Lead generation is the primary goal of most marketing activities: collecting the email address, phone number or physical details of a prospect is the initial, essential step for adding that person to a funnel that hopefully leads him toward the business objectives you have defined - trying an online software, watching a webinar, buying a product.

There are mainly two ways to do lead gen: outbound prospecting and outreach - where you score the web or social networks like Linkedin and Facebook searching for the perfect person at that ideal company that would be an awesome customer and then you contact him via email, message or whatever - and inbound marketing, where you bring prospects to one of your “online properties” using various channels (paid ads, content marketing, SEO, affiliate marketing and whatnot) and then collect their information - usually an email address - in exchange for something they (hopefully) value such as a trial of an online software, a white-paper, an e-book, access to private content and so on.

The “funnel”

The image most often used to represent the journey of a visitor that becomes a (happy) customer is that of a “funnel”: a set of related and subsequent steps in which different contents, offers and activities are presented to the person, trying to help him understand, like, desire and finally purchase the things we sell (in reality there’s also another important step post-sales which is making him a “fan”, an advocate of our products or services).

While all this seems pretty easy on paper, every single step of this process is a quest on itself: selecting efficiently the most interesting contacts at target customers, crafting a compelling message for cold emails or websites, optimizing the conversion rate of forms and landing pages, preparing the best sequence of post-registration emails - it ain’t easy.

Chat to become a lead

Luckily for business owners and marketing agencies, a quite new yet already extremely powerful way to complete the top step of the funnel - generating leads - is becoming easier and faster thanks to the addiction people from all around the world have for messaging apps.

As more and more people message each other every month, reaching them and giving them a way to interact with brands and businesses right in the app they already use for chatting with friends, relatives and colleagues means being able to help them become “leads” - while they don’t even notice and are actually quite eager and happy to become one!

This approach brings marketing back to its roots, when people were able to get into a store, talk with the owner or a clerk, create a relationship that often lead to interest, engagement and usually to a successful purchase. The difference is that now these interactions can happen on the screen of a smartphone, any time of the day and any day of the week - so, if you think about it, in an even more effective and powerful way.

But how do you do that - efficiently?

The problem here is that this tactic could be very difficult to scale, especially for small and medium businesses that do not have huge marketing budgets and where the owner usually wears many different hats. As humans we can efficiently interact and chat only with a small number of prospects at the same time, and even in these cases we might get distracted and lost in conversations that should instead be linear, consequential and with a clear goal in mind.

This is where chatbots enter into the picture. All the main social networks and messaging platforms - Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Skype, WeChat but even more exotic ones like Amazon Echo and Cortana - offer some API’s that developers use to create softwares that can automatically interact with users, answering questions, providing solutions to problems, guiding them toward specific business objectives and, if implemented correctly, seamlessly and effortlessly collecting leads. 24/7, 365 days a year, chatting and engaging prospects anywhere in the world.

But how can you actually start implementing chatbots in your social media strategy? Aren’t these tools very complex to create and manage? How can a small business start using these tools to effectively collect leads, close more sales and leverage these new channels - with sustainable and replicable results?

Introducing ChatbotsBuilder lead generation tools

Here at ChatbotsBuilder we have one main goal in mind: help business owners and agencies use chatbots for reaching success and increase revenues. This is the reason why we have built the easiest platform for creating Facebook Messenger chatbots - and this is also why we have added the most complete, simple and effective tools for automatically engaging with prospects and collecting leads.

Whether you are a web agency looking for prospects that need to build a new website, a restaurant searching for customers that want to book a table for dinner or an hotel eager to start receiving reservation requests automatically from your Facebook page, the lead generation widgets we have created for you allow you to easily create conversations with prospects on Messenger, seamlessly and naturally asking them all the appropriate questions while collecting all this data, store it, send it to you via email - and even pass it automatically to marketing automation tools such as Mailchimp.

Words aren’t really enough to explain the power and flexibility you will have with these tools so there’s only one thing to do: try the platform yourself, play with it and immediately create chatbots that will show you, your customers and your prospects what all this means. They will be amazed - promised!