#148: Top Lead Generation Strategies for 2023
If you're not already using AI in your marketing, you're falling behind.
AI is becoming a powerful tool that businesses are taking advantage of to streamline processes, reduce costs and shape consumer behavior. In the marketing realm, artificial intelligence has opened the door to smarter digital strategies—helping companies to create more personalized experiences for their customers. AI can be used in many ways, from recognizing customer patterns and predicting buying decisions to improved delivery of promotions through automated campaigns. The opportunities for businesses to use artificial intelligence in marketing are growing fast, so if you want your brand to stay competitive, it's important that you stay abreast of the latest technology developments. Here's why AI is the future of marketing, and how you can use it to get ahead of your competition.
1. Automation of manual tasks
Automating repetitive tasks in marketing with the help of AI can be a game-changer for digital campaigns. With automated marketing, businesses have the opportunity to save time on labor-intensive tasks and put their focus on building better relationships with customers through personalized content. AI can take automated messages beyond simple replies and make them interactive so that customers can quickly get the answers they need. Not only does automated marketing reduce manual work, it also streamlines customer touch points while delivering insights that help marketers learn more about their audiences and drive more conversions. All in all, automated marketing is definitely worth considering if you want to give your company an edge over its competitors.
2. Predictive analytics
AI can be used to analyze past trends in customer data and predict future outcomes. This allows businesses to anticipate customer needs before they occur and develop better strategies for serving them. By leveraging data and AI, businesses can better predict how to target their customers with marketing efforts in order to have the greatest impact. Not only can AI help develop tailored messaging that resonates more effectively with customers, but it can also offer data-backed insights into things like purchasing patterns and lifestyle preferences. With this data, companies can create the most effective strategies for increasing brand loyalty, generating leads and ultimately boosting the bottom line. In short, AI is a powerful tool in helping you get a better understanding of your customer data and marketing in a smarter way.
3. Personalized marketing
In today's digital age, the ability to generate avatars and provide personalized experiences is becoming increasingly important when it comes to marketing and advertising. Businesses can craft avatar-driven campaigns tailored specifically to each individual consumer through AI-based approaches such as:
Machine learning- A type of artificial intelligence (AI) that allows computer systems to learn from data and automatically improve their performance. It is based on algorithms that analyze existing data, identify patterns, and make decisions or predictions about future situations without being explicitly programmed to do so.
Deep learning- A subset of artificial intelligence where algorithms are designed to mimic the activities in a human brain, such as recognizing patterns and making decisions. Deep learning models enable machines to take on tasks that were traditionally only done by humans. This type of technology can be used to develop powerful applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, robotics and more.
Natural language processing- A subfield of artificial intelligence and computer science that focuses on the interactions between computers and human languages. It is used to process large amounts of natural language data, such as text or voice. NLP uses techniques including machine learning, deep learning, Rule-based methods, and linguistics to understand the structure of languages and how to interact with them.
This allows for a much more accurate targeting of advertisements, as well as greater flexibility in quickly adapting to changes in popular trends or preferences within their consumers’ demographics. Moreover, AI techniques can be used to analyze collected user data in order to better understand users’ needs and interests, leading to even more accurate personalization that goes beyond avatar- or surface level details. All in all, leveraging AI in advertising amplifies the impact of traditional campaigns and helps businesses build stronger relationships with their target customers.
4. Improved customer service
AI chatbots can be used to answer common customer service inquiries, freeing up employees to provide more complex help when needed. AI-enabled bots are also able to carry out basic troubleshooting tasks, reducing the need for costly manual intervention. AI can revolutionize customer service in a variety of ways. AI chatbots, for example, are becoming increasingly useful to address inquiries and provide quick answers without waiting times. AI-driven analytics can also be used to track customer behavior and preferences, allowing companies to create targeted offers that will appeal to each individual customer. Finally, predictive analytics can even help anticipate potential customer needs, providing proactive solutions before the customers even have to ask for them. As such, AI has the capability to transform customer service from an inefficient afterthought into an efficient process with real-time insights that improve satisfaction and loyalty.
Start using AI in your marketing efforts
Making use of tips and techniques focused on leveraging artificial intelligence can be game-changing for businesses as they look to streamline efforts and maximize return on investment. Incorporating AI into your marketing strategy can help you target customers more effectively, predict customer preferences, track customer journeys, customize content delivery, improve customer interactions, and automate mundane tasks such as responding quickly to user queries. In addition to saving time and money, empowering automated processes with AI translates into great business opportunities and attractive results. So let's get the ball rolling - try out tips for adopting AI processes in your marketing activities today!
Listen to the Show:
Laura 00:00
If you're looking to stay ahead of the curve and 2023, I want to share with you my top lead generation strategy. It's a combination of two major industry trends that are not only in business but in life. Combined with a classic framework. It's a framework that I use in almost all of my marketing advice that I provide. Curious now? You might not expect how it all comes together. So get ready to hear about my top lead generation strategy, and why I'm doubling down on it in 2023.
