AI Lead Generation Strategies for Creative Agencies in 2025

Recently, agency owners are getting leads from ChatGPT. Grow and Convert, a content marketing agency I really admire, mentioned that ChatGPT referred 71% of their new leads in an article, and their clients are seeing the same results:

With AI search engines getting more popular, and with AI agents becoming as important, “leveraging” automated prospecting is now one of many agency growth strategies. In this article, I’ll share what many agency owners and creators are doing to improve their lead gen efforts, and how you can do the same.

How to Use AI for Lead Generation 

Your agency growth strategies should include AI (in terms of search engines and AI workflows). Here's how to do that in 2025 and beyond: 

1. Create content that articulates what you do and who you do it for

In other words, have a strong positioning in your website landing pages and blog content. 

Many agencies don’t have a website. This means that when those who can become clients decide to use ChatGPT, Perplexity AI or Claude to find a service for a problem they have, your agency won’t be listed. For example, let’s say I want to hire a LinkedIn ghostwriter. I head to ChatGPT and type: 

Hi, I am trying to improve my presence on LinkedIn but I really don't have the time. The biggest constraint I have is that I need someone to handle posting and also engage my audience as naturally as i would, but i am not sure i can ever find that person. I need the person to run with my ideas so the posts read like what I will typically write, and are also relevant to my target audience. which services do you think i should consider? who can i reach out to to help. 

ChatGPT begins a query fan out process to search for keywords relevant to my query (that I didn’t explicitly write). For example, I didn't mention that I need a LinkedIn ghostwriter, but it understood. 

See the process it took to find answers for me:

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This means that if there are agency owners (or individuals) who have positioned themselves as LinkedIn ghostwriters, they can be surfaced on ChatGPT, and I can reach out to them. And guess what, here they are:

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Most of the brands recommended here came from the Ohh My Brand website’s blog post about personal branding agencies on LinkedIn. Pete Codes and Media Engine also got direct links to their website. Take a peek at their landing pages:

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Here’s the link ChatGPT referred to for Pete Codes:

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All this is to say you must create landing pages and blog content that shows how your service can help your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This way, AI search engines “recognize” your offerings, and are able to refer you to potential leads in the future. 

To do this: 

1. Write a landing page that shows what you do, who you do it for, and how your service is better than competitors For example: “Scroll-stopping design for marketing teams” is what Teamtown, a graphic design agency, uses:
   
   

They even went ahead to write a simple process of how to get started with them:

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The subscription, submission of requests, and discussion of projects is all powered by ManyRequests, a client portal and project management software for agencies and service businesses. This way, you can create tiered services (using our service catalog feature), and choose how you want to be paid (weekly, monthly, quarterly, or hourly), all of which is automated through Stripe.

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📌 Learn more about and try ManyRequests for free here. 

2. Create other service landing pages to explain more about each variant of the services you offer. For example, magier, a web design agency, has different pages for the different services they offer.
   

Because of this, if I search for a service they offer, I'll get detailed answers on how they can help me. They've optimized for it (through landing pages and regular blogs), which helps AI search engines understand their offerings more. 

By the way, magier uses ManyRequests to handle their customer base. In Maximilian Fleitmann’s words, the co-founder: “With the help of ManyRequests, we grew our customer base to 50+ businesses and are seeing no sign of slowing down. The platform handles our customer service workflows from top to bottom and is fundamental to our daily operations.” 

📌Read more about how magier uses ManyRequests. 

3. Create content about your processes (and how you achieve specific results), so AI search engines can understand your processes better. This can be helpful when a searcher has specific nuances that you won’t ordinarily write in a landing page. 

For example, I asked ChatGPT for the best content marketing agencies, and it mentioned Grow and Convert. I asked to know more about Grow and Convert, and it wrote these:

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These sources link to Grow and Convert’s about page, a blog post, their primary landing page, and third party B2B marketplaces like DesignRush and Clutch. This shows that the more content about your service and positioning on the web, the more information AI search engines have of your agency. 

It also shows that you should get listed on these third-party sites that are important to your niche. This is because AI search engines are more likely to trust you when they see that you’re recognized on these platforms, and your positioning is consistent across platforms. 

2. Create freebies and use email automation tools to generate leads 

I first heard about magier when Maria Ledentsova’s, their marketing manager, made a post about their LinkedIn playbook that got them over $1M in revenue. They also got 10k+ email leads— which is a lot.

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I asked for access, and entered my email address so I could download the playbook. 

I haven’t used the playbook till today(😬😬😬), but they got my email address, and they’ve sent me newsletters about design resources and how their services can help me ever since. I don’t need their services yet, but if I ever need a Webflow or graphic design agency, I will reach out to them:

And that’s because they provided a resource most founders (AKA their ICP) would need, and used an AI email automation tool to add me to a list so they can write to me regularly. 

