4 Automated Lead Generation Tools For Marketing Agencies

What is Automated Lead Generation

Even business owners who’ve been able to have the most amazing results can have trouble generating leads from time to time.

With the constant evolution of technology and everything else in the world, it can be difficult to keep up.

Eventually, you get busy trying to brainstorm new strategies, marketing campaigns, or even developing new services or products.

Meeting deadlines and not seeing enough progress can be discouraging sometimes. It happens to everyone.

But because of this constant change in the world, there are many new ways to have automated leads drop right into your lap.

Many different lead generation solutions have risen to combat many of our marketing woes.

Automated lead generation is attainable, and there are now a handful of ways to go about it.

Marketing automation is the process of using software to put out different marketing activities.

This could be anything from marketing emails and social media content to whole ad campaigns.

Not only is this a fresh, new game plan in the sales, marketing, and lead generation program.

It is also bound to be effective in personalizing the customer experience.

It may sound scary to leave your inflow of leads up to software and we will show you how huge this could be for your business as a whole.

We’ve curated this list to give modern marketers a glimpse of newer, automated lead generation services.

80 percent of marketers have started using different automation software to help them generate more leads.

80 percent of marketers have started using different automation software to help them generate more leads Click To Tweet

3 Components of a Lead Generation Funnel

Funnels are a common marketing model used in sales to visualize how the flow of things usually goes.

Understanding this concept is essential in lead generation.

From awareness to traffic, all the way down to leads and conversions, the concept really helps to narrow down what you have to start with.

A lead generation funnel is made up of three main components: the top, middle and bottom.

This is a visual of the buyer’s journey and its key stages being: awareness, consideration, and decision.

1Top of the funnel

Typically consists of gaining awareness and chartering more traffic to your website.

Basically, anything that you can put out that will broaden the pool of prospects, heighten the chances of securing leads, and subsequently converting them into clients and customers.

The awareness stage is when people are just realizing that they may need a service or product that you have to offer.

You’ll want to look to automated sales and marketing lead generation programs this early on.

How will you spread awareness for your brand?

How will you stand out from other competitors?

There are a couple of different ways to really drive people to your site, which we discuss in another article here. Many, if not all, of these different forms of content, can be used to nurture trust.

Apart from attracting people to what you have to offer, further down the funnel, those that don’t seem to be interested get filtered out.

These can be people that are looking for something different or haven’t engaged with your content. It makes creating targeted content so much easier.

After unqualified leads have been filtered out, the importance of nurturing trust with your prospects comes in. You’ve already reeled them in, now it’s time to convince them to come to a decision.

Thanks to the superfluity of modern marketing, it is now ten times easier to monitor your engagements.

Specific tools and services have also been developed to provide insights into your data analytics.

In this part of the funnel, it is where you’re supposed to convince prospects that you are the solution. It is when you want to strengthen your credibility.

2Middle of the funnel

It is fundamental to the entire conversion process.

This is when you get to filter out those leads and prospects who may find a solution in the services you have to offer or be interested in buying a product from you.

3Bottom of the funnel

Your pool of leads here can become significantly smaller than when you had just started.

But these leads are qualified and are just waiting on that extra push from you.

Adjustments in costs, finalization of products or services, and brand specifics are what you’ll want to work on.

The goal here is to secure the leads into becoming a conversion simply by letting your leads feel like they’ve made the best decision or sealed the best deal.

Although this all seems fairly easy, it is important to always make necessary adjustments to your funnel and the things that go into it.

You’ll need to make sure that you treat all parts of your funnel with the utmost care, to ensure that you’ll end up with conversions in the end.

It also helps you see where your strategies are lacking, so you can improve them.

3 Most Popular Automated Lead Generation Types

1. Personalized user experiences

Your site is more likely to generate leads if users report a pleasant experience.

Understanding the way your leads behave is integral to building a website that pivots around this.

Personalized user interfaces, such as integrating behavior-based data into your websites will likely bring in more leads.

Set triggers for your target audience by bringing out content that they can relate to, no matter what that can be.

2. Using chatbots

Social media meshed with other automated lead generation tools is a lethal weapon.

To be able to build synergy between you and your potential customers or clients, you’ll need to be accessible in more ways than one.

Social media platforms are great platforms to generate leads, but more than that, this can be a place where customers and clients feel like they can voice out concerns at any time.

Chatbots have become more popular to serve as customer service channels.

Instead of having someone constantly monitoring your messages or having to do it yourself, chatbots can provide immediate answers for certain questions.

Despite its limitations, like not being able to answer personally or as soon as possible, this gives a sense of accessibility to users.

3. Automated emails

Despite the innovation and growth in technology, emails are still widely used.

