How marketing automation delivers high-quality leads

Marketing automation delivers high-quality leads, meaning your sales team can focus on value added tasks.  

Marketing automation plays a key role in modern B2B marketing. Indeed, according to this research, 58% of B2B companies plan to adopt marketing automation software in the foreseeable future. So, what’s stopping the other 42%? Fear of the unknown, perhaps. In this blog, we make the case for marketing automation and explain why Luddism should no longer be an option.  

There’s no school like the old school… or is there? 

Students of the old school sales doctrine would have you believe the only way to increase leads is by having a large salesforce that spends all day on the phone prospecting new business. That way, you start a conversation with the prospect and get a feel for whether they qualify for your product or service – and you do it at scale. 

However, in today’s world, that approach just isn’t realistic for many businesses. It is too labour, time and cost-intensive. But fortunately, there is another solution: marketing automation. By automating repetitive tasks, such as sending outbound email communications, marketers can better nurture prospects, lapsed customers and audiences – all while recording and analysing data on who has or has not opened the emails or clicked links. This enables businesses to integrate marketing and sales, boosting efficiency as a result.    

But with this approach, many students of the old school may have another objection – that marketing automation doesn’t reap the same quality of leads as traditional techniques. At Copestone, we believe the opposite.  

Below, we explain exactly how marketing automation delivers high-quality leads. 

Align marketing with sales

With marketing automation, both sales and marketing share the same data. This integration aligns both departments and means they are focused on the same goals and objectives from the outset, streamlining your business processes and minimising workload duplication. This results in a more efficient and more productive funnel. 

For example, if marketing has a better understanding of what sales define as a lead, they will only pass the lead on when those specific criteria are met. This helps remove any friction that may exist between the teams and contributes to a more effective system, resulting in high-quality leads which, in turn, increases the likelihood of sales closing deals. 

Enable greater control over lead nurturing

Marketing automation requires leads to be developed through rigorously planned campaigns. 

This means you create the customer journey you want your prospects to take – from their first interaction with your brand through to the time they convert – and then build this into a workflow of different outbound communications, each resulting in different actions and outcomes. These campaigns give you far greater control over the journey you take your prospects on and this should funnel your prospects more efficiently.  

As a result, your sales team don’t have to waste their time finding out whether a prospect is interested in your proposition or not because the campaign process eliminates the timewasters for them. It is a way of getting rid of the tyre kickers without doing much of the legwork. 

Deliver insights to make leads warmer  

The main reason why marketing automation is so powerful is that it is based on data and data, of course, is measurable. This means you get to see what works and what doesn’t in your campaigns, giving you the insights you require to improve campaign performance. 

This is often done through A/B testing, where you have two variants that you test simultaneously to see which performs better. Once you have the results, you can use this knowledge to improve performance in other campaigns. 

By optimising campaign performance, you then increase the quality of your future leads because you have more data on their behaviours and can see how engaged they are with your brand and, crucially, when they should be passed over to sales. 

Assess the quality of leads through lead scoring

And if ever there were doubts about the quality of leads delivered by marketing automation, these arguments can effectively be rendered invalid by lead scoring. Within marketing automation solutions, this functionality enables you to score the quality of your lead based on their engagement with your campaigns over time. 

So, if a prospect has a good lead score, they are ready to be passed onto sales. But if they have a bad lead score, you just add them back to the nurture plan until they are ready to be handed over to sales. It’s that simple. 

If you would like support managing your marketing automation campaigns so that you can focus on your value added tasks, then contact us today. 
 

If you need support to write engaging, audience-driven content for your B2B brand or agency, contact Copestone today.