Emerging Trends Shaping the Future of Lead Generation

Staying ahead of the lead generation curve is pivotal to ongoing success and scalability.

Phonexa CMO Talar Malakian recently joined digital marketing entrepreneur Alex Oliveira on the LeadGen HQ podcast to unravel the intricacies of lead generation strategies, trends, and challenges.

The LeadGen HQ podcast aims to provide listeners with actionable insights and practical tips for harnessing the potential of different lead generation channels.

Let’s revisit the highlights of this enlightening dialogue exploring the diverse channels and practices that power the leadgen industry’s growth.

AI + Marketing = Enhanced Productivity

AI-powered tools are becoming increasingly popular, particularly among marketers. According to Malakian, enhanced productivity is the strongest AI use case for marketing teams.

“We’re talking about the marketing use cases, but if you take a step further than that, there’s also all the internal efficiencies that you gain by even just using AI for internal knowledge management,” said Malakian. “For example, we started using a platform that helps us generate, through AI, internal training videos. Now we have an internal repository of those videos, and it’s allowed us to really have knowledge sharing be a little bit more accessible.”

This type of flexibility is invaluable, especially for growing businesses.

“When you’re growing, and you’re bringing more people on board, how do you get more productive by using the tools at your disposal?” said Malakian. “There are multiple quadrants that are a part of the overall value proposition — there’s the content generation piece, data analysis, knowledge sharing. There are multiple quadrants that you can find yourself in depending on how you’re comfortable using these tools.“

Decision-Making Still Needs To Be Human

Malakian emphasized that the decision-making process, regardless of how productive you are, still needs to be human. She said that Google’s algorithm, for example, isn’t going to recognize that you used AI to create content, thereby tasking marketers with making engaging content that doesn’t look like an AI-generated article put out by a competitor.

“It’s always been about engagement with algorithms — how long somebody stays on a page, how valuable the content is to them,” said Malakian. “So, keep in mind that you can maximize productivity, you can maximize the number of things you do, but POV perspective and human decision-making should always be the thing that differentiates you.”

Beyond that, Malakian stressed that the narrative of what a brand stands for still needs to convey how productive they are and how much it can produce, thus necessitating the human touch.

Pivoting Marketing Strategies Based on Customer Feedback

Malakian also highlighted the importance of using customer feedback as a barometer for future campaign performance.

“In the past, I would say that we were running really product-focused campaigns. It was ‘how do you do call tracking and distribution’ or ‘how do you track your clicks’ — very functional, feature-specific guides,” said Malakian. “We pivoted a little, mainly because our customer feedback was, ‘hey, I really need intros to other publishers … I’m stuck in a place where I’m kind of growing, but I don’t know how to onboard more publishers and more brands and maintain all of those relationships, especially with a slim team.’”

Malakian explained that this direct customer feedback resulted in her team pivoting their content marketing strategy, as they produced “How to Scale ROI Across Publishers & Partners: An Affiliate Network’s Guide” to address the target audience’s pain points.

The distribution plan Malakian and her team put together involved:

• Paid media
• SEO
• Thought leaders who helped promote and share the guide

After creating multiple distribution paths for the affiliate network guide, Malakian’s team built a relationship with a publisher catering to affiliate marketers to further promote the content.

“We created all these distribution channels, and then we looked at all the data and said, ‘What is working here on this one specific campaign?’” said Malakian. “And it was probably one of our most downloaded lead magnets.”

According to Malakian, the key to the campaign’s success was to first pinpoint the ideal customer profile in order to identify and solve the problems plaguing that specific audience. The second step was determining how to distribute the guide effectively.

Malakian suggests asking these questions when putting together a distribution plan:

• Am I getting people to vouch for the content?
• Do I have thought leaders surrounding this piece?
• Do I have enough channels?
• Am I giving it enough time to see what is actually working for us?
• Am I giving it enough time to see where my users are at?

“It comes down to customer discovery,” said Malakian. “If you know what the pain points are and you truly understand how you can solve them, don’t tell [your audience] what you do, tell them how you can help them.”

To continue the conversation with Malakian, connect with her on LinkedIn.