Introduction: why lead generation?

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Successful lead generation is essential for any business—if a business wants customers, that is. To summarize lead generation in a sentence, it’s the process of converting individuals who have shown interest in your product or service into paying customers. Whilst this might sound like regular marketing, there’s a very crucial distinction which makes the two strategies differ. 

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Marketing and Lead generation have a symbiotic relationship and both have the ultimate goal of generating sales, but they differ in their method of attracting customers. Marketing is focused on promoting the business to a wide audience and creating brand awareness in order to drive demand. In contrast, lead generation is a strategy which focuses on gathering contact information and then nurturing contacts into paying customers. 

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Lead generation is incredibly effective because it is more specific in who it targets than marketing. In fact, it hones in on individuals that have already shown a level of interest in your business, let’s say by downloading a guide or filling out a form in exchange for their contact details. So whereas marketing is essential for a business to establish a presence in its sector, lead generation concentrates specifically on attracting and converting customers. 

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This article will first delve into more traditional lead generation techniques before showing how an AI-powered lead generation engine can completely revolutionize your business. The first half of the article will discuss traditional lead generation techniques as well as how marketing techniques can be turned into lead generators. The second half will show how an AI tool can transform one individual in your business into a lead generation powerhouse as well as how this can help you devote more time, effort and quality into nurturing your leads into customers. 

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In the AI era, there is no reason you can’t have a lead generation pipeline which identifies the highest quality leads, reaches out to them at scale, and hurdles you straight towards the nurturing phase. There’s simply no excuse anymore for pouring resources into less effective and more costly alternatives. 

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Let’s get started: classic lead generators. 

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The essence of lead generation is to convince people to share their contacts with you. We’re going to go through a few possible ways of doing this, one-by-one. 

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Lead Magnets

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These are freebies or free-trials offered in exchange for contact details. This is an easy tactic to implement, and effective. 

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Let’s see how this works for an individual starting a free-trial with a SaaS company. The idea is simple: if they cancel their account at any point, they will still be reachable by marketing content since they inputted their email address when creating their account. You can even ask them their reasons for canceling when they did and tailor an offer accordingly. 

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The good side of this lead generation technique? 

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People like free things, so lead magnets are a great way to start reeling in new customers. On top of this, nothing builds trust with customers like allowing them to try your product or service for free.  

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The bad side?

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We know people like freebies, but just because someone’s been drawn in by one certainly doesn’t mean they’ll remain loyal customers. In business terms, lead magnets can be bad for your churn. It is far more effective to identify high-quality leads from the outset.

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The bottom line?

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Despite the caveat, we always recommend you pair a lead generation technique with a magnet–especially for SaaS companies where the try-before-you-buy mantra is especially important!

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Referral programs

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Referral programs are powerful lead generation tools that leverage your existing customer base to bring in new leads. It works by encouraging your customers, through an incentive such as a discount or cash reward, to get others signed-up.

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The good side of this lead generation technique?

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Word-of-mouth is one of the most trusted forms of marketing. Referred leads have someone they trust vouching for your business, which makes them more likely to convert compared to leads generated through other channels. 

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Your existing customers have also been incentivised to remain engaged and to keep spreading the word about your company. If the people they refer do the same, this can create a viral loop. Whilst there is an upfront cost involved, this is much lower than traditional advertising or marketing methods, and it can also scale very quickly without a significant increase in costs. 

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The bad side?

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The effectiveness of this method all depends on your customer base. Whilst some users will be attracted by cash rewards, others–particularly businesses–won't be. 

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Referrals might also be bad quality leads, in that they might not be a good fit for your product or service, and may have signed up just so that their friend gets a reward. Even if your referral program rewards both the referrer and the referred, this is not a sure-fire way of ensuring either keeps their account after receiving their incentive.

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The bottom line?

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As long as you align the incentive with something your customer base wants, referral programs can be a great way to see exponential growth in potential leads. 

