Zoho One’s suite of cloud applications is one of the single best software packages available today for small- to medium-sized businesses. While it offers a ton of tools, we’ve found that many businesses are overwhelmed by all of the options and they wind up centering their efforts on Zoho CRM. Certainly, not all of the tools will help every business achieve its sales and marketing goals. Much of marketing and sales hinges on your lead generation strategy, which dictates which tools you need. But Zoho Campaigns and SalesIQ offer powerful tools to help convert leads to sales through marketing automation and may be covered under your existing licensing agreement. To illustrate these possibilities, we want to run through how to use Zoho One’s suite of products to help automate your marketing campaign.

Executing Lead Generation Strategy with Zoho Marketing Automation

When creating an automated marketing campaign, you want to contact a large number of potential leads to account for conversion rates. But you also want to avoid coming across as spam that will be immediately deleted.  Ultimately, you need to keep a personal touch. To do this, build your campaign on paper first. That is, identify your target audience and their pain points, and map out the customer journey and the signals they will give you along the way that show their interest in your products or services. Once you know this type of information you can begin mapping your campaign into Zoho CRM through segmentation, whether this involves particular industries, a certain number of employees, use of certain products, etc.

Using the information you have and grouping leads into specific segments, you can provide a personal touch and offer a specific value proposition. This is the key to successful marketing automation. It doesn’t start with tools. It starts with content and an actual value proposition to the prospect. Given this, start with personalization. The key to this is creating valuable assets, namely, showing that you understand the pain points that they are experiencing and can offer solutions to these pain points. You want to educate the customer about the problems they are experiencing and the solutions you offer. Once you have this thought out, then move onto the question of automation: how can you use the automation services within Zoho to execute a segment-based campaign and find touchpoints and lead scoring so you know what marketing to send to people?

3 Steps for Planning a Lead Generation Campaign in Zoho CRM

To illustrate how to create an automated marketing campaign, let’s take a hypothetical company, Centurion Cyber Security Solutions as an example of how this could be set up for a particular industry. Centurion is an enterprise-level cloud software security company that also offers direct services, and they want to develop a campaign that targets the insurance industry. They can plan their lead generation campaign around three steps.

Step 1: Identify what to promote.

Identify the service area and/or product line they are going to promote and map it into Zoho records. Centurion wants to target cloud security software, hack recovery, and cybersecurity audits.

Step 2: Identify the target audiences’ characteristics and pain points.

Be specific. Not everyone is a potential customer, and you want to focus your time and energy on high value prospects. But you also don’t want to be so narrow that you limit your target audience is limited to a handful of companies.

Centurion wants companies with a budget for what they sell, so they’re targeting companies with 10 or more employees. They want to identify the decision makers at the company that would be in charge of taking meetings or evaluating services. Because there have been recent reports of vulnerabilities with Azure, they’ve decided to target customers using this platform. And they’re targeting the insurance industry because they know it is vulnerable to attack and security against Azure vulnerabilities would be top of mind for prospects.

Step 3: Create assets.

This refers to any content (blog posts, webinars, white papers) that educates and helps to solve pain points for prospects. In Centurion’s case, they want to create assets that highlight the vulnerabilities that exist with Azure and how their cloud security software, hack recovery services, and audits can prevent attacks or help with post-attack recovery.

Integrating Zoho CRM, Sales IQ, and Zoho Campaigns

Zoho One Apps

Once the above three steps are in place you have to think about how you are handling any leads you bring in and their information. If the leads are in Zoho CRM, you need to make sure that lead information is detailed and customized. We recommend enriching the lead information by researching the company and adding that information to the CRM as well. From here you are able to segment leads into categories for more accurate targeting with follow up campaigns.

To make full use of the lead data, connect the CRM with your email marketing software. This involves syncing Zoho CRM and Campaigns. Once synced they are basically talking to each other and making sure that all of the pertinent information is passed between them. Now, whenever a lead visits your website, information will automatically flow into your Zoho CRM and then to your email lists in Campaigns.

At this point, you can start sending automated campaign emails. But before you do, Zoho SalesIQ can add more information to further aid and help you assess your marketing efforts. SalesIQ tracks who is coming to your website and what they visit, as well as how they got there. Generating tracking parameters in SalesIQ will give a more detailed breakdown of how your campaign is performing. Then when you create an email template, you can thread the recipient’s name through SalesIQ and see who comes back to your site and for how long. Because all of their actions are tracked and recorded in SalesIQ, you can use this in lead scoring.

Bringing Your Automated Marketing Campaign Together

With all of this setup, you’ll have generated content, you’ll have leads coming into your CRM, and you’ll be able to segment those leads. This allows you to launch your campaign by adding recipients to a list. The list will be customized around the specific segments you create. You then need to connect your segments to Zoho Campaigns so that they’re shared. This gives you the ability to send niche content by email to your segments. By this, we mean you can send emails that are built on a template, but add specific, customer-oriented information through dynamic insertion of marketing variables. If you set the tracking parameters, you will then be able to track what the email recipients do on return to your website.

Coming back to our hypothetical company, with this setup Centurion may have the lead information such as name and email for a procurement executive from First Street Insurance. If this executive attended a webinar on Azure vulnerabilities and read a white paper on cybersecurity audits, the automated marketing campaign could send the executive an email that included their name, while addressing Azure vulnerabilities as a pain point and offering a free demo of the audit software.

Finally, Campaigns will ask if you want to connect your leads back to the CRM. You do. This syncs the information so that your Zoho CRM lead information will include what emails you sent them, as well as open and click rates, or other interaction with the campaign. This allows you to attribute lead scores and notify sales based on those scores for further outreach. If the procurement executive clicked on the email that was sent about a free demo but did not respond, their information could then be sent to the sales team who could call follow up.

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As certified Zoho consultants and authorized partners, one of our specialties is working with clients to get the most out of Zoho One. For help with your Zoho and marketing automation needs, contact us for a free consultation.