Best Practices of Growth – B2B Lead Generation Blueprint for AI Products and Services

Artificial intelligence companies are leaping onto the scene in every sector – and business leaders are bombarded with a wave of hype and AI exaggeration.

Buyers are skeptical about AI claims, and very few companies stand out in the noise.

While some AI product or service companies are successfully gathering quality enterprise leads – most AI vendors and consultants generate very little attention online, and collect very few leads without outbound or cold calling efforts.

A small percentage of AI product or service firms are generating web visitors and reliably converting them into qualified leads – while most firms flounder with almost no quality inbound leads.

The truth is:

AI Firms Overspend on Branding Too Early, and Under-Invest in Building a System to Ensure Consistent Lead Flow

This is why the AI landscape of startups, consultants, and AI-related software products is full of branded, modern-looking websites that (a) don’t attract the right kind of desired customer, and (b) don’t convert potential customers into leads.

AI vendor firms brag about their “world-class AI for ___” or “world-class AI platform for ____” – or they launch press releases about their latest fundraise – but few of them can brag about having actual customers (in truth, very few of them attract any customer conversation from their website).

Emerj’s analysis of hundreds of AI vendor firms, and hands-on experience managing hundreds of B2B AI advertisements across sectors shows that under 15% of AI-related vendors (including consulting firms, AI solution providers, crowdsourced data providers, etc) have strong, conversion-focused landing pages.

A mere 5% have landing pages that appeal to their core buyer’s motives, and even fewer have reliable digital marketing channels to drive visitors to those landing pages to be converted.

Events and outreach are perfectly fine lead generation channels – but they continue to be used as a crutch for firms who cannot turn their website into a lead generating engine by itself.

If you’re anything like the AI-related vendors we work with, you want:

• A stream of qualified leads entering your CRM every day from digital channels
• An ability to attract more of the right kind of web visitors (those who could become paying customers)
• An ability to quickly qualify inbound leads and get them to the phone with a salesperson

The question is: HOW to achieve those results? These are exactly the challenges that we help our clients with here at Emerj.

How AI Firms Win Market Share – One Critical Insight

Over years of running our B2B AI Lead Generation Audit services and hands-on advertising services with AI vendors – we’ve developed a Blueprint for attracting and converting AI-focused enterprise leaders.

For the last two years, this set of standards and guidelines has been reserved for our consulting and advertising clients.

While the standards cover everything from email marketing to landing page design to content creation (you’ll see the table of contents below), the core principles are based on one fact:

Enterprise AI buyers need a next step towards buying that is framed in their own best interest.

Our checklists and best-practices across all channels are based on this one principle. It’s the principle that not only attracts more of the right buyers, but converts them into lead. It’s the principle that not only converts them to leads, but sifts out the hot leads from the cold.

Most AI vendors (whether consultants or software providers) don’t know which leads are good are bad because they aren’t doing this well – and they aren’t applying this simple principle to their marketing follow-up or online marketing assets.

This isn’t marketing theory or hypotheses, our blueprint is based on the fact that each month we spend thousands of dollars across dozens of individual advertisements for AI product and service companies, and we know what works and what doesn’t.

Emerj’s Blueprint for Attracting and Converting AI-Focused Buyers

Improved and refined with new charts, graphs, and checklists we’re making the blueprint available: “Best-Practices of Growth – B2B Lead Generation Blueprint for AI Products and Services”

These insights and strategies were never intended to be a book. As the process has been refined over the last two years, we’ve used it almost exclusively in-house in order to manage our campaigns for our AI vendor clients, and to coach them on improving their lead generation systems.

Short and to the point, this 40-page blueprint is structured into six sections:

1. Target Market Refinement – Get a clear view of your buying stakeholders, and the stakeholder types most likely to interact with your online marketing assets. These are some of the best secrets from our AI Go-to-Market process, distilled into a set of simple frameworks for marketers.
2. Content Built for Attraction – Write the kinds of articles and reports that attract the right kind of buyers to your site. Create material that not only ranks in search, but encourages engagement and conversion to a lead.
3. Landing Pages Built to Convert Buyers – Checklists and examples of landing pages that convert well, and screen out the wrong kinds of leads. Not only will you see more leads coming in by implementing these strategies, your salespeople will be happier because they’ll be speaking to quality leads.
4. Deeper Conversion Page Fundamentals – From thank-you pages to webinars, this section breaks down new ways to turn all the online assets in your “buyer’s journey” into accelerants for the close.
5. Email Automation for Screening and Booking – Get your leads to self-select based on their level of interest and fit – create simple, short marketing automation funnels that coax out the best leads immediately and get them to the phone.
6. Broadcast Email, an Ongoing Lead Source – Discover over a dozen ways to turn your unconverted leads into future sales through simple newsletter and promotion strategies that can add an extra 15% more appointments per month for your sales staff.

None of these strategies involve a new website, a new marketing agency. In fact, most of these tactics involve simple changes to layout and online copy that make all the difference between converting the right leads.

Simple Insights for Immediate Marketing Returns

There are individual insights in this blueprint which, by themselves, will transform your ability to gather more and better leads for your AI offerings. Some gems include:

• Two Strategies to Turn Leads Into Appointments Fast – Having salespeople follow up on every lead that enters the pipeline is a waste of time. With the right thank-you page, and the right first email communication, 30-40% of hot leads (leads with a current ability and willingness to buy) can literally book themselves a meeting with your sales staff.
• Optimize Conversion – 5 Landing Page Best Practices – From webinars to white papers to case studies, the best landing pages have five things in common. Landing pages can often double their conversion rate by applying these small tweaks that the best landing pages have in common.
• A New Source of Leads You Already Have – Turn weekly and monthly email communication into more than “branding” – use these communications to consistently drive more sales appointments from qualified prospects, by embedding a subtle, “non-sales-ey” call to action.

Just using any of those individual strategies could imply a massive improvement in lead quantity and quality.

If you’re looking for more of the right leads in your CRM every week, and more sales calls with real AI buyers – purchase your copy of “Best-Practices of Growth – B2B Lead Generation Blueprint for AI Products and Services”