Over the last several years, growth hacking techniques have been significantly improved. Generating leads has become more complex: cutting-edge technology is now necessary to be successful in this area.

Thankfully, many tech actors came out recently, proposing more and more tools and features that can do the job perfectly. Chrome extensions, saas actors operating through LinkedIn, Email, Twitter…

As growth experts, we – at LaGrowthMachine – have been developing our own automation tool based on the growth community’s needs. Our experience allows us to get a very large vision of this entire area. That’s what we want to share with you today!

What can you do with an automation tool? What kind of tool can you use? What are the main automation tools that exist for growth hackers? What workflow can you build up and how can it serve you?

In this post, we’ll first explain the main feature of automation tools. Then, in contrast to the numerous subpar articles littered all over the web, we’ll provide you with a concise list of 11 must-have automation tools that each growth hacker should have and use. To wrap up, we’d like to introduce our very own LaGrowthMachine workflow that can help you with your lead generation efforts.

What is an automation tool?

When we talk about automation tools, it can be really vague.

There are tons of tool that allows you to automate stuff, not only for prospecting or marketing purpose but also for many IT, logistics, data, and other subjects.

As LaGrowthMachine is a sales automation tool that allows you to generate more B2B leads, we’re only going to talk about marketing and sales automation tools – the ones that are interesting for the growth marketers community.

A sales or marketing automation tool is a solution that will help sales and marketing people to automate some of their recurring tasks, with the objective of increasing the number of leads, the number of clients, and the global turnover of a company.

Fundamentally, these objectives coincide with the aims of growth marketers.

What tasks can you automate with it?

Automation tools can help growth hackers in many ways.

In the previous paragraph, we’ve defined an automation tool as a solution that can help sales and marketing – and growth – people with their daily routines. Let’s define what a growth routine is exactly.

Even if it depends on the company you’re working at, a B2B growth hacker can generally be responsible for:

  • brand awareness;
  • brand image;
  • lead acquisition;
  • lead conversion;
  • lead funnel;
  • website UX;
  • etc…

The role of a growth hacker is to be able to activate all the channels he can to drive growth. He will have to take a proactive stance in all marketing and sales activities for the company. Also, he will be specialized in one or two areas of expertise (i.e. SEO and social selling).

For all the tasks quoted above, there are many tools that exist and allow you to automate partly or fully the processes.

For example, LaGrowthMachine allows you to automate:

  • lead enrichment (getting additional data from an original list of leads);
  • prospecting cold messages via LinkedIn and/or email);
  • reporting (showing you your campaign performance, live).

Some tools will help you with marketing email automation, some will automatically synchronize your CRM data with other solutions, some others will give you the ability to manage your posts or your ads on social networks…

In the next part of this post, we’ll focus on the main automation tools that will help growth hackers with their tasks.

10 must-have automation tools for growth hackers

As said in the introduction of this post, we’re observing many lists of tools across the web.

To us, the majority of these articles aren’t proposing real value to the growth hacker community. Instead of doing another post like those, we’re only going to focus on 9 tools that you should be using if you are working as a growth marketer.

The preceding paragraph articulated the tremendous volume of responsibilities a growth marketer is expected to undertake to get the job done.

The tools we are suggesting will work in synergy, allowing you to automate a myriad of tasks associated with growth hacking. When used together, they will prove to be very powerful in driving growth for your organization.

Tool 1: LaGrowthMachine for Sales Automation

First of all, LaGrowthMachine.

With this single tool, you can exponentially increase your growth hacking capabilities.

As your main goal is to increase leads, clients, and turnover, LaGrowthMachine will allow you to:

  • Enrich data automatically: you just need to import a list of leads with a little information in the tool. It will scrape additional data such as the lead’s phone number or email for you automatically.
  • Send emails automatically: you can set up a campaign to send as many emails as you want to your leads.
  • Send LinkedIn messages automatically: you can set up a campaign to send as many LinkedIn outreach messages as you want to your leads.
  • Invite people on Linkedin automatically: you can set up a campaign to add your leads on LinkedIn before reaching out to them, with an invite note or not.
  • Synchronize with your CRM automatically: you can set up LaGrowthMachine to tag your leads directly into your CRM, depending on their reactions to your outreach messages.

There are many more additional and very cool tricks such as the Inbox feature, the live reporting feature, the lead management feature, etc…

Our clients receive an astonishing 3.5 times more B2B leads with our tool than when manually gathering them, and in much less time too!

Tool 2: Mailchimp for Email Marketing Automation

Aside from LaGrowthMachine’s lead generation and sales automation capabilities, growth hackers should highly consider utilizing email marketing automation campaigns – an excellent top funnel channel to promote your services.

