4 Hacks For Lead Generation With AI & Marketing Automation
What are leads? Should you bother trying to generate them? In this article we’ll look at what leads are and why they’re important in order to grow your business
What are leads? Is lead generation necessary? In this article we’ll take a look
To be precise, leads are your future customers. However, not all leads convert to paying customers, raising the need for a steady lead generation process.
Here, we’d take an example of trade between two great civilizations- ancient Egypt and Greece.
The Greek acropolises across the Mediterranean region relied on Egyptian wheat to feed its growing population. This gave traders from the Land of the Pharaohs innumerable opportunities to generate wealth.
What Were These Opportunities?
Currently, these are called leads (Greek traders who could sail down to the Egyptian coast and load off wheat baskets to ships). Now, here leads were generated through networking. Greek sailors and travelers provided crucial information, enabling Egyptians to communicate with traders and transport wheat to faraway lands. In return, the seller-Egyptians would earn silver and gold coins or exchange goods through barter system (deal closed). Without leads and proper networking, Egyptian traders would have missed the chance to earn coins!!
Fast forward to present, networking is still practiced to generate leads and close deals. Additionally, contemporary technologies such as AI and marketing automation are accelerating the lead generation processes. According to a report, AI for sales increases leads by 50%.
And marketing automation is accelerating the rate of captured leads. This you could see in the below graph:
Source: EcommerceBonsai – 75+ Latest Marketing Automation Statistics – 2025 Benchmarks
Here you could see marketing automation streamlines efforts (35%), improves customer relations (34%), reduces manual tasks (30%) and increases captured leads (28%).
With AI & marketing automation, you could target convertible leads at right place. A quote by Wayne Davis, Professor of Emeritus of Philosophy, perfectly fits the context here:
“The lead generation process starts by finding out where your target market ‘lives’ on the web.”
Below, we have the full guide to AI-powered lead generation process:
Just as you could see in this image, lead generation is carefully planned. In the initial stages, you need to have measurable objectives (quantifying what you want to achieve to never lose momentum). Prioritizing data quality and management is crucial to generating quality leads for easy conversions.
Moreover, by ensuring data quality, you could make the right decision quickly. Personalization is prioritized it holds the key to further conversations leading to sales.
This is done with AI and human collaboration (with this you get the right quality and number of leads). The subsequent steps follow where right tools are chosen based on scalability, testing and refining are executed.
You need to maintain transparency throughout the process.
Now, as a marketer you need to know the 4 best ways to generate leads:
Chatbot
You must have encountered these chatbots while trying to interact with customer representatives of various industries. These bots use NLP (natural language processing) for automated responses. The answers mimic human-like interactions gaining the consumer’s trust.
While interacting these bots even offer discounts, and other goodies to the visitors. It motivates leads to give away crucial information such as their interests, preferences, professions, and others.
But how chatbots could help you with lead generation?
This you could understand from the below pictorial representation:
Source: BotsCrew: Chatbots for Lead Generation: How They Qualify Leads
This image illustrates absolute information about what a chatbot does.
While interacting with website visitors, these bots collect email addresses and other crucial information as lead data. You could say, these bots generated leads. And marketers could further use the same for their marketing strategies such as sending personalized email campaigns, messages on contact numbers, and so on. Sales rep’ could also use these data in their sales strategies.
Voice AI
The voice AI technology uses the power of artificial intelligence to meet the requirements of leads. The entire conversation is voice-based and personalized to make the lead comfortable.
The voice search AI uses the NLP technology to understand the user’s queries and accordingly respond; it gives results as per the user’s search pattern.
The process improves the accuracy, thus enhancing the user experience.
Below, you could see the top voice search in USA:
Source: Yaguara.co – 62 Voice Search Statistics 2025 (Usage & Trends)
The common voice searches are weather, music, retail, news, healthcare & wellness, consumer packaged food and others.
One of the challenging aspects of voice data collection is the privacy concern. With consumers increasingly using voice AI technology, experts fear these data could be misused by some organizations. But right now, voice AI is proving beneficial for both organizations and users.
Personalization
How do you feel when someone compares you to another person?
Of course, you won’t like it as we all are unique, and so are our choices, dressing style, and so on. So, as a marketer, you need to personalize every approach to connect with global prospects or leads. Artificial intelligence plays a big role in creating personalized communication to generate a specific set of leads (quality leads). Find the below image for a better understanding:
Source: Faster Capital – The Importance of Personalization in Lead Generation: Tips and Tricks
You could see the lead generation process here. After a thorough understanding of the target audience, marketers need to create valuable content, they could even integrate user-generated content for the same. AI could develop right personalized CTAs for generating leads.
Predicting Consumer Behavior
It’s challenging to predict consumer behavior. But with AI and marketing automation the entire process becomes easier. This is called predictive analytics, improving the lead generation process.
In the below image, you could see how customer behavior is predicted using AI:
The data is collected from all touchpoints and stored in a centralized database. It is then segmented based on demographics and behavior, followed by application of predictive analytics models for a tailored approach. Marketing automation is then implemented leading to automated responses based on predictions.
Consumer preferences change over the years or even within the next season!! So, you need to track evolving preferences. Overall, AI and marketing automation help in strategic decision-making and generate leads for upselling and cross-selling.
Wrapping Up
Lead generation is a tedious process. However, with the integration of AI and marketing automation, organizations could now generate a good number of quality leads. And with this, they would increase deal closure and revenue.
The blog explains some of the best hacks that every marketer could use in their process to generate leads.