It can be difficult not to sound like a broken record on your emails, and chances are the people they’re addressed to won’t even read them.

Lucky for us, email automation is a thing.

Imagine having emails that are tailored for different people and not having to write and rewrite them every time?

It’s like magic.

Automated Lead Generation Service Qualities to Look For

There isn’t just one automation software or service that you can use. In fact, automation is a combination of a couple of different ones.

Depending on your product or service, the automation software you choose will differ from others.

But some of the qualities you’ll want to look for in these services may include:

• Ease of access

You’ll want to invest in user-friendly but still effective services.

Because you’ll be using this service or software often, you want to make sure that it will be simple and easy to navigate.

This will make you look forward to using your automation rather than dreading it.

• Great customer service of their own

From this standpoint, you are a customer and the developer of your automation service is the provider.

Just in case you don’t fully understand the workaround of the software, the developer should be open to any sort of help.

Providing tutorials or helpful tips with the service is something that developers can extend to their clients.

Not all people are equipped with the proper knowledge to operate new interfaces, so any help would definitely be appreciated.

• Analytics

Any service that can accurately measure how well your campaigns, ads, posts, and other content is doing is a good match.

Numbers mean a lot in marketing.

You may also need the reporting to help keep you up to speed on what your next move will be.

• Pricing

Another important aspect to consider is how much you’ll be spending on the services.

Of course, we all want to invest in the best of the best services, but we also need to be practical.

You’ll want to evaluate what you’re getting for the price you’re paying.

Weigh your options and don’t be afraid to invest in those that seem to be the best bet for your company.

• Meshing

Automation services are supposed to enhance and help you.

How well these services will mesh with your existing pile of things to get done will be the deciding factor.

Top 4 Automated Marketing Lead Generation Tools and Services

While we cannot dictate which services will benefit your business most, we can give you a place to start.

Here we’ve put together our own list of top services and agencies that can help come up with automated lead generation services:

1. LeadFuze

“Lead generation, automated.”

It’s literally our tagline.

LeadFuze (with the help of Fuzebot) is an AI-based automated lead generation tool.

Users simply input some details about their ideal buyer (e.g. industry, employee size, role, keywords, etc.), and Fuzebot finds thousands of emails of fresh leads that meet those exact requirements.

LeadFuze is a software solution to help you build lists of accurate leads automatically while integrating with sales outreach tools to allow you to reach those freshly verified leads.

LeadFuze in action. Sign up to get 25 leads for FREE.

Next, with the help of our cold email integrations, you can have agency leads that you add to a list, automatically get sent emails.

Once that funnel is set up, new emails will go out. Every. Single. Day. Do you want to email 50 new leads each day? 1000? More? It’s all possible.

Those who don’t respond can get scheduled follow-ups that come from your email account to fully exhaust the leads generated and those who do respond will be pulled from any further automation.

The only thing that you have to do is talk with the people who have already shown interest in your business by responding.

Cold emailing is one of the most effective ways to generate leads for your business. Click To Tweet

It can be your entire outreach process on autopilot.

The Idea: An entire cold outreach process—fully automated.

2. Lead Chat

Chances are good that you understand the benefits of live chat. To give you a recap, live chats can really help your brand feel more personal.

Accommodation and access to what a brand or company has to offer help generate leads because of user experience. Not only that, but it even nurtures these prospects.

Getting to speak with inbound traffic as soon as they have a question can lead to a very short sales conversation ending with a new client.

Gone are the days of only needing a billboard or an advertisement to garner leads.

Many people are more inclined to a good user experience than just simply your products or services.

Even with all of the benefits, it's difficult to have someone on all the time to answer live chat. Click To Tweet

Even if you or someone from your staff is available, it can be hard to keep up with.

Then, there is all the time that you’re not (supposed to be) working.

So how is this automated lead generation? Lead Chat isn’t a plugin or software, it’s a service.

(Image Source: REVE Chat)

Imagine having a real person who was on call 24/7 to field questions about your brand, generate agency leads, and even nurture them a bit without having to hire a small, full-time staff to make it happen on your own.

See the value there? They’ll even integrate into your CRM and input the data, just like any other rep.

Your mind may have already begun to worry about the cost.

While they don’t have pricing available upfront, the cost doesn’t seem to be outrageous. According to Lead Chat’s site, “We’re up to 50x cheaper than hiring a full-time employee to manage your live chat. And you get access to our entire team of agents and experts!”

The Idea: Outsourced 24/7 live chat service that attracts and gathers agency leads right into your CRM.

Other live chat services are available for you to decide on as well.

3. Craigslist + Feedly

Sometimes you probably think that your main competition isn’t other agencies, but companies that decide to hire dedicated people to handle the services you provide.