This strategy is cost-effective and can easily bring more leads into your pipeline. Your goal with this tool shouldn’t be to convert leads into customers, but mostly to get fresh leads data that you’ll be able to target later with other actions and another tool such as LaGrowthMachine.

Mailchimp is an excellent solution for quickly and affordably sending a wealth of marketing emails to huge lists of leads. You can:

  • Create email campaigns: with their campaign builder, flexible and super easy!
  • Send email campaigns: to as many leads as you want. To get their email address, you can enrich the data with LaGrowthMachine or another tool, export your list and use it in Mailchimp.
  • Schedule campaigns automatically: you can pre-build campaigns, audiences, and schedule when you want to send your campaigns to different audiences. This allows you to get a continuous flow of new marketing leads while focusing on something else.

With Mailchimp, you can also get some important data such as your email deliverability, your email open rate, and your click rate, which makes you able to iterate your campaigns to drive more performance with time.

Tool 3: Plezi for Marketing Automation

In the previous paragraph, we were talking about Email Marketing Automation. Now we’re going to talk about B2B Marketing Automation.

Plezi is a tool specifically designed to help growth marketers construct lead nurturing campaigns that will guide and extend their leads throughout the buyer’s journey.

Mailchimp also offers some features, though primarily tailored for marketing emails only. With Plezi, you can:

  • Create automated lead funnels: tracking the lead from the first interaction with your brand, until turning client. You have the ability to send him automated content through email or social media, teaching him and fostering engagement with your brand until he is prepared to purchase.
  • Lead scoring automation: depending on your lead’s actions, he’ll be scored precisely from very cold to very hot with a grade. This grade will drive him to an automated loop or another.

To sum up, Plezi is another interesting automated solution that allows growth hackers to generate leads, aside from your email marketing and sales outreach actions.

Tool 4: Hootsuite for Social Media Management Automation

As growth hackers, you might need to be active on one or several social media. If your company specializes in B2B, it is likely that you’ll need to take a focused approach when using LinkedIn in many ways (ads, posts, engagement, adding people, talking into groups, and webinars…).

Hootsuite is a good solution to help you manage your different actions through social media in time.

With Hootsuite, you can:

  • Add your different social media accounts in one place: with this little automation, you really can follow up on each social media very quickly.
  • Schedule posts automatically: you can create as many posts as you want in advance and schedule them. Huge time saving, here.
  • Monitor new trends: which can inspire you for creating future posts.
  • Running ads automatically: you can set up your ads and sponsored content directly through Hootsuite on each social media.
  • Answering inquiries: some leads will be generated through this, and the more reactive you are, the better the UX will be, the higher the chance of a conversion.

Most of all, social media automation is a huge time saver for your daily routine as a growth marketer.

Tool 5: Google Analytics for Trafic Reporting Automation

There are many data & analytics tools that help you to measure your performance and monitor your acquisition channels.

However, Google Analytics might be a good solution for us as it’s free, pretty easy to use and it will give you a lot of information to understand your audience and track your marketing and sales performance.

With Google Analytics, you will be able to:

  • Track your traffic: with an accurate vision of your audience, your channels, and much additional information.
  • Track your conversion: and understand what actions bring you more or fewer leads, clients and money.
  • Set up automated reports: with Google Analytics, growth marketers will be able to create custom reports that are gathering data automatically. You can schedule reports export automatically as well – let’s say weekly or monthly -, for a presentation for example.

As you will get involved in many different actions, tracking and measuring performance with good data is an obligation.

Tool 6: Landbot.io for Chatbot Automation

Landbot.io is a solution that enables you to create your own chatbot pretty easily and quickly. Then, the bot will be able answering to lead inquiries automatically. This can save you a lot of time as well, because the more you’re doing actions from marketing and sales – with LaGrowthMachine for example – the more you’ll drive traffic onto your website.

A chatbot can help develop your:

  • UX: by giving automatic answers and guiding people through your website, you’re offering them a satisfying experience that can drive more sales.
  • conversion: By utilizing automated services, you can effectively manage a larger volume of leads in less time!

Automated chatbots offer growth hackers an invaluable asset – time. By utilizing automated chatbot technology, growth hackers can save countless hours that would have otherwise been spent manually interacting with potential customers and clients. And it’s working great.

Tool 7: Calendly for Meeting Schedule Automation

You probably already know this one.

It’s a free, easy-to-use, and very effective service that allows people around you to book a live meeting directly into your agenda (Google Calendar for example).

Within two clicks, you can send your Calendly link to a colleague or a lead and he’ll schedule an appointment whenever you’re available. The invitation is sent and synchronized automatically.

Tool 8: Ahrefs for SEO Automation

Sometimes, growth marketers will be assigned to SEO missions as well, as it is one of the main inbound channels to acquire new and qualitative leads.

