Automation can help boost leads and conversions for your business. Pic: Pixabay

Four tools for boosting leads and conversions through marketing automation

By | 15 July, 2016

BECAUSE social media plays such a huge part in the lives of netizens, it means that business organizations need to leverage platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and focus their marketing efforts in building lasting relationships with a highly-engaged and social audience.

94 percent of businesses with marketing departments already use social media as part of their marketing portfolio, says a report by Social Media Examiner. These organizations often utilize a large part of their marketing budgets and departments in attempting to engage customers through social media.

For a business, this means streamlining your workflow in order to maximize engagement without losing productivity, and without having to spend too much on manpower.

Automation: The magic word for boosting engagement

Automation might initially sound like a bane for marketers, especially if it means losing yet another aspect of the business to bots and networks. However, it can help improve agility for organizations of all sizes. With growing competition, you can easily improve customer engagement and streamline the workflow in ways not otherwise possible.

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Automation does not have to mean your customers will lose out on the personal, human touch. You can use platforms that can personalize and target the engagement process, so each customer feels important even if everything is automated. The key is to tailor the messaging in such a way that prospects will feel the interactions were specifically built for them.

Here are a few ways automation can help maximize conversions and engagement.

Target your messaging. Lead generation can be the most difficult part of marketing, especially if you don’t know where to start. This involves finding the right audience using the right timing. You can improve the relevance of your message on social media and target an accurate audience based on their interests. Rather than cold calling, you can immediately immerse yourself in the audience most likely to respond positively to any information you share.

Lead generation app Socedo, for example, automatically fills your sales funnel through a customizable workflow that matches potential customers with your identified criteria. The Israeli startup’s cloud-based platform even engages leads automatically and it can help you gain traction and brand equity without breaking a sweat.

Re-target your campaigns. According to studies, 68 percent of buyers on e-commerce sites abandon their shopping cart at some point. In many cases, it takes a little bit of a nudge to convert these prospects into actual paying customers – sometimes even long after they have abandoned the original sale. Re-targeting will involve nurturing the incomplete interaction, so that the prospect is encouraged to finalize the deal.

Fanplayr, which is likewise headquartered in Israel and with offices in several cities across the globe, including Mumbai and Tokyo, is a cloud-based solution that automates re-targeting by utilizing real-time analytics and segmentation. It then optimizes content and engages the audience at any point in the sales cycle to provide a more compelling offer.

The goal here is to get prospects to convert and find a compelling deal with as little manual intervention as possible, making it a win-win.

Enhance and personalize engagement. Getting a positive response from a lead is one thing. Being able to keep the conversation going requires additional effort. Engaging with leads lets you build rapport and get them more interested in what you have to offer. This also helps build brand equity – your organization will be seen in a positive light if the audience feels an actual connection rather than a sales push.

In this regard, Marketo – which has offices in Australia and Japan – is an ideal platform that can automate engagement. It features social apps like referral campaigns, shareable videos, and social polls, among others. The solution also provides analytics which show you how much the social activity drives actual conversions and revenue.

Optimize your workflow. The modern business does not only involve solutions that help you interact with customers; it also involves apps and solutions that help refine the business workflow. This includes analytics, which enable you to develop a strategy that fits with your business and its target audiences.

Microsoft Dynamics is a popular platform for enterprise resource planning, providing business intelligence capabilities that allow you to get better visibility over your business operations. The solution also keeps track of external factors – like social sentiment – which can help you engage effectively with the audience. By understanding how to adjust the workflow, you can easily achieve better efficiency and productivity.

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The takeaway

For 80 percent of marketers, engagement is considered to be the most important metric for valuing social media success. For any business, automation can clearly help in improving engagement, in order to boost leads, conversions and profits. It’s simply a matter of finding the right tools and using these effectively in reaching out to the audience.



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