11 Feb
Trends in lead generation for 2021
- How were leads generated until now?
- Trends 2021 How are leads going to be generated now?
- Instant Messaging Marketing
- Website Chatbots
- WhatsApp / Messaging Chatbots
- Sponsored Message: Increasing your sales in minutes
- Direct leads to WhatsApp to increase contact with your customers
- Lead Nurturing AI / Automation
- ATOM: generation of qualified leads
Lead generation is increasing the number of people interested in acquiring your products or services. The leads are prospects or potential customers. According to this, the lead is the contact or personal data that we obtained from the people or companies interested in us.
Today there are many strategies and methods to get a reasonable number of leads. However, we will not talk only about what you can do with this objective. Also, we want to talk about what will be a trend for 2021 and what can succeed beyond expectations.
Before starting, it is necessary to be clear about the following terms:
Conversion funnel:
It is a series of steps or stages in which you can find prospective customers and that you can carry out until the purchase with the help of various tools such as content and others.
Online recruitment:
It refers to any method you use to get emails, telephones and other contact information, it can be forms on your website, information material, surveys, etc.
Lead scoring:
It is about qualifying each lead according to the possibilities they have of becoming loyal customers.
Lead nurturing:
It is a series of content, actions and strategic interactions, designed to accompany leads to transform and remain as customers.
How were leads generated until now?
Email marketing
Email marketing strategies are often used both to attract new users, and to maintain constant contact with them, with lead nurturing actions.
Display campaigns
The goal of banners is to capture the attention of the public. The use of a good microcopy has made this tool one of the most used, although its biggest flaw is that it can be intrusive for many users.
Social media advertising
Platforms like Facebook have specialized ads to capture leads, however many times the organic traffic is not what we would like and its effectiveness depends on how much budget we spend on it.
Trends 2021 How will leads be generated now?
Without many detours, the answer to this question lies in automation and conversational marketing. The automatic and immediate interaction of this technology, generates increases in the capture of Leads, that the brands had never imagined. And best of all, they continue to maintain a human touch, as the entire journey through the funnel is done through simple conversations and interactions. Here are the tools that set this trend:
Instant Messaging Marketing
This is the perfect time to use messaging marketing to grow your business. Messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, which in 2018 was opened to brands, know that their differential with respect to email platforms, lies in two points:
Comfort: When a person communicates with your brand through WhatsApp, they feel that they can do it whenever they want from an environment that is like their home. They also feel that they are the boss, that they are in control and that they receive exactly the information they want, with the fluidity they need, without having to wait for notifications in their inbox.
Asynchronous conversation: Messaging platforms allow a conversation to be resumed when the user requires it, without losing the thread of said conversation. That is, it is not only about responding to the user always instantly, but that the user can do it whenever they want either instantly, or in a week. Classic email delays or waits can be fatal for someone walking down the funnel to become a customer of your brand. Remember that to choose the ideal messaging platform for your brand, you must think about its value and relevance:
How relevant is it to my target audience to be present on this or that channel? Are you solving my weaknesses? Does it really improve the experience?
Website Chatbots
Why is the bot trending? Because it allows you to attract a lot of customers online that you never thought possible. While content generation is engaging, there is something that substantially increases leads and that is chatbots. Many customers have seen up to a 33% increase in leads on their website, by adding a chatbot, compared to traditional web contact forms.
The amount of information that can be collected about people through chatbots is staggering and makes the experience interactive and therefore entertaining for the buyer. People are already used to using applications like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. A conversational chatbot asking a few questions seems completely natural. Much better than filling out a boring form.
WhatsApp / Messaging Chatbots
In Latin America 70% of users use WhatsApp. The possibilities that this platform has are incredible, if you think about the amount of Leads that you can obtain by automating your company’s WhatsApp line. This is the reason why we talk about this tool as a trend, since hundreds of companies have discovered this and have implemented conversational commerce strategies that bring traffic to WhatsApp.
In addition, other advantages of WhatsApp is that you can unify all the lines of your company into one. You can design a conversation flow so that potential customers find what they need in a few minutes, create response templates to automate responses to your customers, and develop pre-defined responses that will save time and increase satisfaction and therefore improve the journey. from the funnel to the goal.
Sponsored Message: Incrementando tus ventas en minutos
Have you heard that it is easier to sell to a user who already knows you than to one who does not? Well, this objective within Facebook Ads allows us to do a conversation-type retargeting to all those users who have written to us, either through traffic campaigns to Messenger or organically. This type of strategy works especially to reactivate users with a better offer than the one they have already seen on Facebook.
Benefits:
- You can reach your entire audience in less than a day.
- The cost per conversation and action is reduced x10.
- Increase your sales in no time.
Here are a few tips to perfectly execute your sponsored messages:
- Use anchor texts with the best possible offer.
- Redirect your users to where it is more strategic, you decide: landing page, WhatsApp or Messenger itself.
- Avoid spam, try to use sponsored messages with a periodicity of two months or more, to avoid being invasive and annoying your users.
- Using a chatbot + task automation is an excellent combination of tools to filter traffic (do lead scoring), so that your sales team or ATC, attend to valuable leads that are worth spending time on.
