Lead generation is a time-consuming and laborious process that can benefit greatly from automation. Automated lead generation helps increase productivity, reduce labor costs, and minimize errors.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is identifying potential customers using a combination of sales and marketing techniques. It aims to fill the sales pipeline with more opportunities to increase revenue.
Businesses benefit from lead generation by:
- Saving time: With an effective lead generation strategy, your company will save time looking for potential customers, allowing your sales team to focus on converting leads.
- Reducing cost: Lead generation increases your chances of getting a return on your investment by prioritizing leads that are more likely to convert.
- Optimizing resources: Selling to leads likely to become paying customers is more efficient. Lead generation allows you to identify these leads, making the sale cycle faster.
- Improving the sales process: Lead generation ensures that the sales pipeline is brimming with qualified leads so that your sales team has no shortage of opportunities to pursue.
Why Businesses Should Consider Automated Lead Generation
It can take months of consistent, high-quality efforts before you can see the results of your lead generation strategies. To overcome that, companies of all sizes can choose to automate their lead generation processes and speed up the outcomes.
| Benefits of Automated Lead Generation |
| Increase Production Output |
| Lower Operation Costs |
| Reduce Errors |
| Easy Upgrade |
The benefits of automated lead generation include:
- Increase Production Output: Automation makes the lead generation process faster. For example, it can shorten the production of content and reports.
- Lower Operation Costs: Instead of adding a workforce to do repetitive tasks for lead generation, you can avail of premium membership of service software.
- Reduce Errors: Automation reduces human errors, especially when analyzing data and documentation.
- Easy Upgrade: As your company grows, you’ll also need to increase your production. Automating part of your lead generation will allow you to keep up with the growing demand of your company.
How to Automate Lead Generation
There are many aspects of lead generation that can be automated. These include:
Content Creation
Salespeople use content to educate and push leads to the next phase of the buyer journey. It usually takes a lot of time and effort for the marketing team to publish consistent content that resonates with your target audience, but software can speed up the process.
Some examples are:
- Jasper.ai: Formerly known as Jarvis, this is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that automatically creates content for blogs, email marketing, and web copies.
- Copy.ai: Similar to Jaspar.ai, this software produces AI-generated content.
- Grammarly: This software detects grammar slips and punctuation errors. It also helps you set a tone for your entire content and provides feedback for its overall readability.
- QuillBot: QuillBot is an excellent paraphrasing tool to help prevent plagiarism.
AI-generated content is not perfect. You’ll still need editors to fine-tune articles and ensure that it adheres to your brand’s messaging and editorial standards. Despite its flaws, using AI when creating content can significantly speed up the process by preventing issues such as writer’s block.
To get the best results when using software for content creation, remember to:
- Proofread: Sometimes, software’s content does not make sense or is challenging to understand. In these cases, you have to fine-tune the content to ensure that it’s easy to read, free from grammatical errors, and has a good flow.
- Adapt your brand tone and messaging: AI-generated content tends to sound robotic and lacks creative flair. You’ll need to edit it to reflect your brand’s tone and messaging.
Email Automation
Cold emailing is the strategy of reaching out to potential customers via email. This technique significantly benefits from automation, as manually sending emails is inefficient and time-consuming.
The key to email automation is choosing the right tool. These are the features that you should look for in an email automation tool:
- Automation capabilities: A reliable email automation tool must-have features that allow you to send out customized responses for specific triggers.
- Customizable templates: Most email automation tools have templates that help you save time creating content. It’s recommended to pick a tool that offers a wide range of template options to make a unique copy that resonates with your brand.
- Personalization: Personalization is crucial when using email marketing for lead generation because it creates rapport with leads, increasing the open email rates. A tool that allows you to personalize email content easily will help nurture leads more effectively.
- Real-time Analytics: A tool that automatically generates reports about your email marketing campaign performance is an excellent choice to measure your strategy.
- Mobile optimization: It’s recommended to look for a tool that automatically optimizes email content for mobile devices, as that’s how most people view emails.
- Segmentation: Your marketing team will forward you a diverse email list. Organizing it can be time-consuming, so picking an email marketing tool with an efficient segmentation feature is recommended.
Outsourced Sales
Outsourcing involves hiring a third party to do a specific task. It’s a solution commonly used by companies that lack workforce or expertise.
Outsourced sales is an effective form of automated lead generation, as it allows you to capture sales leads without doing the legwork. The benefits of outsourced sales include:
- Low initial investment: You don’t have to pay full-time employee salaries, benefits, training costs, or equipment.
- Fast launch: Outsourcing companies already have teams of professionals, allowing you to execute your strategy faster.
- Increase efficiency: By outsourcing sales tasks, your in-house sales team will have more time to focus on nurturing leads and converting them into paying customers.
You can choose to outsource your entire sales process or pick specific tasks. Here are examples of lead generation tasks to outsource:
- Appointment setting
Sales development representatives and managers run the appointment setting program. Their primary task is to qualify leads and persuade them to book appointments with account executives.