You can also do the same. How?: 

• Create an eBook, infographic, or any usually gated information targeting a job-to-be-done. This can be a task someone in your target audience needs to do in their day-to-day job. It can be something else— the goal is to create an asset that'll be helpful to your ICP. Like that LinkedIn playbook. 

For example, if you’re a content marketing agency, that valuable thing can be a resource on the type of bottom-of-the-funnel content companies should create to be recommended by AI search engines.  For context, Lashay Lewis, a B2B content manager, writes a lot about how to create BOFU content that gets mentioned in AI search engines. 

She shares LinkedIn posts like this, where marketing leaders and founders can use these tips to optimize their G2 listing:

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This way, when they need her expertise on anything B2B content marketing, they will remember her and likely reach out. 

• Use email automated prospecting platforms to collect their email addresses and segment all emails. You can segment emails based on their role or whether they signed up with their work or personal email. 
• You can then send newsletters about other offers you have or how you’ve helped other companies. Just like magier does regularly.
  

You can use tools like ActiveCampaign, Omnisend or Brevo for this. 

3. Build mini apps to visualize your services 

One of AI lead generation strategies that agencies use today is AI agents. These are “robots” that help you build and create workflows that work independently. 

For example, the founder of a link building agency says he uses AI for lead magnets. If you don’t want to create gated resources to generate leads, you can use a tool like Replit to create a mini app that helps potential clients. Here’s what he did: 

• He used Replit to create a list of websites that SaaS companies can reach out to for a link based on the domain ranking, niche, and overall topic resonance. 
• The Replit mini app queries the agency’s database whenever a prospect searches for opportunities for their company. It provides some potential link building options for them. 
• These prospects can either write to the publishers of these websites to get a referral link themselves or reach out to the agency so they can get the links for them. 

This way, a typical SaaS founder has an idea of the quality of links the link-building agency can get for them. The agency owner also gets to offer value upfront (which may convert to business for them). 

It’s a win-win. 

As another example, this company used Replit to create a service that reviews legal papers in a short time.

If you offer content editing as a service, you can create a Replit interface. Users can upload their piece on it, and it'll populate the screen with common errors (in sentence structure or APA referencing) that they miss while editing their work. 

This way, prospects get a feel of the things you take into consideration when you edit their work, and they also get to rely on your interface for minor edits, at least until they’re able to afford your services. 

4. Use AI and interactive demos to automate outreach and sell 

Agencies and companies use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator or any other email scraping tool to find email addresses of ICPs. 

In our case, you can use a medley of ChatGPT (or Claude AI) and Make.com to personalize and automate emails for these ICPs. If you want to take it a step further, record a demo of what your service is and how it works and add a link to every personalized email. 

Here’s a video of a creator who explained this concept in full detail: 

Here’s how it works: 

Step 1: Find your target audience on LinkedIn 

You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator (or even a tool like Dux-Soup) to find the kinds of people you want to reach. This can be e-commerce founders in the US, or head of marketing at SaaS companies. The more specific, the better. 

If you don’t want to use LinkedIn Sales Nav or Dux-Soup, you can use Google to find leads with public emails. Use this advanced search structure: “site:instagram.com "founder" ("@gmail.com" OR "@outlook.com" OR "@company.com"). Here’s the breakdown: 

• site:instagram.com tells Google to only look through Instagram. 
• "founder" is the role you’re targeting. You can replace this with “ecommerce”, “brand strategist”, “podcast host”, “CTO”, or anything that suits your ICP. 
• ("@gmail.com" OR "@outlook.com") tells Google to return only results where an email address is listed on the profile. 

You can do the same for other sites like LinkedIn (site:linkedin.com), Twitter (site:x.com) or Behance (site:behance.net). It all depends on where you believe your target audience is hanging out. 

You’ll get tens (or hundreds) of results. 

Now copy everything on the result pages and paste them to ChatGPT to format it in a way you can easily dump into Google Sheets. Here’s a full video from a creator about this process:

Step 2: Auto-generate personalized messages using AI 

Once you have a list of prospects, you plug that Google Sheet file into Make.com, which is the automation hub. You can then connect Make.com to Claude AI (or GPT-4) and prompt it to write LinkedIn connection requests (or send emails) that are personalized based on each person’s profile. 

Instead of the usual “Hey, I’d love to connect,” you send something like:

“Hi (name), I saw you're doing xyz for brands in xyz. I recorded a quick demo showing how agencies like yours are using AI to reduce brief turnaround time. Want to take a look?” 

This message feels like you know a bit about the company, which always helps. 

