Lead generation overview
Lead generation is a process of targeting the people who present the highest chance of becoming your customers, making them interested in your products/ services, and influencing them to take action.
Lead generation is a vital process to generate potential clients for any business. The leads will then be driven further down your sales funnel to eventually become clients.
Lead generation involves working with different traffic channels (such as organic, ads and social media) by using many different strategies.
A successful lead generation means a business’ success. Lead generation has never been easy and is a fierce and exhausting battle among competitors. Businesses must always stay up-to-date to keep up with the competition to generate sales and reduce costs.
Automated lead generation
Lead generation can be a very manual process, especially when you’re a beginner.
An expert that has many years of experience in the field is probably utilizing different online marketing tools to make a big part of the task automatic.
Using automation for lead generation can free up a lot of your time to do something else while still keeping the lead gen campaigns effective.
Lead gen automation is a higher level of lead generation and is only used to generate leads online.
Manual vs automated lead generation
Manual online lead gen is basically collecting prospects one by one from different channels such as social media or/and Google search result pages. The business will then reach out to them one by one using emails, phone calls or both.
As you can imagine, manual online lead gen takes up a lot of your time and energy. Therefore, the sooner your business utilizes automation, the faster it will grow.
Offline lead generation isn’t automated, it’s the process of interacting with your prospects in an event or meeting to try to motivate them to buy or use your products or services.
Offline lead generation can be effective, however, businesses nowadays cannot rely entirely on offline lead gen, they need to transition themselves from offline to online in order to grow bigger.
Automated lead generation in different channels
Lead gen can revolve around working with many different channels. Each channel can have lead gen automated in different ways, more or less automatic depending on the availability of automation tools in the field.
1. Lead gen automation in email marketing
Email marketing probably has the most automation tools for use.
Most online email marketing software nowadays offers automation features that allow marketers to send emails automatically to their users based on their activities on websites or apps.
For example, if a user signs up to download a checklist on your site, an automated email will be sent to the user’s email address. That’s a great way to keep your users engaged with your business.
Why cold emailing?
If you’re running cold email campaigns to generate leads, you will need more tools to make the campaigns automatic.
Cold emailing is the most popular strategy to generate leads effectively. Countless businesses around the world rely on it to generate leads and sales every day.
Cold emailing is the most popular lead gen method but it doesn’t always mean it will be a fit for your business until you try it out.
Cold emailing consists of two parts. The 1st part is prospect generation and the 2nd part is cold emailing.
Prospects are the people who present the highest probability of becoming leads. To generate prospects you can use digital marketing tools or a data scraper to collect them from the Internet.
Using the software isn’t easy and cheap. Therefore, the best way to generate excellent prospects is to use a B2B leads database.
There are many B2B data providers on the Internet and many of them are just a waste of time and money, therefore, you will need to be very careful in picking the right fit for you.
A great B2B data provider usually provides the following:
- Free trials
- No credit card is required
- Excellent support
- Generous discount for first-time clients
- Refund policies
At Limeleads, a leading B2B leads database, we offer all the things above and many more. We make sure that we’re a great partner toward your lead generation success by providing expert advice for lead gen whenever you ask us.
Simply sign up for an account and get your free trials with us. Risk-free experience guaranteed!
When you’ve got a sizeable list of good prospects, it’s time for cold emailing. There are several cold emailing software such as Mailshake to help you with cold emailing automation.
You’ll be given the features to automate your follow-up emails to be sent at a certain time or based on how your prospects interacted with your first emails.
Moreover, the software will schedule to send your emails out at optimal times to avoid bounced emails. It will also present your campaigns’ performance stats in an intuitive way for easier optimization.
2. Automated lead gen in paid ads
Ads are mostly automatic but you need to have good ad knowledge in order to avoid critical mistakes when setting up your ad campaigns.
For example, if you’re targeting the wrong audience in a different area from your intended geography, you’ll be losing money.
Choosing the right bidding strategy is also vital. You can choose to optimize for conversions, clicks or/ and impressions (in Google ads).
When you’ve finished setting up your ads correctly, the optimization will happen automatically thanks to machine learning.
When it comes to lead gen ads, there are two most popular ads that are designed specifically for lead generation. They are Linkedin lead gen form and Facebook lead generation ads.
These two types of ads will deliver a form to your prospects while they are surfing the platforms to entice them to take action and become your leads.
The leads are accessible at all times in a secure place. Some businesses find these ads effective, some don’t feel the same since they can be really expensive.
3. Automated lead gen in social media
Posting on social media can help your business generate leads effectively.
To generate leads this way, your social media posts should include a lead magnet or a landing page where the users can visit and become leads easily.
The success of this strategy also depends on how many followers your business page has and also how interesting your posts are. Going viral with your posts on social media is pretty much like hitting a jackpot.
Businesses should not rely on such posts, they should instead come up with a thorough content plan and stick with what already working.
Nowadays, you don’t need to prepare and publish your posts day by day. Automation tools like Facebook Content Studio or Tweetdeck can help you schedule your posts to be published at specific times.
You only need to prepare the content for the posts in one go, then schedule them to be published later and forget about the whole thing.
These social media automation tools also provide a performance report that is very helpful for optimization.
Conclusion
Digital marketing campaigns have become increasingly automated for the past several years. Automation with the help of AI and Machine Learning is predicted to be the future of marketing.
We’re actually enjoying it but it’s just a fraction of the potential that marketing automation can get.
Lead generation is vital to any business and making the process automated will help you free up a lot of your time for doing something else.
The above points are what you can do to automate your campaigns in different channels to generate leads more effectively.
If you have any questions, Limeleads can help with that, simply drop us a message at [email protected] or via our live chat support.