5 ways to automate PR processes for streamlined lead generation

Automation in PR can improve your company’s lead generation process.

PR helps businesses clearly communicate company messages to target audiences, but only effective strategies can ensure businesses cut through competition and establish consumer relationships with increased engagement and sales. With the business-to-consumer relationship as a priority, PR pros can become more efficient with new technology.

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Lead generation is the process of generating and securing interest in your brand, messages, and products among members of your target audience. Streamlined lead generation is a version of this sales-oriented process that focuses on minimizing inputs of time, effort, and human resources while maximizing its efficiency and, ultimately, your sales outcomes as well.

Two powerful weapons PR pros can use to streamline their lead generation are automation and artificial intelligence. Here are five ways your company can start using these tools.

Conducting market research and competitor analysis

Market analysis and competitor research are essential in any business’s long-term growth plans. There are a variety of purpose-built AI tools that assist PR professionals in conducting research and performing competitor analysis. These assess competitor strategies, reach, and authority to help gauge consumer preference. 

This data can help professionals have an edge in PR messaging and avoid making similar mistakes as competition. It can also help brands respond to competitors’ messaging, either indirectly or directly.

1. Cultivating and nurturing leads

Automation is essential in any lead acquisition and nurturing process. Whether you’re aiming for B2B or B2C leads, real estate leads, or leads for any other marketing purpose, automation is crucial for maximizing your company’s potential. Automation tools should be highly customizable to your needs, allowing you to combine specific actions and triggers with your lead generation goals. 

Features like speech-to-text technology are also valuable, allowing you to capture ideas, take notes, transcribe meetings and interviews, and create content quickly and efficiently using machine dictation. Speech-to-text technology can streamline workflows and provide clearer insights into the media presence of your clients across industries and sectors.

2. Improving lead quality

When the analysis of key performance indicators like social media interactions, web traffic, and lead generation are automated, AI-generated insights can provide more clarity on the impacts and reach of PR efforts. 

This further allows PR professionals to create ideal customer profiles based on their most promising prospective audiences and personalize campaigns using the latest data. It also allows you to use intent data based on corporate IP addresses, web data, and user profiles to identify when prospects are active in the market and ready to hear your value propositions. Moreover, AI tools can measure and assess returns on investment produced by PR and other campaigns. 

3. Automating data collection

Save time and energy with AI-powered data analytics tools like Google Analytics. These help collect, collate, and analyze large amounts of data from various sources, including forums and social media platforms. Additionally, they can automatically analyze data sets to identify key trends and gauge the efficacy of PR campaigns. 

Media monitoring tools also use AI to collect social media data, including mentions of clients and information on larger conversations around campaigns, brands, and initiatives.

4. Enhancing personalization

According to Content Stack, increasing personalization across a larger number of marketing channels can increase consumer spending by as much as 500%. Moreover, personalization can lower customer acquisition costs by up to 50%, improve revenues by 15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by as much as 30%.

Automation tools gather data to implement a high degree of personalization in PR campaigns and messages. These include targeting customers who have previously purchased certain products, those looking for an investment in a set price bracket, or any service offering that suits a pre-defined audience. 

This personalization helps tailor communications for target audiences to ensure they're relevant and relatable, improving the efficacy of outreach efforts and generating more quality leads. 

5. Managing conversions

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your blog pages, landing pages, adverts, websites, and other key touchpoints to maximize the rate at which your traffic is converted. AI makes CROs more precise, enabling PR professionals to make more informed decisions to improve conversion rates.

AI tools can help you gain a deeper understanding of your audiences and address friction points prompting them to click away. When used ethically, AI is a powerful weapon when it comes to communicating messages to target audiences, effectively capturing their attention, and forming lasting customer connections. 

If you want to learn more about using AI in the PR industry, contact us to get started.

Photo by Lukas