If you looked at our past blog posts, you already know the basics of inbound marketing. It’s a methodology that aims to create a personalized customer journey for your potential clients through the development of reliable content distributed via different digital channels.
In this scenario, marketing automation plays a crucial role. This kind of strategy helps you automate some marketing processes such as social media posting and sending e-mails.
Let’s take Netflix for example. When you first log-in you’re invited to select some of your favorite shows or the ones you’re looking forward to watching. This information and the content you decide to watch over time gives Netflix some relevant information about your preferences. In this way, thanks to marketing automation tools and weekly or monthly strategy you’re offered movies and series according to your previous choices. Suddenly, you stop browsing on the platform, and you start to consume the content that Netflix has selected for you based on your past behavior.
According to HubSpot, in an ideal world, marketing automation is a combination of strategy and tools that will help increase your sales through offering highly personalized content and products to your potential clients based on their past purchases and online behavior.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. Most of today’s marketers seem to forget to develop a strategy for the moment after they’ve collected their leads.
In other words, marketers think that their only purpose is to attract visitors and leads and that the sales team has to do the rest.
We’ve seen why Smarketing is an essential concept for your business to succeed with its inbound strategy.
To do so, you also have to set effective marketing automation tools and tactics not only to better manage your organization but also to boost your sales.
Let’s have a look at how HubSpot may help you achieve these goals.
4 ways HubSpot can help you boost your sales thanks to marketing automation
1. Develop a website to collect new leads
It’s 2019, so we won’t repeat how important it is for your business to have a functional website. Graphics and good content are crucial, but for you to convert visitors into leads, you need to consider also landing pages and forms.
For example, a form in the home page to request more info about your products or services is a great way to offer an easy and intuitive touch point to your potential customer.
On the other hand, if you’ve already developed useful content for your website’s visitors to download, include it also in your home page as we did.
In this scenario, HubSpot is a very useful tool for your marketing automation strategy, because:
- It helps you easily create forms and landing pages, without the need for any coding or graphic design experience,
- Once that a visitor fills a form, he or she automatically enters in the buyer’s journey that you’ve designed.
2. Lead segmentation
Once again, in a perfect world, all the collected leads will be ready to purchase. Unfortunately, this is a rare situation.
For a lead to become a customer, you need to develop a nurturing strategy.
Thanks to HubSpot’s workflows you’ll be able to set different types of communication with your leads based on their behavior.
Nurturing a lead with specific and tailored content according to where he or she is in the buying process is a must if you want to be helpful and to push the leads to become sales-ready when they really are.
3. Offering a personalized conversation
HubSpot’s workflows are also great because, as we’ve mentioned, you can provide customized communication to each lead and ease up the sales reps’ job.
For example, if a visitor fills up the contact form requesting more information about your products or services, he/she will be more willing to make a purchase rather than someone who downloaded an e-book from your blog.
In the first case, the follow-up e-mail will contain information about some product details and maybe the pricing list and will also include a CTA to book a free consultation.
In the second one, you’ll follow up with a “Thank you” e-mail and maybe offer more content that might be interesting to your lead.
In both cases, you’ll offer personalized content based on the lead’s online behavior, and this will help you in the future to tailor your marketing automation strategy even more.
4. Lead scoring
How many times we hear about sales reps being annoyed about the “unqualified” leads collected by the marketing team? Sometimes they’re right!
Knowing when a prospect is ready to make a purchase is very difficult.
That’s why lead scoring is a great way to categorize leads according to their behavior.
Lead scoring once again is an automated tactic that helps you add or subtract points from each lead, based on their actions on your website or blog.
HubSpot offers a great feature that helps you personalize all these properties and assign to each one of them a score based on their importance and the goals you want to achieve.
Let’s take a practical example here to make it clearer.
Let’s consider that you offer interior design services and you’ve written an e-book on the latest color patterns. Mary, who’s passionate about DIY and the latest trends in the field of interiors, downloads the e-book.
You’ve also developed an infographic on what professional skills to look for when searching for interior designers and Pete, who is looking for a pro to help him with the looks of his new apartment has downloaded that infographic.
In the first case, we have Mary: according to the content she downloaded she’s just looking for information, she’s not ready to purchase, so Mary is a lead, but not a sales-ready one. So, based on the choice she made, her score might be 3.
Pete, on the other side, is already looking for a professional interior designer that could actually help him with his apartment. We know that because of the kind of content he chose to download. In this case, his score might be 7.
Lead scoring is extremely useful for two reasons:
- it helps your sales reps give priority to leads who are ready to purchase;
- it gives them all the information they need to approach a potential customer in the right way offering him/her a tailored solution.
Probably you think that the above-mentioned best practices are mainly useful for your marketing team.
Not at all. The sales process begins when a visitor lands on your website, blog or social media accounts.
An effective marketing automation strategy is crucial for you to offer a personalized buyer’s journey and customer experience and to allocate your internal resources smartly and functionally.
Do you want to know a little bit more about marketing automation and how it can improve your sales process? Book a free consultation with us!
We’ll be excited to show you all the infinite possibilities of this strategy and how to effectively use it for you to reach the results you’re looking forward to.
