Dave Morton, Co-Owner & President of Marketing Services
Marketers are constantly searching for new leads. What if you could spend less time cold calling and more time nurturing the best leads already on your plate?
It’s time to get familiar with automated inbound marketing. It’s a digital marketing technique that is part of an overall inbound marketing strategy.
This method delivers your unique and useful content to leads based on their location in the sales funnel. It connects them to the relevant content you’ve created specifically for their needs without being too aggressive.
Marketing automation is a tool, a software or technology that allows businesses to automate marketing tasks so they can achieve goals faster. It allows leads to move at their own pace and frees up staff time for more strategic work. Examples: automated messages across web, email, social, and text.
Inbound marketing is a strategy focused on visibility and making connections. It means being at the right place at the right time to answer the questions your target audience is asking, rather than interrupting them while they are looking for something else. Examples: content marketing, blogs, events, social media presence, SEO strategy, and social listening.
Marketing Automation + Inbound Marketing = Automated Inbound Marketing
Let’s take another look at our client Brock Grain Systems. We’ll dive into an example of what quality automated marketing can do for your business.
Brock is a B2B client that has historically sold person-to-person. They have district managers throughout the United States, but their grain bins are sold by dealers located in communities all across the country. The district managers are the sales force, but the local dealers provide the actual product to the customer. Brock makes their dealers’ lives easier when they send good leads their way.
When COVID-19 hit, the person-to-person sales model was no longer an option. Every aspect of the market went digital, so Brock was forced to follow suit. They took advantage of the opportunity by pulling our agency in to build a more robust digital advertising strategy. When they invested in more digital ads, it led to more digital leads. Now that we’ve developed a database of leads, we’re turning our attention to automated inbound marketing.
The strategy in 2022 is to write more informational content about grain storage to use as part of the inbound strategy. When this content gets in front of a potential client, the automation kicks in:
- District managers are notified immediately after a lead fills out a form.
- The automation software collects pertinent information like:
- Where did the lead visit within the website?
- What ads did they respond to?
- Where does the lead work?
- How many times have they gone to our website?
- How many emails have they received and which ones did they click on?
- The software then assigns each lead a score based on where the lead is in the sales funnel.
The whole interaction is automated up to this point. When the score reaches a high enough threshold, it indicates to the sales team it’s time for a real person to make contact. The software does the busy work, freeing up the sales team to spend their time nurturing worthwhile leads and relationships.
When J.W.Morton & Associates was starting out in the advertising business, we ran ads in magazines to generate B2B leads. The customers filled out a card in the back of the magazine to indicate which ads they were interested in and sent the card back back to the publisher. The publishers would then send those leads to advertisers. After magazines, it was 800 numbers. After 800 numbers came the internet.
Gathering leads is nothing new but how is your team managing them? How do you focus on the leads that need your attention now? Automated inbound marketing helps you work smarter. It assembles warm leads who have opted in and told you they want to hear from you. It makes your marketing less intrusive to a potential client or buyer.
Looking to learn more about automated marketing and how it can make your lead generation process more efficient? Contact us to set up a call.