7 Ways to Scale B2B Lead Generation Through Marketing Automation

The need to scale B2B lead generation is felt by every business looking to grow or survive in our highly competitive world. You might have a great product or a cutting-edge service, but without relevant leads, there’s not much you can do to increase your revenue. As you know, growing qualified leads is easier said than done.

To get leads, B2B companies often try paid ads, email blasts, and social campaigns. Yet much of their efforts fall through the cracks. Marketing automation can serve as glue, linking your marketing activities and scaling them based on logic and heuristics.

Over the last decade, several advanced marketing automation platforms have become available that can sync disparate marketing activities, create detailed workflows, and map prospects’ actions across different digital touchpoints. 

Essentially, you can develop a marketing engine that can generate valuable leads, enrich them over time, and make them sales qualified. Let’s discuss seven ideas that can help you scale up outreach and lead generation through marketing automation.

1. Use Automation to Build Custom User Experience

Marketing automation software can help you create custom user experiences for people when they are visiting your website. Digital applications like HubSpot or others such as Sendinblue can help you build personalized landing pages and email content based on contacts stored in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. 

When a specific user lands on your website, that person’s landing page gets modified with relevant content and other presentation elements that are more suited for his industry. For example, if you are trying to get sign-ups for a learning course and someone from a real estate background visits your site, content such as case studies and testimonials from the real estate vertical gets shown to that user.

Customizing user experiences can help you quickly increase the lead volumes that you can obtain from your CRM data and any other contact list that you are reaching out to. In fact, companies are looking to personalize even the very first contact that a user makes with your website based on readily available data such as behavioral data, geolocation data, etc. 

Top-of-the-line marketing automation solutions like Marketo allow you to use personalized content widgets, offers, and announcements in real-time, even for anonymous visitors.

2. Improve Post-Click Experience

An effective way to connect with the user is by personalizing landing pages based on the ads. For example, if you have created multiple ads that target different audiences, you should also create landing pages where the content is relevant to the ad in which the user engages. 

While mapping ads with landing pages can be done manually, it does not scale. Imagine you are running around thirty to forty iterations of display ads for different products and services. Manually creating so many landing pages would be insane. 

With the right marketing automation software, custom landing pages relevant to the ads can be generated dynamically based on keywords or tags. Reports show that PPC campaigns matched with relevant landing page content can lower acquisition costs and generate more leads.

3. Warm Up Cold Leads by Retargeting

Marketers often complain about their leads getting cold over a few interactions. A person may have signed up to your website and might have opened one or two emails sent via your marketing campaigns. However, after that, no further action is noticed from that specific lead. Email retargeting helps you keep these leads interested in your offerings.

The technology works very similarly to remarketing ads that Google and Facebook offer. A small piece of code is contained in the email that gets fired when the email is accessed, like how Facebook pixels enable remarketing. By using relevant automation software, you can show display ads across the Internet to anyone who has opened up your email. You can even set the logic for displaying such ads, such as ones that are shown to people who have opened an email but have not taken any follow-up action for a few days.

4. Rely on Chatbots

A number of leading marketing automation software offer chatbot-building software or features as a part of their package. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to exploit the chatbots for lead generation and tend to use them for customer service only.

Chatbots can be used effectively to understand the audience and preferences in an automatic fashion. You can configure chatbots, many of which can be easily integrated into your marketing automation software. You can then create interesting surveys and quizzes that can help you gauge the preferences of your prospects. 

Chatbots can work as an interesting supplement to lead generation forms, as users tend to engage with them to address their queries. By planning the interaction steps, the chatbots can be configured to request client contact details to better assist them.

Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot allow you to quickly build bots to qualify leads and help you create customized messages that can add a human touch to get more leads. Typically, chatbots can be configured to come across as more friendly than standard pop-up lead forms.

Source: HubSpot

5. Integrate Social Handles with Your Marketing Automation Software

Most leading marketing automation software can help you schedule and post content on social handles from within the platform.  You can also use this tool to integrate social channels with other key aspects like analytics, remarketing, etc. 

Posts created with automation software contain tracking that can help build leads when a conversion takes place. When you create ads on LinkedIn or Facebook through automation tools like HubSpot, any lead that you generate gets added to the CRM. 

You should also try exploring integration options provided by leading marketing automation tools. For example, HubSpot allows you to integrate with Facebook messenger, and you can even manage all conversations from within HubSpot. 

6. Run B2B Webinars with Marketing Automation Software

In many cases, the data collected during webinars is not properly utilized. With the help of marketing automation software, you can create registration assets, promotional material, landing pages, and related material from a single platform. You can also optimize a workflow for managing B2B leads generated from these events, and at a certain stage, move them into different workflows based on engagement with your content. 

7. Automate Personalized Cold Email Campaigns

Some marketers balk at the idea of cold email campaigns for some good reasons: If not done correctly, cold email campaigns can generate spam signals and harm the image of a brand. However, gaining sufficient leads through inbound marketing alone is simply not a viable option for many businesses.

Many established companies and enterprises, and small businesses alike, do not have substantial resources or time to run paid campaigns to fuel their inbound campaigns; cold email campaigns have become a very necessary part of their B2B marketing playbook.

With marketing automation software, you can include custom content blocks in the email that includes industry-specific content for different contacts. You can change the content or offer testimonials based on the recipient. For example, if you are an invoicing software company and reaching out to a restaurant owner, you’ll want to include only industry-related content like testimonials from food and beverage establishments that use your product. Likewise, a real estate consultant will only find a testimonial relevant from someone in his trade.

You can improve even the most basic engagement with a cold email campaign to build up leads. For example, workflow rules can be created that prevent another email from being sent out until that person engages with your content. This would drastically reduce the chances of spam reports while getting you fresh leads from cold email campaigns.

Automation for B2B Lead Generation

A powerful marketing automation software can provide you with the right tools to get ahead of the competition. The key is to organize and plan ahead with your team and build an outbound marketing strategy where software remains at the forefront of the lead generation process. If you can consolidate all data sources and campaigns in a single platform, you should be able to drastically scale up your B2B lead generation volume.