The No. 1 objective before moving onto anything else with marketing automation should be to increase inbound leads.

The main purpose of marketing is to generate leads, drive sales and increase ROI.

Marketing Automation gives you all the tools necessary for generating leads. Tracking visitors, creating effective landing pages and content marketing should be a part of any lead generation strategy.

Tracking visitors allows you to understand what’s working on the website and gives you an idea of what people are interested in. Designing multiple landing pages gives you the opportunity to get information from potential leads through a form. Content Marketing allows you to reach an audience that would have never found your website if not for that one blog post or Twitter update.

All of these methods of generating leads can be accomplished through marketing automation. However, before diving head first into marketing automation, it is important to understand why these facets of lead generation are important.

Track Visitors

Great marketing automation software will provide advanced analytics, which track the visitors who access your website.

The analytics will provide detailed information of who accessed the website, the particular page they visited and how long they stayed on the page. After gathering the data, you can then segment the types of visitors into different groups using behavior based segmentation.

After dividing visitors into groups, you can then perform A/B testing to find out what types of content provokes a positive or negative response.

Once you start tracking visitors, you can begin to implement strategies to reach those visitors and turn them into leads.

Landing Pages

Effective landing pages bring in leads through a form. Once a visitor fills out the form with their information, you can then use it for lead generation.

A landing page is any page of your website that has a form and has the sole purpose of generating leads. A good landing page needs to have:

  • A clear, concise and compelling headline
  • An explanation of the value and importance of the offer to the buyer persona that you’re attempting to reach.
  • Bullet points to make information easier to consume (Like this one).
  • The appropriate number of fields for your offer. The form should not have no more than seven fields to full out, with five being the optimum number of fields to use on a form. For the most part, the fields that should be included are name, email address, company, company website (should be optional) and phone number.
  • Website navigation and links removed
  • A relevant image.

Websites with at least 40 landing pages generate 12 times more leads than websites with five or fewer landing pages.

Marketing automation can track the effectiveness of your landing page based on the submission rate

Content Marketing

Marketing automation can track the effectiveness of your blog, which is a crucial part of bringing visitors to your website.

Having a consistent presence on your blog and in the social media community will allow you to bring in visitors. These visitors might never have found your website, if it wasn’t for the compelling blog post or tweet.

A blog allows you to showcase your expertise in your chosen field. Thereby giving the visitors piece of mind, knowing that you’re well-versed on a subject that they had very little knowledge of before reading your post.

AUTHOR
Isabel Hasty
Isabel Hasty writes and edits case studies to share client success stories and industry trends. She produces a variety of lead-generation content, including white papers, blogs, infographics, and thought leadership articles.