Automating the lead generation process is critical for businesses looking to scale their operations and acquire new customers in a systematic way. An effective automated lead gen process can help generate more high-quality leads while freeing up time and resources. Here are some tips on how to automate various aspects of lead generation.
Use lead generation software
Lead generation software provides tools to automate different lead gen tasks like identifying potential customers, reaching out to them, capturing leads, and managing relationships. These could include:
- Lead capture and contact management software like CRMs to organize prospect data.
- Email marketing and outreach automation tools to run targeted drip campaigns.
- Chatbot and live chat tools on your website to engage visitors and convert them.
- Lead scoring and nurturing tools to identify sales-ready leads.
- Marketing automation platforms to streamline your entire lead generation process.
Such tools can minimize manual tasks, provide valuable data insights, and enable you to generate and qualify leads 24/7.
Implement website lead capture forms
Having lead capture forms on your website allows you to gather visitor information and convert them into leads. Important aspects to optimize include:
- Placement on high-traffic pages like homepage, landing pages, blog, pricing.
- Clear, benefit-focused headline and descriptive supporting text.
- Limited fields asking only for essential info like name, email, phone.
- Integration with CRM to automatically capture and organize leads.
- Thank you page and auto-responder email to engage visitors post-form.
Testing different forms, placements and CTAs will reveal what works best for converting your website traffic.
Promote gated content offers
Gating your premium content behind lead capture forms is an excellent way to generate leads. For example, you can gate access to:
- Whitepapers, ebooks, templates behind landing pages.
- Webinars, events and trainings behind registration forms.
- Free trials and product demos behind contact information capture.
- Members-only resources like forums, courses and tools.
Driving traffic to these gated assets via social media, email, SEO and running ads will help attract more leads.
Invest in paid advertising
Paid platforms like Google Ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, Quora ads can allow you to proactively target potential customers and drive them to your lead capture forms.
Key advantages of paid advertising for lead generation:
- Reach your ideal audience by location, interests, job role, and more.
- Display ads on millions of sites across search, social, display networks.
- Show ads at the right stage of buyer’s journey from awareness to consideration.
- Track conversions and optimize campaigns for better ROI.
Allocating a portion of your marketing budget to paid ads can deliver more inbound leads at scale.
Leverage AI to qualify leads
AI tools can help you automatically score and qualify the quality of incoming leads using parameters like:
- Lead source e.g. Organic vs paid vs referral vs direct etc.
- Page views, time on site, clicks etc.
- keywords and content topics engaged with.
- Website and email activity.
- Fit based on customer avatar like role, title, company size etc.
AI lead scoring frees up time spent manually ranking leads. It identifies hot, warm and cold prospects so you can determine lead nurturing and sales hand-off strategies.
Automate lead nurturing workflows
Lead nurturing is contacting prospects through personalized, relevant communications on an ongoing basis to convert them. Steps to take:
- Segment leads into groups based on profile, behavior and time since last contact.
- Trigger targeted email campaigns for each segment providing value.
- Send series of touchpoints combining promotional content with educative content.
- Track engagement with emails like open rates, clicks, downloads to gauge interest.
- Develop escalating nurturing journeys customizing messaging per segment.
Automating this process provides a hands-off yet personalized cultivation experience at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Create chatbot workflows
Chatbots make it easy to generate and qualify leads 24/7 straight from your website. Tactics include:
- Installing chatbots to assist visitors and capture leads from conversations.
- Programming chatbots to segment visitors and ask intelligent questions.
- Using chatbots to book sales meetings and demos with promising leads.
- Following up via chatbots with new content, offers after lead capture.
- Linking chatbot data to your CRM to further qualify and nurture leads.
The always-on automated nature of chatbots provides instant lead engagement no matter when visitors come to your site.
Outsource lead generation activities
Working with specialized lead generation companies lets you ramp up lead gen without expanding in-house staff and effort. Outsource tasks like:
- Running email, social media and cold calling campaigns.
- Managing paid ad campaigns end-to-end.
- Generating and following up on inbound leads from your site.
- Qualifying and verifying leads before sales hand-off.
- Managing CRM, marketing automation and other software.
Outsourcing to experts boosts lead volumes while freeing up internal bandwidth for sales and service.
Develop referral programs
Referrals from satisfied customers and business partners are proven lead sources. Tactics include:
- Creating advocate and partner programs to engage external influencers.
- Offering rewards and incentives for referrals like discounts or credits.
- Making it easy to share and recommend your business via email, social media.
- Gamifying referrals e.g. leaderboards for top advocates.
- Automating referral outreach like sending advocate assets for sharing.
Driving advocacy makes lead generation and sales a natural byproduct of your customer success.
Conclusion
Automating lead generation enables companies to scale their customer acquisition and gain significant efficiency. Core tactics like leveraging lead gen software, gated content offers, paid ads, AI, chatbots, outsourcing and referral programs can all contribute to a robust automated lead generation process. With the right technology, tracking and optimization, businesses can generate 5x or even 10x more qualified leads without proportional increases in time and effort. A well-designed automation strategy is key to extracting maximum value from your lead generation activities.