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Quizzes

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Quizzes are powerful lead generators because they have the secondary capability to inform you about your customer base. Quizzes can uncover the preferences, pain points and needs of your customers, and this data can effectively be used to tailor later-stage marketing efforts. Notably, it can be used to segment leads into different categories which enables personalized follow-ups. 

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The good side of this lead generation technique?

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People are naturally curious and want to learn about themselves, so quizzes tend to have good engagement rates. 

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The bad side?

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The effectiveness of this method as a lead generator might be inversely proportional to the engagement a quiz gets. A fun quiz might attract a lot of individuals who are not interested in your product, whereas a technical quiz designed to generate data useful to your business might not achieve high engagement rates. 

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Quizzes come with other difficulties too. They take time to design and market, and you can’t keep flogging the same old quiz! 

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The bottom line?

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Even if quizzes come with a handful of downsides as lead generators, we believe a way to learn about your customer base is always useful. 

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Landing pages and exit-intent pop-ups

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These are two strains of the same thing. A landing page appears before a user reaches your website, and exit-intent pop ups appear when they try to leave it. These are distraction-free pages which focus on a direct call to action which–you guessed it–asks users to provide their contact details. 

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These also have a useful secondary purpose. You can use them to mention product launches, free trials, demos and other things. You can also use them to collect data on your marketing strategies. Through analytics tools, you can see how users react to new slogans, headlines, images, etc. that you're trialing. 

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The good side of this lead generation technique?

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Simplicity is key, and this is a very easy way to get contact details.

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The bad? 

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Exit-intent pop ups in particular can be annoying. This could be bad for your bounce rates. 

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The bottom line?

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The simplicity of this form of lead generation is why we like it so much. That being said, it can’t be a stand-alone practice. Marketing efforts are especially necessary with this technique, or people won’t be landing on your webpage in the first place. 

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Marketing to lead generation: evolving your marketing strategies. 

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Marketing output is rarely exchanged for contact details, but there are very compelling ways of doing so. Let’s see how.

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Social Media Lead Ads

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Visual Marketing is the most common form of marketing, and we consume most of it on social media. These have now been specialized to capture user information directly within social media platforms. For instance, Facebook lead ads and LinkedIn lead gen forms enable users to fill out forms without even leaving the platform. 

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The good side of this lead generation technique?

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Social media has a wide reach, so the seamless integration of a lead generator here cannot be underestimated. On top of this, social media platforms also offer advanced targeting options to reach specific demographics and users with particular interests.  

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The bad side?

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Whilst we said simplicity was key, it’s true that the simplicity of the form-filling process here means that not all leads will be high quality. There’s also the question of how likely it is that users would want to fill out forms on social media in the first place.

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The bottom line?

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This is a good way of adding a lead generation device into your pre-existing visual marketing. It remains true however that this technique might not generate as many leads as you expect it to. A solution to the above would be to incentivise users to fill out the form with a paid incentive.

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Written content

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Let’s take a look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) articles. These discuss interesting information related to your company and attract a relevant demographic. They also have a secondary but no less important raison d’être, which is to to include key words and phrases which make them rank online. Since people landing on these articles have made searches relevant to your company, this is a surefire way of driving organic traffic to your website. You can turn these into lead generators by locking half of your articles so that people enter their emails to finish them. 

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A marketing format similar to SEO, but which always involves an exchange of contact details for content, is the art of whitepapers. These are in-depth, deeply researched and authoritative long-form articles that deep-dive into very specific topics. They usually present an issue and provide a solution—which can of course be fixed by your company! Individuals downloading these are already going to be interested in the solution your company is offering, but the persuasive tone of whitepapers might just be what they need to become customers. And if they’re not persuaded to become customers by the end of the article, they’ve provided their contact details which can be used to give the extra nudge.

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The good side of this lead generation technique?

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These are all excellent ways of generating organic traffic to your website, since individuals which like your content are likely to be interested in your product. 

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The bad side?

