Unveiling the Future Of Lead Generation Through Artificial Intelligence

What is Lead Generation

Though self-explanatory, let’s try to delve into the phrase a little deeper. Lead Generation refers to the process of recognizing potential customers based on your business and collecting their details to convert them into paying customers. That is the ultimate goal.

Collecting their information includes their personally identifiable data like name, email address, contact number, and other relevant details. All these then help to nurture the leads, passing them down the sales channel to finally convert them into customers.

There is a wide range of options to generate leads, and while email marketing comes first in our mind, cold calling, social media marketing, content marketing, ads, and more are other useful ways too.

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Lead Generation: Then v/s Now

The manual (door-to-door) sales strategy was the initial way, slightly more than half a century ago. Later came the telemarketing and DRTV (Direct Response Television) advertising. These worked for the yell-and-sell era.

Time just doesn’t make humans old; ideas get affected, too! Though these methods are still used, however, the strategies behind them have changed. The primary factor is the changing role of customers – everyone is more well-informed than ever before, and the second reason is technology.

The recent and revolutionary (maybe?) technology update we have (no surprise anymore!) is AI. ‘Everything is figureoutable’ became actual and efficient.

In the comparison list of benefits of the lead generation process: then v/s now (using AI), the list of the latter would surely surpass the former.
Here’s why!

Why Should One Invest in Lead Generation Using AI?

Its innumerable advantages attract most businesses to embrace it and use it to generate leads. Let’s know a bit more about these advantages:

• Increased efficiency: Taking away the manual and tedious tasks, say, lead scoring, data analysis, etc., from you, AI opens a huge room for businesses to function more efficiently and take up high-value activities in focus.
• Improved lead quality: AI analyzes several factors, such as demographics and previous interactions of the leads, to recognize the most promising ones. It overall results in high-quality leads.
• Better targeting: The deep insights and analysis AI provides help businesses to understand their target customers better and allow them to tailor their nurturing strategies accordingly.

With a plethora of enumerated benefits, AI is changing the way leads are generated. It can enhance this simple process with its powerful data-driven approach. Its predictive and automated analysis can help businesses provide a personalized experience, which raises the possibility of a lead getting converted. Overall, you can deliver an improved and seamless customer experience.

Now, let’s discover how to go about that. 

Some tactics to use AI for Lead Generation

• Employ the chatbots to bring customer journey needs to an ease. It helps streamline the buying process through effective communication, which plays a vital role in lead generation.
  We are privy to chatbots and encounter them on almost a daily basis on webshops. However, AI-powered chatbots are quite advanced. They can use preset questionnaires that persuade the website visitors to share their details.

• Talking about website visitors, you get tons of traffic every day, and some of them are your actual customers. However, the question is how can you get more customers like them. The answer is by creating buyer personas based on your actual ideal buyers. For your initial marketing strategies of a business, you might create buyer personas per your primary research. However, as your business grows and you have huge traffic on your website, you’ll have an opportunity to improve your buyer personas using more effective data. And this is where AI comes in!
  
  AI for lead generation can help curate your buyer personas through personalization. Along with ML (Machine Learning) systems, you can create more accurate buyer personas by analyzing transactional and behavioral data from website visitors. In the end, it betters the business ROI just by improved lead generation efforts.

• Now, you have a powerful database to put into action. However, marketing is knowing about the current trend and not forgetting the past patterns too. Especially with lead generation, predefined processes, and results are not guaranteed. You have to keep trying and testing different strategies to increase the possibility of leads getting converted. And AI is all set to help!
  Analyzing data to identify patterns is AI’s forte, which can help your business formulate further steps to success.

• Post understanding the pattern, let’s move to keeping the similar people in the same place – let’s segment. Here, too, AI-powered solutions (can help!) using clustering algorithms to segment leads more accurately.
  
  More personalized interactions mean higher chances of influencing buying behavior, which can result in 10-15% increase in revenue.
  
  And, this was JUST a trailer! Undoubtedly, there are more such tactics to use AI to generate quality leads.

Few existing AI tools

Finally, let’s introduce you to some of the existing AI tools that might be super helpful in lead generation:

• Lusha – A B2B Lead generation AI

Lead Generation is a step of high pertinence, and often, it becomes a large gap between marketers and their next step. Lusha can bridge this gap with its AI-powered software. Users can find the most promising leads and contacts via its intelligent algorithms.

• Drift – A Chatbot automation AI

A streamlined and non-virtual interaction experience can boast a lot of benefits for businesses and their buyers. And if you are not using a virtual bot, Drift’s chatbot is at your service!

• Signum – An Audience parsing AI

There must be some reason why Segmentation, Signum, and solution all start with ‘S,’ right? Truly so! It can assist you in accurately creating segmented lists. Choosing quantity over quality is an old rule; however, Signum serves it with a trendy twist. It is an AI-powered audience parsing tool that can help you focus more on leads that have high conversion potential and segment those leads that aren’t high priority into separate lists.

• Albert – A Prediction AI

Predictions attract people more! And Albert took it seriously. Its predictive algorithm makes it unique. It works based on behavior and utilizes such insights to lead a customer to a sale. Using the information it collects, Albert will target the audience that most likely relates to your business and will likely make a purchase.

Takeaways

Yes, AI is powerful! Especially in the genre of lead generation. It takes away the tediousness of this task and returns insightful preceeding steps as well as results. Be it gaining insights into your ideal audience, segmenting it, targeting it, or nurturing it, AI has a solution!

Definitely, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. As technology advances, new ways of incorporating AI in lead generation will be discovered, and people will welcome these new ideas; hence, you can expect to see it a lot more.

For now, let’s experiment with this new technology and “lead” toward generating EVERYTHING (because, hey…we have AI)!