Leads are the lifeblood of your business, the fertile soil in which revenue grows. So, it makes sense to use the best tools at your disposal to improve your lead generation tactics. When your marketing includes channel partnerships, automation and integrations become even more important because it is easy for the lead generation process to lag without proper platform support.

It is easy to think of automation as simply a way to facilitate some of the less mission-critical parts of the marketing and sales process. But the truth is that channel marketing automation can greatly benefit your lead generation strategies when used to their full potential.

Let’s take a quick look at three ways channel marketing automation can be used to generate more leads.

The Power of Email Campaigns 

Long understood to be a great lead generation strategy, email is still a top way to get more leads. Give your channel partners the email content and campaigns you’ve created to use in their own marketing efforts.  It’s that simple.  Not only does it foster a unified brand message, it also makes your partners happy that they don’t have to start from scratch.  A platform can make it easy for you, the supplier, to give them the content but also provide the partner flexibility to personalize parts of the message for their specific needs. From there, more automation allows you to segment your target audience and send emails targeted specifically to where the customer is in the buyer journey. This would be virtually impossible to do manually, given the scope of your customer base.   This level of personalization in your email campaigns leads to a better customer experience, which in turn helps to generate highly qualified leads.

Social Media Marketing Automation

Forbes observes: “Businesses that anticipate future behavior can address unique concerns via different sales and marketing approaches.”  Social media is one of the most powerful mediums but it comes at a cost.  Channel partners, especially smaller ones, often lack the time and resources to do it well.  Similiar to share email campaigns, automate your social media syndication to keep a steady stream of content running on social sites.  By going on step further and using analytics tools as part of your social media syndication program, you can see which channel partners are using content effectively, and what your social reach is across the channel community. Armed with this information, you can design social media campaigns that appeal to both your channel partners and customers.

Web Content Syndication

Few would argue the fact that a well-designed landing page is the key to quality lead generation. Marketing automation tools enable you to design and test landing pages and web query forms to ensure they are optimized. And if you have some type of dynamic content syndication, you can target content based on website visitor behavior or characteristics, increasing conversion which means more good leads.

It All Comes Back to Leads

You’ve automated content delivery to your channel partners.  You’ve got more leads.  Now what?  You want to know what’s happening with those leads.  With easy integration to mission critical systems such as Oracle, Salesforce, Sage, and more, you can get insight into lead activities and track results with automated closed-loop reporting.

And then you can really watch your garden grow.