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The problem is that the production of this form of content usually requires specialized individuals or teams to create them. Companies will often have dedicated copywriters who have years of industry-experience in developing this form of content. Whilst this can be automated, as we discuss in our top 5 AI tools for businesses article, real people are better than AI at carving out a unique voice and visual style.

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The bottom line?

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We think that if you can hire a copywriter, SEO is a great marketing technique. But if you want to turn an SEO article into a lead generator you’ll have to be sure that the content makes a compelling read. As for whitepapers, it all comes down to being able to hire someone with the expertise to write them which is rarely cheap. 

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Artificial Intelligence: economizing resources without slacking on results

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AI has come a long way in a short span of time and, as we discussed in our article on sales automation, it’s actually primed to be integrated into the sales process as a lead generator. 

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Artificial intelligence can turn one person at your company into your entire lead generation powerhouse. It works so well as a lead generator because it actually cuts out many of the usual lead generation principles. It doesn’t try and collect contact information, it cuts to the chase by reaching out to any business or contact that aligns with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). In essence, it takes high-quality leads as its starting point. 

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With a tool like Kular you can make direct contact—not just with a company that seems appealing—but with the very individual at that company with the authority to go into business with you. And it can do this at scale. As a result, your company is no longer held hostage by social media algorithms and ads to reach the best potential customers. 

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The other undeniable benefit of using an AI tool is the cost. Tools like Kular only charge when a qualified lead lands in your inbox, or when a sales meeting is booked into your calendar. We define a qualified lead as a lead which tightly aligns with your target criteria.

With the cost per qualified lead averaging $750 from a traditional agency and $500 from Google Ads, Kular sits at a fraction of the price at $150.

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AI’s usability comes down to the type of business you’re running. Since AI is cost-effective and doesn’t require a dedicated marketing team or sales executive to master, we particularly recommend this tool for startups and SME businesses that don’t have the resources for a large marketing or sales team. Since it gives you the capability to reach out to specific individuals at other companies, Kular is particularly useful for B2B engagement. For B2C, more traditional forms of lead generation might be more suitable. But where AI as a lead generator really comes into its own is how it completely frees up your company to focus on nurturing your leads. We’ll be getting to that next. 

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Artificial Intelligence: giving you the freedom to focus on nurturing customers

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Kular enables you to focus on nurturing your customers in sales calls, a key aspect of which  should be the demo. A demo is in fact an advanced type of lead generator. This is because individuals who sign up for them are typically further along the buying journey and have a genuine interest in your product. They are effectively already qualified leads. Because of this, the sales call with its associated demo is the make-or-break of the whole process. So mastering it is essential. 

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The most important thing is making your sales pitch specific to your customer. Marketers report a 760% increase in email revenue from personalised marketing campaigns alone, so this is a non-negotiable. Because of this we recommend you first get specific with your prospecting. Think of the markets you want to tap into and sketch out a few ICPs that you can work through one by one. You can do this by using Kular’s bespoke filters to select companies matching a certain industry, geographic area, company size, or description etc. Remember you can also select specific individuals from those companies. 

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Similarly, Kular’s email automation function doesn’t slack on personalisation. Whilst it can reach out to individuals at volume, if you’ve really gotten particular with your ICPs Kular will be able to use information on your target audience to produce a bespoke first-draft of your email outreach. This is vital since generic emails will end up as spam in your targets’ inboxes, tanking your email deliverability and ruining your domain reputation. 

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Now the work is on you. Research your companies, uncover their pain-points and get them on a call that has been ultra-tailored to their needs. Since Kular has freed up time for you to focus your energy on this all-important moment, you’ve got to make it perfect. 

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Conclusion

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As we’ve seen all lead generators come with their pros and cons. But one thing’s for sure: in the AI era, there’s simply no reason to be wasting resources on ineffective methods. AI comes out on top in terms of cost efficiency, scalability and–ironically–in emphasizing the human element of the sales process.