- Try to always have traffic campaigns active in messenger, except for old users to improve efficiency.
Direct leads to WhatsApp to increase contact with your customers
As we said before, the use of WhatsApp in Latin America is enormous. To date, we have run campaigns in which we have seen that user behavior with chat is very good and we have reached two important conclusions when obtaining conversational customers: Messenger has a lower cost per lead, but its efficiency is low, while WhatsApp it is a bit more expensive, but has a higher closing efficiency.
However, we have also discovered that one of the challenges of messaging platforms is to activate the conversation and many times users do not allow it, therefore we created a feature that allows us to improve the efficiency of the first contact with our prospects.
Taking into account that direct WhatsApp campaigns within Facebook do not allow segmenting, we devised Lead Form campaigns with a section within the form that contains the following question: Do you want to be served by WhatsApp? If the user answers yes, when he gives us his data, the Chatbot will immediately write to his WhatsApp number. This feature has been very effective for the user to be the one to start the conversation immediately. Now, if the user answered no, said user is redirected to the corresponding team, which will continue the contact by phone, to continue with their purchase.
This feature, developed by ATOM, has given excellent results. Would you like to try it? Contact us!
Lead Nurturing AI / Automation
Another key trend for 2021 is the possibility of automated lead scoring, so you don’t have to wait until the next executive committee to measure results and follow up, but you can do it just when you want. This is key, because many times the leads we collect simply do not serve us and while managerial or strategic decisions are made, the team continues to advance on the wrong path.
Examples of wrong leads:
- People interested in your service, but who are based in a country other than the one where your company operates.
- People who do not have the role and authority to make purchasing decisions.
- People who do not have enough budget to generate an adequate ROI.
- People who just want to download your content to do research or benchmarks.
ATOM automation allows your bot to have rules that rate the importance of each customer, according to the conversation that is being had, automatically differentiating leads that have 150 employees, who are interested and can make decisions, from those who do not have these characteristics.
It’s not just about generating leads and more leads, it’s about achieving valuable leads who can reach the bottom of the funnel and become loyal customers.
ATOM: generation of qualified leads
ATOM makes the lead generation funnel huge and automatically gets qualified leads.
Audio/Video Content
The video marketing trend exploded in 2019. According to the Hubspot survey, 87% of businesses used video as a marketing tool that year, representing a 26% increase from 2016. The trend continued through 2020, noticing only a minimal decrease of 85%. claiming to use videos for marketing. Most importantly, 92% of companies using video reported a positive impact on ROI. This has been the highest percentage so far.
Again, there is no news here. Audio and video content has been on the rise for years. Podcasts, webinars, demos, live streams, product videos on your website and social media became particularly essential in 2020 when the face-to-face element was removed from the table.
The answer to the question of whether you should do a podcast or a video is actually more practical. Each has its limits and benefits. Video content is great when you have time to sit back and focus, but when you want to engage your target audience on the move, in a car, or on the train, a podcast is more suitable.
You may be wondering how chatbots get in here. Well, while video and audio content is the perfect container to communicate your experience, bots are the ideal way to deliver it at the right time and place. They can fish for any content on your site at any given time based on a potential customer’s preferences or allow you to optimize your webinar marketing with one-click sign-ups.
Decisions based on DATA
By having all the conversations of your customers on the ATOM platform, you can find common behaviors. What does this mean? That our platform can function as a trend predictor based on the history of conversations with your clients. This is another of the benefits that make conversational marketing a trend for 2021 in terms of lead generation.
By having a DATA analysis, based on the conversations of clients and prospects, each decision made will make the funnel easier for potential clients to navigate, because it will allow to adjust that journey according to a key criterion: customer satisfaction. . Best of all, you’ll save consumer research costs with astonishing precision and margin of error.
Post COVID-19 opportunities
2020 was a huge leap in consumer acceptance. Even people who previously did not interact with a company through a messaging application (either live or via chatbot) had the opportunity to experience such conversations.
This perfectly represents managers and entrepreneurs who know that behind crises there are opportunities to discover. A Nielsen study found that during the last three months e-commerce has grown than expected for the next four years, so the sector is adapting to the new reality. The market went from a 3% share of online sales to around 10%, a figure that will gradually drop to 7%, at which a stabilization is expected.
Another vitally important fact is that it went from a young virtual buyer to a virtual buyer of all ages, with an emphasis on people over 50 years old. It is also estimated that when the situation normalizes, those who will abandon the practice of virtual shopping will not exceed 17.5%.
For these reasons, hundreds of companies have decided to invest a greater part of their budget in conversational commerce strategies and automation in messaging platforms, because their target is migrating from the post-pandemic experience.
Marketing and Sales
Alignment Although it may seem incredible, the alignment between marketing and sales is scarce and it is difficult to make them integrate and work in accordance. Website chatbots centralize engagement (both live and automated conversations) under one roof, giving both teams overall control through a friendly, no-code interface. Better yet, after establishing common goals and a way to measure them, marketing and sales can work together to create conversational conversion funnels that work for both of you.
If you want to make your company benefit from these trends and start the year fresh, contact ATOM and we will provide you with personalized advice, so that you can see Leads grow as you have never done before. Contact us!
Automating and improving communications with your customers.