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Improve Your Industrial Marketing Lead Conversion Rate

60% of industrial marketers are unhappy with their lead conversion rate, yet 45% are unaware of marketing automation.

Cold calling is becoming a thing of the past in industrial marketing, as marketers are now able to track the website content that prospects view, then follow up with a custom response.

With the majority of B2B marketers unhappy with their lead conversion rate, it would be foolish to remain willfully ignorant to marketing technology that can help improve your conversion process.

In our recent survey, Industrial Marketing 2014: International Survey of Manufacturers, we found a majority of manufacturers are unaware of marketing automation.

So what is marketing automation?

Marketing automation serves as the conduit between sales and marketing teams, with marketing teams collecting data on prospects using software such as Act-OnEloqua and Pardot, and sharing it with their sales teams through customer relationship management (“CRM”) software.

You can track how long a prospect has been on your website, what pages they viewed, even what emails they have opened from your email marketing campaign. At this point, you can assign points to each action, and leads qualify themselves over time as they reach a certain number of points.

Oftentimes, the lead conversion process fails when sales and marketing teams lack a communication channel or have misaligned interests.

I’ve written before about how marketing automation can help manufacturers bypass this issue.

This problem is easily overcome by collecting and sharing data that is meaningful to both parties. For example, a “prospect” or “lead” score can be developed by tacking interactions with both sales and marketing functions such as calls, website visits, newsletter opens, etc.

This score is generated by marketing automation software such as Act-On or Hubspot, and then used to populate your company’s CRM system for use by the sales team to identify hot prospects.

Marketing automation allows you to align the incentives of your sales and marketing teams. When one wins, so does the other.

If you fall into both the 45% of manufacturers who are unaware of marketing automation, as well as the 60% who are unhappy with their lead conversion rate, there is now no excuse to settle for the same paltry results – low quality leads.

Industrial marketing technology exists to improve your lead conversion rate. And at a time when so many B2B marketers are unaware of it, let along implementing it, your company can get a big leg up on your competition by adopting it.

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