Big Leap was hired to help. One of the strategies we used is lead form tracking. 

Once implemented, Cascade Collision was able to gain more insight into what channels perform best. 

Optimized Landing Pages and Lead Forms for Lead Capture

The best possible landing pages and lead forms can be built to optimize lead capture. Without optimization, lead gen can come to a halt because users aren’t interested enough in your products or services. Or, they get bogged down figuring out the next step to take. 

Make it simple for them to move forward with their purchase journey when they’re ready for it.

The Benefits of Optimized Lead Capture

1. Attracts the right people who will become leads, saving your time, money, and energy on tons of unqualified leads 
2. Helps give a value-added, persuasive pitch, positioning leads to convert
3. Minimizes audience distractions, enabling you to guide their attention on what matters most
4. Gathers valuable data about what type of language and imagery appeals most to your audience, giving you the opportunity to get the response you want

Case Study:

Workfront came to Big Leap needing help with conversion rate optimization. Their landing pages were getting a great amount of traffic, but their leads weren’t converting. Big Leap diagnosed the issue to be a lack of precision and focus in their messaging. We pinpointed a specific landing page that showed great potential and we optimized it, also recalibrating its messaging. 

After these tweaks, the page netted a remarkable 104% increase in conversion and engagement.

Considering Marketing Automation Software for Lead Generation

There are plenty of software options for marketing automation and lead generation, and we’ll talk about the capabilities and shortcomings of each.

The main thing to remember, though, is that even with advanced software, it still takes up to a whole team of people to devise automation strategies, run the software, perform A/B testing, make changes, review reports, and make important decisions. So keep that in mind as you consider purchasing software that you think will make things much easier and less expensive for you, but in the end, may not.

Facts:

• Eighty percent of marketers who use automation software have higher lead generation rates.
• The top overall challenge that 30% of marketers face is team training.

Drip – Email and SMS Marketing

Drip allows users to run multi-channel marketing campaigns without requiring any coding skills.

Capabilities:

• Create multi-channel campaigns
• Run proven eCommerce playbooks
• Integrate customer data from eCommerce stores

Shortcomings:

• The design is geared to solo entrepreneurs and very small businesses.
• It has poor reporting features.
• The software can be buggy.

Mailchimp – Automated Email Marketing

Mailchimp helps its clients improve marketing results through higher customer engagement. 

Capabilities:

• Pre-built automation flows
• Predictive segmentation 
• Stand-out emails

Shortcomings:

• It’s initially free, but prices climb quickly for scalability.
• Access to free email scheduling is only available for the first 30 days.
• There’s no automation at larger scales for targeting audiences.

Hubspot – Marketing and Lead Generation

Hubspot offers many tools and integrations to choose from, including marketing, sales, service, content management, and operations.

Capabilities:

• Landing pages and lead forms
• Traffic and conversion analytics
• Multi-touch revenue attribution

Shortcomings:

• The support team sometimes comes up short.
• Constant changes and new features can be overwhelming.
• Some functions are limited or too complex.

How to Get Next Level Marketing Automation for Lead Generation

Your best bet in getting the results you want from marketing automation for lead generation is to hand it over to the experts. Doesn’t that sound lovely? 

Remove the intense hassle of all the many tasks involved in this realm and let Big Leap do it all for you. All you’ll need to do is sit back and see the positive results stream in. 

Don’t waste your time trying to generate leads without marketing automation—there’s no point. Our team of experts will do all the hard work to nurture your target audience into your best customers. 

Facts:

• Lead nurturing generates nearly 3x more clicks than email blasts.
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

Trust Big Leap to take your marketing automated lead generation tactics to the next level. Let us show you what we can do!