AI Tools Every Marketer Should Use for Demand Gen

This Week

• Long Read: Supercharge your demand gen with AI

• AI Tools: Predictive scoring, landing pages, lead enrichment

• Cheat: How to prompt

• Around the Web: Hubspot’s new AI

• Invest: Apple’s spending spree

• News: Ad agencies, AI ethics

• Folks to Follow

How to Use AI to Supercharge Your Demand Gen

I love the hustle of startup marketing. I've felt the adrenaline rush of envisioning leads and conversions hitting unprecedented peaks: the adrenaline pumps, visions of skyrocketing growth dance in your head. But a few months in, reality hits hard.

Those leads?

They're trickling in at a disheartening pace. The sales team, once optimistic, now wears a veil of discontent and frustration. The mounting pressure, the sinking numbers, and the echoing silence from potential customers cast a shadow of despair on your once vibrant dreams (okay, maybe that’s a bit melodramatic, but it felt that way to me).

As you can tell, this is a path I've traversed, and I'm here to tell you while it seems hopeless, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

It’s called Artificial Intelligence.

Want to know my secrets? Read on with my Medium friend link.

The 6 AI Demand Gen Tools you Need Right Now

Lusha

What It Does: Lusha helps you enrich your CRM by providing updated B2B contact information.

Favorite Feature: You can use the Lusha Chrome extension to source contact info from LinkedIn profiles.

Pricing: You get 5 contact cards on the free plan or you can upgrade for $29/month. If you want intent signals and other premium features, you’ll need to talk to their sales team.

G2 Rating: 4.3

Apollo.io

What It Does: Like Lush, Apollo.io helps you find prospects for outbound efforts.

Favorite Feature: If you upgrade, you can bulk export 480 contact cards at a time.

Pricing: Apollo.io offers a free basic plan with 25 contact cards, or you can upgrade for $49/month.

G2 Rating: 4.8

Drift

What It Does: Drift is a nifty chatbot you put on your website. It helps answer basic questions from website visitors using preset Q&A sets.

Favorite Feature: Your chatbot can qualify a lead before you send it to sales.

Pricing: Drift starts at $2,500/month.

G2 rating: 4.4

Salesloft

What It Does: Salesloft is a sales workflow platform that helps reps find prospects, send emails, and track quota.

Favorite Feature: You can build custom cadences that include email and phone calls based on audience segments.

Pricing: Custom, but expect to start somewhere around $125/month per user.

G2 rating: 4.5

Mutiny

What it does: Mutiny is a website personalization platform that uses AI to identify your visitors and show them the most relevant and most likely to convert content.

Favorite Feature: The AI-assisted landing page builder is super easy to use and gives you suggestions based on other high-performing B2B websites.

Pricing: Custom, but expect to spend $1,000 — $2,000/month as a starting point.

G2 rating: 4.7

MadKudu

What It Does: MadKudu analyzes your data and surfaces high-intent prospects for delivery to your sales team.

Favorite Feature: It matches incoming leads against your ideal customer profile so you know which ones are a good fit.

G2 rating: 4.4

Pricing: The growth plan will set you back $1,999/month.

Prompt Trick

If you've interacted with an AI chatbot like ChatGPT and felt underwhelmed, it might be time to hone your prompt writing skills. Even the most advanced language models rely heavily on the quality and clarity of the prompts they receive.

Try this:

🔨 Task description: Tell the bot the tangible output you want from it ("Generate a tagline for ..." or "Write an email about...")

🌍 Context: Consider the background your AI needs to provide a desired output ("Draft an email introducing our new product line to existing customers")

👩‍🔧 Role: Give the AI a persona to adopt in providing an answer ("As an HR manager, outline the steps to manage a low-performing employee")

📖 Specific requirements: Give detailed guidance on what you want the output to contain ("Create a 1,000-word blog post broken into 5 sections")

✖ Boundaries: Tell the bot what NOT to do ("What CRM software should we use? Exclude options with an upfront investment over $10,000")

🧠 Reasoning: Ask the bot to explain its thinking ("Which marketing channels will be best for us, and why did you choose each one?")

If you like this, you can sign up for free resources and workshops at Section.

Hubspot Doubles Down on AI

If you’ve ever used a marketing automation tool, you know: there’s nothing automatic about it. But Hubspot is integrating AI tools to make it easier.

They’re releasing an impressive number of features, and many of them really do help streamline a marketer's process.

I particularly like the idea generation and chatbot features.

You can find the full list of features at Hubspot.

Apple for AI

Apple is leading big tech in AI acquisitions.

Over the past decade, it has scooped up 32 AI companies — runner-up Google has secured 21.

Read on at CB Insights.

News

• How Ad Agencies Are Using Generative AI Today, in Adweek

• The ethics of AI-powered marketing technology, in MarTech

Folks to Follow

• Liam Moroney for thoughtful demand gen insights and frameworks

• Suzanne Moore for B2B demand gen learnings

• The Startup Lab for tweets and medium articles on growth hacking