Laura 00:34
Welcome to the Next Level Leap podcast, I'm your host, Laura Meyer, top of growth strategist to some of the country's fastest growing brands, and mentor to consultants. My signature leap methodology has changed the way 1000s of companies look at growth strategy, and this podcast shares, best practices, and inspirational interviews to help you make that next level leap in your business. Stick around and join me as I share the journey of how we as founders can multiply our income impact and influence by landing on the other side of our next big leap. Let's go.
Laura 01:07
The first trend is the amount of overwhelm and stress that the public is experiencing. With so many pressures facing individuals and companies even in today's society, it's no surprise that overwhelming stress has been identified by the American Psychological Association as a major growing trend. A quarter of adults say that they're so stressed they can't even function 1/3 of adults say that the stress is so overwhelming, and that 76% of adults experience amount of daily stress and overwhelm that affects their health and well-being. The past few years have been an emotional roller coaster filled with injustice, political unrest, and experiencing a global pandemic. And these events, they take a toll on us overwhelm all wellbeing. And they often result in increased stress levels, which manifest into physical health imbalances that we need to really take into consideration as marketers, you've heard me talk about this before. Social media usage has become so prevalent during this time providing us with those really addictive dopamine hits, but also increasing the risk of mental fatigue from endless scrolling and comparison culture. This is something that I see as the second pandemic, it's something that I think about a lot in our marketing. And it is a major trend that we need to be paying attention to whether we're running a business, or working with an organization, or we're just humans on the planet that care about others. This is an incredibly important trend to incorporate into all of our decision making.
Laura 03:02
The second trend might leave you wondering what in the world it has to do with the first and that is artificial intelligence. You've probably heard all of the rage about chat GDP. And have
you tried it I logged in recently and tried it myself. I have under kind of spotty, and I ended up going with some other options. But nonetheless, it is revolutionizing the way that we create content, making it really easy to produce high quality work. Now it has limitations. And I'm probably going to record a podcast episode later on, and how we are specifically using AI and our company. And it's all about input output, you have to be good at what it is that you are looking for. In order to create high quality input. And your you need to be able to assess the quality of the output when it comes back. But for experienced marketers like the people in our organization, this development has opened up a world of possibilities for entrepreneurs and creatives alike, and harnessing AI technology and particularly when it comes to marketing and copywriting can be truly transformative. Now, it's so much easier to produce high quality content on the regular, especially long form content that is connected to my top lead gen strategy. This long form content tends to do very well online but historically is difficult to produce. Now our team can produce what used to be a day or two long project and about 90 minutes or less.
Laura 04:37
The third is not a trend but a framework. And it's a framework popularized in the 1960s by Eugene Schwartz. It's called the five stages of awareness and you might be familiar. It's a marketing framework. That goes back to the advertising days that acknowledges that having a great product or service isn't enough. You have to consider what the customer knows already about deciding what you communicate with them. Otherwise, your messages fall on deaf ears. So we take a look at his five stages. And you might have heard me referenced this earlier in my podcast episode called heart centered customer journey. This is reflecting on what I think is so important to understand about what's happening in the world right now. Many, many advertisers for the last five years have depended on paid traffic to interrupt people's social media feed, and serve them with something that they didn't even know they needed. What's happened is as a result of the first trend is people are getting burnt out. They're ignoring those advertisements. And they're even becoming a little bit jaded.
Laura 05:49
What used to work for direct advertising at the unaware stage of the customer journey. And the unaware stage means I don't even know that I have a problem. Nor do I even know that there's a solution for it is when many people find they're making their first contact on social media with paid ads. In that scenario, what should be the goal of educating them and helping them understand a little bit more about their situation has now become a game of, hey, look, you're bleeding? Oh, you didn't know it. Let's take your money. And I'll give you a solution. And what's happening is that people are ignoring it. And they're blowing it off, and they want nothing to do with it. They even might get angry when they see those ads across their newsfeed. Maybe you've served them ads like that, or you've seen it happen. This approach, in theory is designed to build awareness. But what happens is, is it's just creating more overwhelm.
Laura 06:47
Then, if you're successful at it in the right way, people move down the customer journey, they become problem aware, okay, this is a problem I should do something about. And then solution aware, okay, there's some different solutions out there. And let's see what the best one is what's going to meet my needs, and really highlight how to solve my exact challenges. And I become product aware, and most aware. That first stage of the customer journey, that place where people are totally unaware, needs to be looked at a little bit more closely when considering what your next best step should be when it comes to lead generation.
Laura 07:36
That's why at the start of the new year, my team and I took on a major initiative to develop an effective workflow for SEO, search engine optimization. So before you start asking me if I'm wearing high top sneakers, or singing to Mariah Carey, just because I'm focused on SEO, I must be from the 1980s. So just hold up, stop. It's hammer time. No, I'm just kidding. But really, if I think about it, SEO is that original lead generation strategy that for those of us who have been in business for a long time used to heavily rely on when I look back on my time of being a brick and mortar owner, before social media was even a thing. I recall when I was just blogging. And when we opened up multiple studios, we blogged every single portrait and wedding session, we incentivized our clients to share the blog posts with their friends and family, and our SEO and high quality inbound leads were literally off the charts. Truthfully, at the time, I had no idea how lucky we were, I didn't know that Instagram and Facebook would be arriving down the road. And I just saw blogging and Google optimization as a fun way for our company to expand its reach and highlighting our clients in a way that made them feel very special. And as a result of the trends that I'm seeing, along with this classic framework that I keep going back to time and time again, with my clients, I realized how important it was to start looking at SEO from a new lens.
