Why Automated Lead Generation Software Is An Integral Part Of Marketing?

As businesses continue to get access to more customer data, the whole process of marketing and lead generation gets more tedious than before.

According to a report by Marketing Charts, 17% of marketers spend 15+ hours a week on lead generation.

That is a whole lot of time to be solely occupied by the lead generation process. Just think of all the things you can accomplish and work you can do within this time frame.

Despite wasting so much time on lead generation, 63% of companies still think that lead generation is one of their top marketing challenges.

And this is where organizations leverage on the low hanging fruits of the automated lead generation software. Lead generation software help marketers in securing a steady stream coupled with features including measuring the ROI consistently, easy tracking of leads and their sources and much more. 

Let’s discuss why automated lead generation software is becoming an integral part of marketing 

1. Lead Generation Software Ensures More Leads In Lesser Time 

Generally, sales professionals have to go through the tedious chore of acquiring referrals, recommendations, visit seminars and trade shows, and more to generate leads. Then there’s a whole process of cold calling, which is so dreadful that sometimes it ends up being a painful experience for both the parties. And it is simply too time taking with very minimal ROI. 

The brutal truth about the phone prospecting that the average salesperson makes 8 dials per hour and prospects for 6.25 hours to set 1 appointment. 

Scary, right? 

Think of the all-time that you wasted which could be used for something more productive. 

And this is where lead generation software enter. This software generates leads automatically by processing a lot of important data and prospect’s actions. The beauty of lead generation software lies in their ability to accurately discern the actions and take into account how you are interacting with your customers. This helps you to focus on productive leads already generated by the software and meanwhile, the lead generation software will automatically nurture more leads. 

2. Lead generation software keep your data updated 

The most common problem inflicting the marketers is the overabundance of outdated and irrelevant data. First, the sales professionals spend ages in gathering data about their prospects, and after a few days only, it turns out that a lot has been changed because as the time goes on so much information may become irrelevant. Therefore, managing data is important.

According to a research report: 

• 120 businesses will change addresses
• 75 phone numbers change
• 1 company gets acquired or merged
• 30 new businesses are formed
• 20 CEOs leave their job

These constantly changing business atmosphere nullifies a huge amount of your data. And this is where lead generation software makes there presence known. Lead generation software can be integrated with your CRM and help you spend less time researching and mining your data, resulting in accurate data as well as saving up more time that can be spent on building more connections with decision makers. 

3. Lead generation software automatically nurtures the leads

Unfortunately, many sales professionals inject maximum energy in generating leads while overlooking the importance of nurturing those leads. 

According to a report, 73% of all B2B leads are not sales-ready.

If nothing else, this data at least articulate that sales professionals need to engage with those leads in a way or the other to move them down the sales funnel. This stat also indicates that the leads went cold somewhere after talking with you, before actually entering the buying funnel. These are the leads that sales professionals fail to re-engage with. 

So, a large majority of B2B leads are not ready for Sales. This is where lead generation software come into play. These automated lead generation software very efficiently track and score those leads that have the potential to later get converted into customers. With these softwares, it becomes easier to nurture unqualified and distinguish between casual leads and qualified leads.

If you are not using a lead generation software to lift this weight from your shoulders, you might end clogging your sales funnel with unproductive and dead leads. 

Also Read: 30+ Lead Generation Software Tools For B2B Businesses

4. Lead generation software helps you in lead scoring 

Lead scoring is one of the most important assets of lead generation software. The whole process of going through all the information about the leads and then juxtapose it with your own customer profile to give each lead a score based upon their value can be very tiring. However, notwithstanding the difficulties and efforts, every effective sales professional strives hard to distinguish qualified leads and prospects from casual leads that are less likely to generate a sale. 

A lead generation software can make this arduous task a whole lot easier as they have the ability to score leads and keep track of all the information regarding the leads. The automated lead generation software not only helps to score leads but also automate the sales process, ensuring that leads are not ignored or forgotten. 

Plus, these softwares automates lead nurturing activities such as email campaigns and follow-ups resulting in an optimized sales cycle. Due to the automated process, sales reps can now focus more on well-qualified leads.

5. Track Lead Source 

Lead generation software facilitates easy tracking of the leads along with the sources where leads came from. 

Why tracking lead source is important?

Because it is important to identify which marketing campaigns are working and which strategies need to be revamped. Therefore, lead source tracking is an essential feature in lead generation software. Lead generation software keeps your leads up-to-date in your integrated CRM software. And it’s a given that when information about the lead source is readily available, your sales and marketing teams can better tailor the message to meet the customer’s needs.

