1usefulLet’s be honest, the digital transformation puts all internal and external processes of a company to the test and makes it even more difficult to be successful in today's increasingly digitized world: The changing purchasing behavior of potential customers, the growing number of communication channels, and the changing and stricter legal situation regarding the handling of personal data, make the acquisition of new customers more and more difficult.

The heart of any modern marketing strategy is therefore professional lead management, combined with efficient email marketing, and in the following we give you a few useful tips how to get started:

Define your desired customers to create persona-relevant content

Essentially, many companies already know who they would like to have as customers, they are often just not clear enough. Therefore, define your desired customer with the help of the persona concept:

Marketing and sales work together to create one or more so-called personas, which means fictitious persons, each representing a specific target group. This makes it much easier to align the marketing objectives and measures with the needs of the target group and to implement them efficiently.

If you know who exactly you want to address, create content that is relevant and useful for this specific target group. Put yourself in their shoes and the created personas help you here again to move on. Write from their point of view with a focus on how you can help them.

Turn prospects into customers

At first contact, only about a quarter of all leads are ready for the sales department, which means that most just want to inform themselves and don’t appreciate receiving concrete sales offers yet. By providing them with additional content, you can help those interested in their decision-making process, which is called lead nurturing, "feeding" or developing leads. If a lead has gone through all nurture stages, sales can contact the person. Or if the person drops out in between, or signals not to want to decide yet, you can address him/her again later - of course always with attractive content.

Successful marketing is called today inbound marketing, which combines marketing that does not approach people in the sense of cold calling, but provides them instead with attractive offers that potential customers can voluntarily accept. For example, anyone can freely choose to subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper or attend a webinar, but by using social media, you can draw attention to the content available and even be prepared for being contacted directly. By accepting or contacting one of your, prospects they become the coveted leads.

Get software support right from the start to be able to use collected data for personalization

To be able to record and use every contact, irrespective of which channel it is used for, an efficient marketing automation solution is indispensable - especially if you want to address your leads individually and provide them with relevant content. The software supports you effectively through pre-definable program steps, which run completely automated - from the first contact with your prospective customer to further advancements of this lead through adequate contents, up to its evaluation and forwarding to a sales employee.

As a vendor, you can use a lead nurturing campaign to get more information about your lead every step of the way, and then provide constantly personalized content. Because only those who offer the right content at the right time, via the right channel, can successfully get the attention of potential and existing customers. With a marketing automation solution, everything from data collection, to evaluation, to tailor-made measures that derive from it, can be mapped in just one system.

Find out where your leads are and pass them on to sales

With a lead scoring system, you can always see exactly where the lead is in the decision-making or buying process. Here, sales and marketing usually redefine the system together and set assessment criteria for the maturity of the leads. This includes both explicit factors, such as profile data, and implicit factors, such as visiting the website or the download of a white paper.

All existing information about the lead should be passed on to sales that can then tailor its strategy to the situation, needs and preferences of the lead.

Measure and control success

Whether you are still at the beginning of lead management or have been successfully generating leads for many years and developing them into customers, you can always improve something. To do this, you need to capture every single step and measure how successful it was. Regular analysis helps you to identify which activities you should be developing in the future and which ones you may need to fundamentally revise.

Protect the personal information of your leads

Please note that all data you collect, store and use during your lead generation is subject to data protection. As a result, your company must ensure that the level of data security is conform to your country-specific Data Protection Act. If you use a marketing automation solution for the efficient digital implementation of your lead management, it should therefore be privacy-compliant.

By Daniela La Marca