Laura 09:12
Why? Because when we are direct advertising to people, we're interrupting their newsfeed, we're contributing to their overwhelm. It's going to work much less effectively than it did previously. And you'll hear people saying that Facebook ads don't work as well as they used to. And then you hear Facebook ad gurus saying don't listen to the people who are saying Facebook ads didn't work as well as they used to. But really, I think it has everything to do with this. It has to do with that people don't want to be told that they're broken in their newsfeed anymore. They're over it. They're done with it. It's just chipping away at their self-confidence and self esteem, which makes for a really hard person to serve. And what they need to do is come to their own solution on their own terms in a way they need to be able to go to Google when they think, Hmm, I wonder if I should become a consultant, I'm hearing a lot about consulting, I bet you I'd be good at it. Let me see what information I can find that puts them in
the driver's seat and becomes a very high intent lead. It's a much better lead, then all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere on their newsfeed when they hadn't even considered consulting and saying, Hey, by the way, becoming a consultant can fix all your problems when it may or may not.
Laura 10:25
You know, consulting is a great career path for somebody who has extensive business experience and loves seeing others win. And so, by giving them a place to easily find that information, when they're ready for it, when they're looking for it, when they're a little bit further down, the customer journey, is going to make it so much easier for us to be able to serve the right people in the right way. And their timeframe, not ours. And that's something that I'm really proud about as a marketer. When it comes to AI, it used to be very difficult to produce long form blog content, especially high-quality content that has keywords embedded in it that doesn't make it look like we are packing it in which Google hates, they call it keyword stuffing. But sounds natural, and it's helpful and creates value. But what we do now is with a combination of classic high quality, copywriting combined with AI, we can produce these blog posts so much faster.
Laura 11:31
So, these days, I we're applying these findings in two different ways. The first is I've created a niche blog to generate leads for our fractional freedom consulting certification program, where people get a lot of value, and we're able to create high quality content and get them even more ready for success. And our program if they decide to join. This blog is called Create your consulting offer.com. And we are producing weekly blog posts and YouTube videos to correspond with it mainly using AI. It's pretty amazing. Back a few years ago, it would have been very unrealistic for a company of our size to produce weekly blog content. But now we are we're able to as a result of artificial intelligence.
Laura 12:17
The second is that we are creating a longer shelf life for our podcast episodes like this one. So, I'm super excited about that. We are taking the show notes and turning them into long form well optimized SEO blog posts. We're asking for backlinks from our guests and linking to their websites as well, along with creating searchable titles, so we can use the on-page optimization tricks that tend to work best, hoping that that grows our podcast and most importantly grows qualified leads from our podcast content for our consulting organization.
Laura 12:55
Inbound Marketing may or may not be the right fit for you. But I can tell you, there is nothing better than an inbound search lead somebody who's looking for a credible and reasonable solution. Somebody who doesn't want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out who knows
what they're talking about. And an individual who is looking for solutions. Because of the overwhelm factor that's happening in the world right now, advertising is going to start becoming less and less effective unless it has a component to it that really nurtures people from a stage of total unawareness. Second, if you're not taking advantage of AI, I'm going to put in the show notes, my favorite AI tools. I really liked something called Jasper, I use the content improver almost all the time. And then you can create blog posts from their blog post toolkits and templates. I find it very easy to use. And it's how we've been able to streamline our blog creation process. We also use a tool called SEMrush for our keyword research, which I'll also put in the show notes as well. And if you're sitting here going, Laura, SEO, are you kidding me? It's like a flashback to the 80s and 90s. Well, you know what? A little bit of Madonna never heard anybody. So I hope this has been helpful to you and thinking about your own lead generation strategies for your company in 2023. Let me know is this something that you're thinking about trying, you can go right to our new blog posts of our optimized podcast, show notes and leave a comment or just search me up on social media and I'm there as well. I look forward to seeing you soon. And I hope you enjoyed this.
Laura 14:40
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Welcome to the Next Level Leap Podcast! Join our guide, Laura Meyer, a 20-year entrepreneur and growth strategist for some of the country's fastest-growing nonprofit and for-profit organizations, as she shares her insights and strategies for using marketing to make a difference in the world. In each episode, we explore how marketing can create a ripple effect of change that impacts lives and communities for years to come. From social media to branding to storytelling, we cover a range of topics to help you harness the power of marketing for good. So if you're ready to make waves and spread joy, tune in to the Next Level Leap Podcast podcast and let's create a marketing ripple effect that changes the world!