Also Read: 25 Places to Find Prospects & Leads for your Business [Updated In 2019]

6. Help You With Your Email Marketing Campaign

Going through with your complete email marketing campaign is not easy by any means.

It requires a lot of on your part, not to say a huge amount of your time.

In fact, over 68% of companies spend a week (or more) on the production of just one email.

So, assuming you produce around five emails at a time, just think of the time and energy you will be injecting into it.

Even after you create the email, your email marketing is far from done. You still have a lot to do.

For instance, you have to keep on sharing your newsletters, follow-up emails, sales pitches and so on and so forth.

This is where automated lead generation software tools come into play. For one, they help you acquire your leads and their email address and other contact details. Moreover, they also provide in-built email templates and help you carry out your without intruding your precious time.

How else do these lead generation software tools help you with your email marketing automation?

7. Automate Your Content Promoting Schedule

Hope you already know that writing a couple of blog posts isn’t enough. Nor sharing them on all social media channels.

This won’t ever be enough. You have got to do a lot more to promote your content and make it reach the masses.

You have to post them on your social media channels with attractive captions, statuses, and far-reaching hashtags.

But coming up with varied posts is tedious, to say the least.

This is why you should leverage automated lead generation software tools to help you promote all your content automatically and acquire more and more leads in return.

This video by marketing guru gives a perfect insight into how you can automate your content marketing and content curation strategies:

Many of the automated lead generation software tools help you manage your content promotion schedule without any heavy lifting on your part.

8. Help you monitor your CRM

These lead generation software tools not only help you acquire leads, but they also optimize your data and declutter everything by managing your CRM.

You can also build many custom processes without ever going through the hassle of learning to code.

You can also link your customer relationship management [CRM] software with your social media platforms so as to streamline your social media marketing contacts and strategies.

Most importantly, you can use these tools to analyze your online mentions. For instance, if someone provided some negative feedback about your brand, you can immediately follow-up with them and resolve their problem.

Apart from this, these automated tools will you with your lead-flow process, customer reminders, streamlining the sales funnel and more.

9. You can target a larger audience using these lead generation software tools

So, for now, you have a limited target audience. After all, it’s almost impossible to target a huge audience base manually.

The lead generation software tools completely do away with this problem. With these automated and robust tools, you will never have to curb your expectations.

The automated tools help you identify the verticals that align with your brand and then acquire their details quickly. After that, they help you follow-up with your leads and prospects, which will effectively send your marketing message across.

Before anything, these tools help you identify your target audience to a huge scale.

A lot of you may not realize, but not finding your target audience is a huge problem.

In fact, 42% of startups fail because they are unable to find their target market.

That’s where these lead generation software tools shine the most.

Initially, they help you identify a huge market base for your brand, and then successfully help you to capture them.

10. Help you gauge your prospects’ intention

Given that you use your lead generation software tool effectively, they can also offer some useful insights that will help you identify your user intent.

For example, these tools come in handy if you want to gain insights like who visited your website, which webpage interested them the most, which product were they browsing for maximum time and so on and so forth.

Once you are privy of such detailed information, you can try to connect with your prospect to get them further down the sales funnel.

Most importantly, these software tools can also help you gauge your buyer’s journey and the stage they are currently in.

Here’s what a typical buyer’s journey look like:

So, looking at the buyer’s journey, you can decide which action to take next.

Say, for example, your visitor scrolled down your website, checked out a blog or two. Then this is just the awareness stage. At this stage, it’s better to put your energy into nurturing them, which also can be done automatically by an effective lead generation software tool.

The bottom line is to close the sales. And this can only be done at a massive scale if you identify the stage your buyer is on their journey. Once you identify your buyer’s stage, you will find it easier to connect with them, and follow-up with the right message at the right time.

Parting words 

Automated lead generation software tools can build integrated marketing campaigns, track source leads, and a lot more. The above points give you a perfect idea of why lead generation softwares are becoming an integral part of marketing. They singlehandedly automates the rigorous task of lead generation right down to the sales. 

Mind you, a Lead Generation Software tool won’t work like a “magic” solution. At the end of the day, it’s still a helping tool. It all boils down to how effectively and smartly you utilize it.

More than anything, it’s a tool that makes your marketing and sales cycle considerably easier than ever … but still, you can’t solely rely on software. If you want to see stellar results, you also have to put in your own efforts as well. This includes a content marketing strategy to assist your lead generation process. 

Which lead generation software tool are you using to automate your marketing and sales processes? How effective do you think these automated tools are?