If SEO is important to you, Ahrefs should be your go-to choice as this SEO tool will help streamline and automate many of the tasks that take up time in your SEO daily routine.

For example:

  • Crawling your website: you can schedule automated crawl sessions. Ahrefs will explore all of your website’s pages to provide a thorough examination of how well it is performing as far as SEO goes.
  • Automated plug-in: with their chrome extension, you can get data on every Google page results or deep URL, giving you the number of backlinks, the main keywords, and volume for Google queries, etc…

Ahrefs is not really an automated tool for growth hacking specifically. However, as many growth hackers are focusing mainly on SEO, this kind of tool is a game-changer and will help in many ways.

Tool 9: Swydo for PPC Automation

Another part of growth and acquisition can be achieved through PPC (Paid Per Click = Ads).

Depending on the target customer personas, brand strategy, and core business objectives, growth hackers can selectively choose one or many social networks to promote your products/services – including running ads.

If you’re running Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads, it can be tricky – at least time-consuming – to observe your performance through these different platforms.

Swydo is an automation tool that allows you to get ads reporting from a single place: you get all your data in the same place, allowing you to create a centralized performance dashboard automatically.

This way, it’s much easier for growth marketers to monitor their results with ads

Tool 10: Zapier for Integration Automation

Another one of this toolbox is… Zapier.

Zapier is a tool that allows you to create automation between all these other tools. Basically, it’s a framework database that allows you to create API connections between LaGrowthMachine, Slack, and Hubspot CRM, for example.

Zapier can be very useful: instead of constantly exporting and importing data through different tools, growth hackers can create connections to get and reuse the right data from one tool to another for specific matters, such as improving customer management for example.

In this passage, we have discussed the perfect toolbox that functions in harmony. However, some tools won’t be necessary for you, depending on your personal company, budget, or skills.

In this concluding section, we will provide you with a simplified yet equally effective automated sales workflow that can produce substantial results for your business, as a company growth responsible.

Tool 11: Botsify for Chatbot Automation

Botsify is an AI chatbot platform that enables businesses to easily build custom chatbots for their websites and different messaging platforms. It comes with two pricing options. Chatbots can be easily created on the platform thanks to its straightforward drag-and-drop interface.

Additionally, Botsify integrates with numerous well-liked messaging and communication platforms, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, enabling companies to connect with clients on the channels they prefer. All in all, Botsify is a great choice for companies seeking to quickly and easily add chatbots to their websites or messaging channels.

Using LaGrowthMachine as the best workflow to generate B2B leads

The best ratio between the number of leads generated and the time/money you’ve spent to get them can be achieved using LaGrowthMachine with two other tools.

First of all, you’ll need three tools:

  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  • LaGrowthMachine
  • A CRM of your choice

Step 1: Targeting with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium version of LinkedIn.

This tool comes with more advanced search and filter options that allow users to find relevant companies on LinkedIn as well as contacts.

You can filter contacts by job title, company size, industry, or location. You may even narrow down your search criteria by the years of experience or the management role they hold in their organizations.

One of the best to use is to apply an ABM method:

  • go to the account section of Sales Navigator;
  • set up your filters;
  • get a first query with companies;
  • switch to the lead section applying the company you get.

Once you’ve identified the right contacts, you can start building your list of leads.

Step 2: Enriching and Engaging with LaGrowthMachine

LaGrowthMachine is an automated outreach tool that allows you to create personalized multichannel sequences with LinkedIn, Email, and Twitter.

To complete the process, simply export your list of leads from Sales Navigator and import it into LaGrowthMachine.

  1. Then, manage your list of leads in LaGrowthMachine.
  2. You’ll need to set up your sales sequence. We recommend that you go for a multichannel one, using at least LinkedIn and Emails if you’re working in B2B.
  3. Then, launch your campaign. LaGrowthMachine will enrich your data automatically, so you’ll get a least an email or a LinkedIn account, and will be able to outreach on one of these channels – or both of them.
  4. The tool will send messages you wrote in advance following our copywriting advice.

And that’s it.

You can check your live results directly in our reporting session.

Step 3: Use a CRM to centralize the data

LaGrowthMachine will begin to generate some leads automatically.

You certainly want to save these interactions somewhere. You can reply to them directly in LaGrowthMachine using our inbox feature.

crm integration lgm

But you can also set up your preference in LaGrowthMachine and create a connection with your CRM natively (if you’re using Pipedrive or Hubspot) or with Zapier.

With LaGrowthMachine, you can even preset the way you want your leads to be tagged in your CRM.

Conclusion

With the vast array of tools available for growth hackers to automate their lead-generation efforts, it is essential that you remain focused and select a combination that truly fits your needs. Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed; there’s a perfect choice out there for you!

And in most cases, the process that we just described using LaGrowthMachine will be the right one for B2B.