Not all business leads are equal. In order to identify leads that are more likely to lead to sales, you first need to understand the behaviour and buying signals of hot leads that have a high potential to turn into paying clients.
Using your own sales history data, you can understand more about how leads act when they’re interested in finding out more about your services, what questions they ask, and how they behave when they’re about to make a buying decision. In this post we’ll look at how marketing automation can help identify these behaviours so you can turn leads into consulting opportunities.
1. Understanding the 3 Stages of Buying Life Cycles
Marketing automation provides the most benefits at the following points in the purchasing life cycle:
- Nurturing your leads – As a consultant with an online presence, you must have some way of capturing leads when a potential client’s shows interest by signing up to your email newsletter, filling out a contact form, or downloading information. Once you have these leads, it’s no good for them to just sit in a database. You must ‘nurture’ them by keeping in regular contact.
- Converting leads into opportunities – By creating a call to action, you can turn a potential client into a paying customer. This might be by booking a discovery call, signing up for a free high-level audit, or any other activity that will build your relationship with the lead.
- Communication – Converting new leads into clients is vital for getting new business but don’t forget about your existing and past clients. Keeping in touch is one other way to generate new sales for other packages you offer or to obtain referrals to new clients.
2. Turning Opportunities & Signals Into Triggers
Marketing automation can detect when a lead takes action to show more interest in your services. For example, rather than just sending out a basic series of email autoresponders, you can use marketing automation to identify triggers such as a lead clicking through to a link in an email, or even just opening it.
Once these triggers are identified and detected, you can use rules to tag your leads when an event is triggered. For example, you could set up a rule tagging leads who click a link about “x topic” to be tagged as “interest: x”.
When your leads are tagged in this way, they can easily be stored into “buckets”, or segmented into categories and lists. This enables you to send out more targeted information. You can use marketing automation to do this automatically.
You can also create a lead score for each opportunity, depending on the type of action taken by each potential client. So for example, someone who clicks links in your emails, forwards them to others, and spends more time on your site would have a higher lead score than someone who just opens the occasional email.
When you’ve segmented and scored all your leads, it makes it easy to set up separate campaigns to target different groups depending on their score level and your business goals.
3. When to Act
In order to turn leads into consulting opportunities, you need to focus on your high score leads. These are individuals you want to keep sending relevant, personalised, and event-triggered emails to with an appropriate call to action. You can do all this with marketing automation.
To successfully automate your marketing efforts, you need to identify when to take action.
Did a lead click through a link and end up on your website looking at the services page? Encourage them to sign up to your email newsletter.
Did a lead register their contact details in exchange for downloading a template and checklist for reducing manufacturing costs? Make sure they don’t just get the freebie and forget about you – contact them to remind them about your consultancy services too.
However, marketing automation is not just about sending emails. The most important aspect here is carefully placed and worded calls-to-action that will prompt warm leads to book a meeting or schedule a discovery call, for example.
Use Marketing Automation to Grow Your Consultancy Business
From setup to execution, everything we’ve discussed can be set up inside your marketing automation platform, automatically. Do you want to create new opportunities using marketing automation and need some extra help? Here at Swift Digital, we can assist you with your online marketing needs to ensure your campaigns are a success! To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our Sales Team today on 02 9929 7001.