The beauty is, they have a budget and need… after all they are looking to hire someone full-time for this role.

Instead of using another company, they’re upping their game and hiring full-time employees to handle a couple of things that you offer.

Our next strategy is a bit devious (not really) and very underutilized.

Go to Craigslist and look at the “Jobs” and “Gigs” sections.

There are a few marketing-related links including:

• Marketing/PR/Ad
• Sales/Biz Dev
• Web/Info Design
• Writing/Editing
• Computer
• Creative
• Writing

A quick search led us to see a marketing job post for a very popular fast-casual pizza chain.

Taking a look at the requirements we were able to find a lot of buzz words that you could target. Things like:

• Develop a marketing plan
• Build brand awareness
• Generate new customers and increase frequency
• Build community
• To grow app users and encourage app use
• To represent and be the ‘face’ of [company] to the communities

However, more specifically I would look for things like:

• Digital Marketer
• SEO
• Content Manager
• Search Engine Optimization
• Internet Marketer

Here’s how to pull it off:

First, automate things by setting up an RSS feed for every city or area as well as the key terms that match up with your services.

Things like digital marketing, SEO, content marketing, or writer.

After that, it becomes a little more “hands-on”, so you’ll want to focus on just a few terms and locations to avoid being overwhelmed.

For example, we’re looking in the Phoenix area for the keyword “SEO” and going to get the given URL:

Next, go to Feedly and run a search at the top right using the Craigslist URL:

After hitting enter, you’ll see the result and be able to “Follow” this URL.

Click on “Create a Collection” and give it a name that’s easy to identify. In this case, I used “CL – SEO” for the name.

Now, you’ll see the RSS feed inside Feedly:

The best part about this is it will automatically update when new job postings match these criteria.

Set up as many feeds like this as you’d like and be alerted (bold with a number next to it) when there are new job postings that match your criteria.

This is a post about automated lead generation, but with this one, it’s only partly true.

These are job postings and the company is expecting to hire a full-time or part-time person to physically (or remotely) show up and do a job.

In their mind, they need a time-clock puncher, not a digital marketing agency.

Getting your foot in the door is going to take some finesse. There are a couple of rules here to think about before you manually reach out.

1. Don’t “Apply” for the Job: Some places (more hip to the inbound game) will even say something to the effect of “no agencies” in their job description. Even if they don’t, you don’t want to send in an application with your company where they are expecting an actual name.
2. Do Mention Their Job Post: A company may not know the benefits of hiring a service versus an employee. Instead of the app, send an email regarding the posting. It will probably get opened and do your best to show the benefits (aka results) your agency can give. At a lower cost, no less.

Obviously, your goal is to sell them on why working with you makes more sense than hiring someone (cost savings, a team of experts, etc).

Bonus: This automated lead generation process can work for other job sites, too. Think Indeed, Glassdoor, Inbound.org, etc., and just repeat for those channels.

The Idea: Get fresh leads in your inbox from job postings on Craigslist (or other sites like it) by targeting keywords and setting up an RSS feed.

4. Socedo

Socedo is a “social demand generation platform”, but don’t let that fancy title throw you off.

Imagine if you could target hashtags and keywords that people are using via social that may indicate that they are good leads for your business.

Yes, you (or your reps) can do this manually, but the results aren’t that great for the time put in and there is no way that you’d be able to track all of those valuable terms.

That’s where this tool is so awesome.

Socedo automatically targets those keywords and when someone uses one—they get a direct message from your account. You can then either start the conversation or include a call-to-action in the message that sends them to a resource or landing page.

It’s a lot like LeadFuze in the automation department.

The difference is these leads are talking about things you’re selling in a place where you’re allowed to talk with them directly.

You’ll always be in the right place and at the right time on Twitter and LinkedIn with this tool.

I know a lot of people say that social is only a trickle of leads at best, but what if that trickle could be consistent and done for you?

The Idea: Tracks the words being used by people to target new leads and sends them to your funnel or allows you to directly interact with them.

These are just some of our own personal favorite automated lead generation services that have helped us in our own journeys.

Conclusion

Hopefully, your mind is running and you’re just thinking about the different ways you can use one (or more) of these ideas.

There is a multitude of things that each company must consider before really deciding to use automated services.

More often than not, you’ll most likely need to experiment.

A lot of the time it will be hit or miss.

But different markets and target audiences will need different strategies and tactics.

It’s imperative to open your options and throw a mix of these tactics into your strategies.

Do a couple of these #leadgen tricks and you can just get back to doing what you love—marketing. Click To Tweet

If you’ve implemented one (or all) of these automated lead generation tactics, I’d love to hear about it. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know!