5 (Other) Ways to Utilize Marketing Automation

When you think of marketing automation what is the first thing that pops into your head?

I bet 95% of you will say email marketing. However, marketing automation has become so much more than that, relying heavily on user behavior.

Who wouldn't want to provide visitors with the right content at the right time - through various channels? Through personalized and content focused lead nurturing activities, you will be able to reach your visitors, moving beyond targeting visitors and leads through email marketing.

Marketing automation is pushing inbound marketing even further by creating an even more personalized experience. Here are five other ways you can utilize marketing automation to generate more leads.

How to Make Marketing Automation More Sophisticated

Progressive Profiling

As one of HubSpot's newest features, progressive profiling is a great way to kick your marketing automation up a notch. Allowing your company to capture more and better lead intel. Let's be honest, no one likes filling out forms a mile long. However, the flip side of that is you need certain lead information for your sales process.

To make both visitors and companies happy, the technology of progressive profiling allows companies to set up forms that enable you to designate which questions appear on your lead capture forms based on what you already know about that lead.

Benefits of progressive profiling:

• Shorter forms which will lead to increased conversion rates.

• Avoids asking the same questions each time a lead reconverts.

• Allows you to capture more valuable lead intelligence.

When you're using progressive profiling, you might be tempted to make your forms extremely short and sweet, keep in mind that you still want to ask for contact information that will allow you to properly segment and nurture your leads. Start with the broadest questions first such as first name, last name and email. The more forms the lead fills out, the more detailed the questions will get, allowing you to gather more information as a lead moves further down the sales funnel.

Smart Calls-to-Action

2013 is all about creating a more personalized user experience for your website visitors and leads. We all know that our emails and website should reflect the interests and experiences of each individual lead, and we can do that with smart calls-to-action that change your offers automatically based on what you know about them. The more your leads engage, the more varying CTAs they should see.

Consider this scenario:

Someone downloads your ebook or whitepaper about lead generation, what would you do next:

1. Send them an email pushing them towards your "26 Ways to Generate More Inbound Customers in 2013" ebook?

1. Continue to show them a CTA for "The Immediate Solution For Lead Generation" ebook they already downloaded?

1. Show your lead a CTA for "How Successful Businesses Generate Leads From Their Website?"

Hopefully all of you thought about the scenario and took in the context of this article so far and picked number three. It is important to know that the more engaged a user becomes with you and your company, the type of content you're pushing them should be different. Start to push them more advanced and targeted information, related to their interests.

Social Media Publishing

Are you taking 15 minutes or more a day to post on ALL of those social media sites your company is on? Why post separately on everything from Facebook to Twitter, LinkedIn to Pinterest individually when there is now a more streamlined approach? Marketing automation has now made social media publishing even easier, as well as helping you get back much needed time.

Consider using social media publishing tools like:

• Hootsuite

• Pingraphy

• Tweetdeck

• SplitTweet

Social media tools are important to help  you provide new and more content to fans and followers on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook in a more timely manner. As more people turn to social media for brand updates and engagement, opportunities in this channel will only grow. By posting premium content and engaging with users, your social media platforms will help nurture leads and push new visitors to your site.

Lead Scoring

This will be your sales teams best friend. There is no better way to help sales sort through all of their leads, determining the good from the bad.

Once you start generating a ton leads, it can become a challenge for your sales team to effectively sort through all of them. No one wants to spend countless hours making connect calls with leads that are unqualified. Not only will that effect sales but also those leads that are qualified.

Consider using lead scoring if:

• Your company is generating a lot of leads.

• You're capturing demographic information on conversion forms.

• Sales team is frustrated with unqualified leads.

• Marketing is frustrated with sales because no leads are closing.

No sales person wants to harass a lead before they're ready to buy and it's important to identify which leads still need to be nurtured by marketing before passing them on to sales. With lead scoring, you can assign specific values for each behavior and action and your lead score will automatically update each time they do something on your site.

Smart Lists

Instead of just sending each lead every single email you draft, you can target specific lists with content related to their previous actions to help nurture and push those contacts down the sales funnel. And you can do all of that with HubSpot's Smart Lists, your contacts will no longer be just another lead.

Creating a smart list on HubSpot:

• Login to your account and under the contact drop down select list. 

• You'll be sent to a page that has all of your lists. You will want to select create new, located towards the top of the right sidebar.

• Give your list a name. Now you can either create a static list (which will only include your current leads) or a smart list (which will automatically add new contacts to that list based on criteria you set for the list.

• Go through each drop down to select the different criteria for your list. What form fills or page views should each lead complete or not complete to be added to this list.

• Don't forget to save your list.

Common uses for Smart Lists include:

• Segmented lists for email marketing

• Segmented lists for outbound calls

• Lifecycle stage contact analysis