When done right, an appointment setting program can supply the sales pipeline with unlimited opportunities. It also unburns AEs, allowing them to focus on closing deals.
Building an in-house team requires high investment, which takes time before becoming operational. By outsourcing this process, businesses can enjoy the benefits of appointment setting at a lower cost and risk.
- Content Creation
Content is essential for the sales process because it educates and nurtures leads. Salespeople don’t always have the skill to produce high-quality content; when they do, they still have bigger priorities. That’s why outsourcing your content creation can be a great idea.
There are outsourcing companies that specialize in producing valuable content. They have experienced writers and editors who can deliver unique, persuasive, and informative content to help convert leads into customers.
Outsourcing can also have its fair share of disadvantages, including quality issues and lack of control. To avoid these pitfalls, you need to find the right service provider. A reliable outsourcing company has the following characteristics:
- Trained & experienced workforce: An outsourcing company’s quality of service highly depends on its workforce. Pay attention to how they hire, train, and assign the lead generation professionals working on your campaigns.
- Competitive pricing: Outsourcing companies that offer prices too good to be true often take shortcuts in their work, affecting their outcomes. Pick a service provider with competitive pricing but with the capacity to deliver quality results.
- Open communication: Communication is crucial when outsourcing services, as you won’t be there to oversee the day-to-day operations. Choose an outsourcing company that’s responsive to questions and suggestions.
- Accountability & transparency: A reputable outsourcing company values transparency and accountability. You can investigate these aspects by checking third-party review platforms or asking previous clients.
Tools for Automated Lead Generation
Automation tools help you streamline your lead generation processes across all channels. This will fill your sales pipeline with a steady flow of leads, increasing your sales and marketing team’s productivity.
| List Building or Management Tools |
| Pay-per-click (PPC) Marketing Automation Tools |
| Data Collection Tools |
| SEO Automation Tools |
Here are examples of automated lead generation tools that you can take advantage of:
List Building or Management Tools
Lead generation will get you plenty of email addresses and contact data to sort out. Some of these emails might not be instantly useful, as certain leads don’t fit the qualification yet, but they might be in the future. That is why it’s recommended to use an automation tool that makes list building and management more convenient.
Tools with automation features for list building and management will also make it easier for you to segment your prospects and identify leads to prioritize.
Pay-per-click (PPC) Marketing Automation Tools
PPC marketing is the strategy of paying a certain amount for every ad clicked. It increases organic web traffic and brand awareness.
Automating PPC marketing campaigns allows you to stay on top of search engine marketing trends and focus on SEO. This is very effective for long-term campaigns because it improves over time. The more data you feed PPC marketing automation tools, the more efficient it will get, allowing you to save time and money monitoring and maintaining your campaigns.
Data Collection Tools
For a lead generation strategy to work well, you must have the latest market data. Data collection tools can automate this process by generating periodic reports about your target audience, market trends, and campaign performance.
You can also use automated data collection tools to see your competitors’ actions. It allows you to identify their well-performing content, reproduce best practices, and look for areas of improvement.
SEO Automation Tools
SEO helps generate organic traffic, making it crucial for lead generation strategies. SEO automation tools have a wide range of features such as:
- SERP tracking: Many SEO automation tools generate instant reports on websites and competitors’ SERP rankings.
- Technical SEO analysis: Most advanced SEO tools have features that automatically review your website’s code, structure, and content. Ensuring that the technical aspects of your website are in order makes it easier for search engines to crawl and rank.
- Keyword research: Some SEO automation tools have features that automatically generate a list of keywords to help you attract the right audience.
The data and information produced by SEO automation tools allow sales and marketing teams to make informed decisions about lead generation strategies.
How to Pick the Right Automated Lead Generation Tools for Your Sales Team
| Factors to Consider When Choosing Automated Lead Generation Tools |
| Automation Capabilities |
| Usability |
| Functionality |
| Integration |
| Cost |
The right automated lead generation tool can help your sales team stay competitive. Here are factors to consider when choosing a tool for your team:
- Automation capabilities: Take a closer look at whether the tool has the appropriate machine learning capabilities to automate the lead generation processes you need.
- Usability: The tool must not have a steep learning curve and should be easily utilized by your sales team’s members.
- Functionality: There are plenty of automated lead generation tools available in the market that offer a wide range of features. Choose the one that better suits your business needs.
- Integration: It’s recommended to pick tools that work seamlessly with your existing software to create an ecosystem that boosts overall performance and productivity.
- Cost: Most automated generation tool features are advanced, so you rarely see free services. The tool’s cost must be within your budget and deliver an ROI when you achieve your goals.
Bottom Line
When done right, automated lead generation can increase the productivity and efficiency of the entire sales cycle. It also makes scaling a lot easier with lesser risks involved.
