Table of Contents

Introduction

Traditionally, small businesses thrive on delivering excellent products and service needs. Word of mouth and past referrals help to sustain the sales pipeline. It is especially true when you’re on a small budget and cannot turn to paid media to get leads. However, you need a better system to automate lead generation as your business grows. Moving in this direction releases critical time and resources that can be used to improve your sales process and customer experience.

One way to look at it is to embrace automation for lead generation. When done right through a three-step system, it lets you automate your process, remove bottlenecks and streamline repetitive tasks. But first, let’s look at the benefits of automation.

lead generation
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Why Your Business Needs Automation

Automation is part of your business’s overall strategic plan to save bandwidth since you’re not manually working on getting qualified leads for your business. It also helps scale up quickly with minimal effort. However, you need to factor in a few points before automating.

Automation without personalization could reduce the conversion rate and make it a numbers game. It can stay effective only when you have a near-infinite customer base. 

On the other hand, when you have a small niche with limited customers, automation could result in you running through your pool in a short time, thereby limiting your scope for growth.

Approach Lead Generation with This Three-Step Process

The customer journey is no longer linear. And with multiple distractions gaining a lead’s attention is becoming increasingly demanding. Follow this three-step process to automate your lead generation.

  • Reach: Create your website with SEO-based content to attract the right traffic. With accessible landing pages, you can build trust and likability. Use ads to reach the right audience with workflows with the necessary triggers and actions. Outsourcing to Eastern Europe companies allows you to work with experts who know what content you need, what changes to make to your website, what ads your business needs to achieve new customers, and improve other areas for greater reach. Invest in automated cold-calling that automatically scores the leads, records, and transcribes the calls for future analysis. Consider purchasing relevant leads from reliable companies. For example, you can get targeted HVAC leads from 33 Mile Radius. 
  • Nurture: Once you have recurring traffic, optimize your ad copy by ensuring relevant keywords, highlighting USP, and ensuring adequate CTA placement. Automate landing page tasks like capturing contact data, segmenting contacts, and integrating the page with your marketing automation platform. The recorded and transcribed cold-calling scripts can be a good starting point for creating templates for future use. This way, your sales team can save time looking up phone numbers and reaching out to prospects. Depending on your product, you could also consider nurturing through automated SMS messages or WhatsApp. These channels have a relatively higher open and engagement rate.
  • Convert: Use chatbots to interact with your customers on your website. Use inbuilt forms in your email to collect responses and qualify your leads. This way, you can get a qualified email or phone number to convert your leads into customers. At this stage, look into RFP, quote requests, and meeting appointments to close deals with new and recurring customers. Seamless automation happens when you integrate each of these steps to occur without human intervention.

How To Automate Effectively 

Most processes in your small businesses will have repetitive tasks that can be automated without human intervention. Identify such lead-generating functions that can save you time and money:

  • Create Process Workflow: Customers enter your sales funnel depending on their customer journey. You can streamline this process by automating the customer workflows. Identify the crucial repetitive processes and create workflows and the respective process map. Align them to the company objectives so they are in line with your goals. Monitor these workflows and optimize them over time.
  • Build Assets: Build assets for each stage of lead generation. For example, invest in an optimized website at the reach stage that creates authority and builds a large audience base. Likewise, identify the top-performing landing pages and optimize them for conversions. For your products, use computer mockups to see what they will look like to the audience. Engage in retargeting ads to nudge the users to try your product or service for better conversions. Use submission forms to make it easy for customers to interact with your business. Enable quick decisions by relevant CTAs. Remember to integrate all these assets into your CRM to access all customer data in one location easily. It gives you an accurate understanding of your customers and their behavioral patterns.
  • Test Automation: Once your workflow is ready, test the automation by running a PPC campaign. It helps identify leakages and bottlenecks. You can save substantial resources by fixing these before launching your automation campaign. Test the different CTAs, including email capture, Click-To-Call, or lead magnets.
    To enhance small business efficiency, automate repetitive tasks, focusing on optimizing assets for each stage of the sales lead generation process. Conduct thorough tests, including competitor analysis, to ensure seamless integration of automation into your strategy.

    Also, look at competitors to assess their performance and evaluate your goals for CTR, conversions, and impressions.

Invest in Marketing Automation Tools

Regardless of the size of your business, sales automation tools can give your business a helping hand in efficiently assigning and getting tasks done. This investment lets your business achieve more in less time, allocate teams to high-priority work, and primes your audience for an excellent experience. 

With lead-generation automation tools, your users enter a robust funnel that boosts your bottom line. You can use targeted messaging for better user response. Automation tools improve campaign tracking, thereby making it easy to monitor metrics that matter to improve business performance.

Another benefit of marketing automation platform lookinglion is that they are easy to learn without technical knowledge, making it easy for your team to communicate internally. It eliminates errors and improves service delivery, leading to better UX.

A/B testing with automation tools allows your business the flexibility to test what works and push for conversions without manual intervention at each stage of the funnel

Final Thoughts

Lead generation can be a long-drawn process for your small business. But with automatic lead generation tools, you can reduce the time required to get qualified leads in your business. 

A series of steps in reaching, nurturing, and converting your customers can create a strong sales pipeline for your business. Consider the many ways in which you can begin this automation. 
Map your customer journey to all process workflows and automate repetitive tasks. Link all assets to your CRM, so you can get customer details to personalize your offerings for your users. Before launching the campaign, run a PPC campaign to check for potential bottlenecks and leaks.