Unfortunately, there are no winners here. With so many businesses competing to generate leads online, 6 out of 10 marketers consider lead generation to be the most difficult part of their job.
Sure, you can offer them some respite with the right lead management software . Plus, some alignment between your sales and marketing teams and process improvements can close the gap. But what can you do to maintain a steady stream of high-quality leads?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has even touched this segment of business operations to make it more efficient and productive. To illustrate this point, let’s see how you can use AI to generate leads and make your business profitable!
Understanding AI for Lead Generation
Lead generation is a vital part of any organization’s custom customer acquisition strategy . In other words, it is the precursor to a healthy sales pipeline and a profitable business. Using AI tools for lead generation would be a smart and strategic move because it offers:
Increased efficiency: Automating routine and repetitive tasks like data analysis, lead qualification, and scoring frees up marketing and sales teams to focus on more complex or high-value tasks like lead nurturing or closing sales
24/7 Availability: AI-powered chatbots that answer more about ivory coast phone numbers basic queries, collect lead information, and qualify leads 24/7 ensure that no potential customer goes unnoticed
Informed decision-making: Data-driven insights gained from big data analytics highlight trends and patterns that may indicate strong purchasing intent or signals
Hyper-targeted content: Dynamic, emerging data that resonates with your target audience based on their past interactions, online behavior, specific needs, or challenges can improve conversions
Personalized customer journey: AI can customize the end-to-end customer journey – from the first-touch landing page to the marketing message that leads to purchase to drive engagement
Better Leads: Lead prediction with AI lead generation tools analyzes past behavior to predict future actions and intent. This helps you prioritize leads that are more likely to convert
Cost-effectiveness: Coming from other benefits such as task automation, high scalability, personalization of customer experiences, increased revenues, and data-driven decision-making, AI can significantly improve cost-effectiveness
Cleaned-up lead generation campaigns can benefit greatly from an AI boost. But how do you go about taking a step forward with AI implementation? Let’s take a look.
How to Use AI to Generate Leads
Now that you understand the power and capabilities of AI-powered lead generation software, let’s take a look at some practical use cases and applications that will inspire you.
Building Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP)
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) generated by AI
Discover Your Ideal Customer with AI Tools through Hootsuite Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) paint a clear and vivid picture of your ideal customer. Once you can hone this mold, locating promising prospects becomes easier.
With AI on your side, you can capture data from a variety of sources to create your ICP (and sometimes more than one!). From website analytics to CRM data, AI lead generation tools can sift through large amounts of information to create a detailed ICP. They will define your ideal customer based on a set of parameters- demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral. The final profile that is created acts as a blueprint that guides the marketing and sales teams.
For example, using AI to generate leads might reveal that your ideal customers are CFOs at Bay Area-based SaaS startups. You might even discover common triggers like signing up for webinars, visiting a pricing page, etc.
Lead scoring and qualification
Not all leads are created equal. Some are low-hanging fruit ready to convert, while others may have your sales team jumping through hoops to no avail.
For this reason, lead generation needs to be done with a laser-focused approach. After all, you want to spend your time, money, effort, and resources on leads that are more likely to convert.
Lead scoring attaches a numerical value to each lead indicating its likelihood to convert. This score helps marketing and sales teams focus and prioritize their efforts. AI-powered lead scoring makes calculations more intuitive and data-driven. You can quantify purchase intent based on various parameters such as specific page visits, time spent on site, downloaded content, etc.
**For example, a prospect who spends about 2-3 minutes on a product page and downloads a pricing guide is more likely to convert than someone who just signs up for a newsletter. As such, the former would receive a higher lead score
Discovering untapped leads
With AI-powered lead generation, you can discover new and untapped opportunities.
We’ve already discussed how AI lead generation tools analyze data from multiple sources. This can include social media platforms and third-party databases (with permission, of course). By expanding your reach, you can uncover a treasure trove of potential customers who haven’t even interacted with your brand yet, but are showing strong buying signals through their online behavior. Whether it’s an untapped source of lead generation or a completely new market segment, AI can be your eyes and ears!
**For example, let’s say your Business offers a social media marketing analytics platform for the healthcare industry. However, the AI lead generation tool detects a marketing manager at a tech startup who frequently posts, shares, or engages with marketing automation-related posts on LinkedIn. This person and their network could be promising leads based on their interest, online behavior, and profile, even if they are not aware of your brand