Step 3: Include a link to a personalized demo

You can also add one last spin to it to make it more personalized: a demo video. You can use the software, Supademo, for this part. 

Supademo lets you record a walkthrough of your offer (say, the onboarding process or your Webflow design workflow), and turns it into an interactive experience that feels like a guided tour.

You can customize every demo link with the person’s name and company. So when they click your link, they see their name and company now (as if the demo was specifically created for them). Note: this process is automated, so you don’t have to manually plug it to every video demo. 

With an interactive demo like this, you can walk them through: 

• How your agency works. 
• What problems you solve. 
• What the next steps look like (for someone who’s just hearing about you). 

Step 4: Run the whole system in the background

Once this workflow is set up, it runs 24/7. You can trigger it to send 1-2 LinkedIn connection requests per hour (or emails) to avoid being flagged by LinkedIn and email providers. 

And if someone replies, you’ll know they’ve already watched your pitch, which means they’re probably ready to talk. This way, you have an AI for lead generation on autopilot. 

5. Use a tool like Apollo or Success AI to find more leads 

Another reliable AI lead generation strategy is using AI in sales outreach through automated prospecting tools like Apollo, Success AI, ZoomInfo, etc. 

For example, let’s say you run a Webflow design agency, and want to use Success AI for agency lead gen, you can target any kind of audience you want and it'll help. 

Here’s how it’ll typically work for you: 

1. You’ll build a filtered lead list of ICP: Success AI has a database. You can use their database to find specific people by job title (e.g., “growth manager”) or location, and filter by company size. 
2. Enrich your data automatically: When you gather them, the software fills in missing info like emails, company websites, decision-maker names, etc. You can export this to a CSV or send it straight into your campaigns. 
3. Next, write outreach emails using the AI email assistant: Give it your offer and preferred tone, and it’ll generate short cold emails you can tweak and test. 
4. Send cold emails directly from inside the platform with no limit on how many you can send per day. 
5. Track replies and manage follow-ups: Success AI includes sequence builders with logic-based follow-ups. If someone doesn’t reply, it bumps them with a second message. If they do, you get notified instantly. 

However, as a Redditor puts it, “AI tools are just force multipliers for good strategy. If your messaging sucks or you’re targeting the wrong companies, no tool will save you.” 

This is because you still need to:

• Clearly explain what your agency does and who it’s for (AKA your positioning). 
• Write cold messages that don’t sound robotic. 
• Segment your leads based on the problem they have or what they’re trying to achieve. 
• Check that your email domains are set up properly so your messages don’t go to spam

Once that’s done, a tool like Success AI lets you move fast. You can reach hundreds of qualified leads regularly and scale faster. 

Three philosophy to improve your AI lead generation strategies 

These tips are from some of the things Alex Hormozi, a business owner and consultant who does 200M in ARR, has said in the past: 

1. Create a self sustaining system: 

When you have a system that brings in clients, always ask for reviews and referrals. 

Customers who refer others just brought another business to you (which is good), and those who write reviews gave you more proof to show prospects that your agency really helps. 

You can repeat this process as often as possible: get customers, ask them for reviews and referrals, and grow your business by word-of-mouth. 

You can use ManyRequests to do this easily. After every project, it triggers the feedback and review dashboard, and the client can write good things about you and the team: 

📌 Learn more about ManyRequests here. 

2. Offer free resources people charge for so they’re more likely to buy from you 

I mentioned earlier how the marketing lead at magier offered a LinkedIn playbook to founders on their LinkedIn. If I were a target audience (or needed their services), I would’ve considered working with them because of the way I discovered them. 

This is what Alex Hormozi says. When people see what you offer, they’re more likely to use your playbook, and you can potentially sell your services to them in the future. 

So, focus on offering value first, then they’ll hire you. Compared to if you didn’t offer any type of value at all, and you're pitching them. 

3. Create automation and content that helps you grow

Automated systems are the core of many AI lead generation strategies today. When you have an offering, you need automated prospecting tools like email automations or Zapier/make.com workflows to help you scale fast. 

You also need to create content as regularly as possible to educate your ICP and improve your digital footprint. The more known you are, the higher your chances of being trusted by your ICP. 

Rounding up: Next steps

There are many AI lead generation strategies in 2025 and beyond. The five tips shared here are just a few to contribute to your agency growth strategies. As next steps, focus on creating highly relevant content (on your website and LinkedIn) and use a client portal like ManyRequests to onboard clients into your agency. 

ManyRequests gives you a custom portal where you can have many services listed, automate invoices, and manage your tasks in one place. Clients can also chat with you (and you can exchange messages with your team members). Everything is kept in one easy-to-find place, which makes it user-friendly for agencies of all sizes. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to see how it works.