Wouldn’t it be great if you could ensure your advertising budget is spent only on those who are actively likely to buy from you—and never wasted on people who will never be interested?
This is the premise that reputable growth marketing agencies operate on: deliberately engineering systems to identify and attract high-intent leads while ruthlessly eliminating marketing spend on irrelevant targets. With the help of the Automated Sales Process™ (ASP™) framework, you can do exactly the same.
If you’re still trying to attract prospects by chucking resources at broad-reach marketing and hoping for the best, your playbook is ancient history. Modern advancements in AI, machine learning algorithms, and privacy-first tracking have completely changed the online marketing game, allowing us to achieve exponentially more with far less.
Using the Automated Sales Process™ (ASP™)
The ASP™ is a growth hacking framework. By pairing cutting-edge marketing technology and AI-driven automation with a growth marketer’s mindset of always seeking asymmetric leverage, the ASP™ helps businesses scale faster and more efficiently than ever before.
There are six core components to an ASP™:
- Attraction
- First impression
- Engage & educate
- Follow-up
- Sales technology
- Referrals & retention
Let’s dive into the Attraction component.
How do Growth Marketers Generate Leads Differently?
The Attraction phase is where traditional marketers routinely set their budgets on fire. Historically, lead generation meant casting a massive, indiscriminate net because it simply wasn't possible to isolate high-intent buyers from the masses (e.g., a highway billboard has no ability to discern your target audience from a passing commuter). That era is over. Today's growth marketing and digital advertising landscape is built on AI-driven precision—leveraging algorithmic bidding, dynamic audience clustering, and real-time behavioral data to eliminate wasted ad dollars entirely.
Greater Precision
Today's ad platforms allow us to target ideal buyers with pinpoint, hyper-contextual accuracy. We aren't just selecting basic age and gender demographics anymore; we can deploy LinkedIn Conversation Ads directly into the inboxes of key decision-makers based on their exact job titles and industry behaviors, serve native, algorithmic video ads to niche subcultures on TikTok, or bypass traditional broadcast TV entirely using Connected TV (CTV) to serve interactive video ads directly to households streaming specific niche content.
Immediate Feedback
When our initial hypotheses about a target audience fall flat, modern tooling provides immediate, granular feedback that empowers us to pivot in real time. We no longer wait weeks for a post-mortem on an expensive print or radio campaign. By leveraging AI-targeted testing and dynamic creative optimization (DCO), we can test dozens of hook, copy, and visual variations simultaneously. The algorithms instantly identify which creative resonates with which specific user cluster, automatically shifting budget away from underperforming ads and scaling the winners.
Instead of risking your entire quarterly budget on a single speculative campaign, growth marketers use continuous, rapid micro-experiments to empirically validate messaging and audience fit before scaling spend.
Automation
Automation creates massive leverage by removing friction and manual labor from top-of-funnel attraction. Whether it’s deploying AI agents to instantly qualify inbound chat leads 24/7, setting up algorithmic bidding rules that scale ad spend only when your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is met, or automating lead routing directly into your CRM, technology ensures your attraction engine runs at peak efficiency without constant human babysitting.
While digital channels offer the fastest feedback loops, this doesn't mean growth marketers completely shun offline advertising. Guerrilla tactics and direct mail can still be powerful growth hacks—but they shouldn't be your starting point if you are resource-constrained.
Targeting Your Ideal Buyer
The ASP™ framework relies on precise targeting, which is impossible without a razor-sharp definition of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
A foundational growth marketing practice is creating detailed customer avatars. An avatar goes far beyond surface-level demographics like age, income, and marital status. To build an engine that truly converts, you must uncover psychographic layers: their media consumption habits, niche internet subcultures, daily operational pain points, professional aspirations, and biggest fears. This deep behavioral profile dictates the exact creative angles and channels required to capture their attention.
Reaching Out to Your Ideal Buyer
Once you know precisely *who* you are targeting, you must engineer the *when*, *where*, and *how*:
- Will your avatar encounter your message when they are actively demonstrating high purchase intent, casually seeking education, or passively scrolling for entertainment?
- Where do they actually congregate online? (Top tip: use SparkToro or native platform Audience Insights to discover the exact podcasts, newsletters, and social accounts your audience already pays attention to.)
- What content format commands their attention—short-form vertical video (TikTok/Reels), long-form text (LinkedIn/X threads), interactive CTV ads, or audio?
Every attraction campaign must align precisely with these behavioral realties.
Growth Hacking Tactics to Attract Prospects
While platforms constantly evolve, almost all prospect attraction strategies map to four core pillars:
- Direct: Leads navigate straight to you due to existing brand awareness, word-of-mouth, or dark social sharing.
- Search platforms: Leads discover you while actively seeking solutions (captured via modern SEO, AI search generative optimization, and high-intent PPC).
- Social & discovery platforms: Leads discover you algorithmically via paid social, influencer seeding, or viral short-form video.
- Other: Leads find you through strategic co-marketing, newsletter sponsorships, affiliate networks, and PR (get creative!).
As you orchestrate your attraction strategy, several specific growth hacks can dramatically tilt the odds of success in your favor.
Advertising Arbitrage
Advertising arbitrage is the ultimate expression of the growth hacking mindset: finding mispriced attention to extract maximum results for minimal cost. You are essentially looking for an inefficiency in the advertising market where attention is high but ad competition is temporarily low.
There are two primary avenues for arbitrage:
- Identify fast-growing reach with lagging advertiser adoption: A prime example was Reddit prior to its IPO. While brands ignored it due to perceived community moderation challenges, astute growth marketers tapped into massive, hyper-targeted subreddit communities at rock-bottom CPMs before mainstream ad dollars flooded the platform.
Or:
- Capitalize on established reach experiencing a sudden drop in advertiser demand: Look at X (formerly Twitter) post-Musk acquisition. As traditional legacy brands pulled budgets over brand-safety concerns, ad auction competition plummeted. This created an incredible arbitrage window for agile, thick-skinned B2B and DTC brands to capture high-value user attention at a fraction of historical CPMs.
Successful arbitrage requires constantly monitoring the digital landscape to find these fleeting intersections of under-monetized supply and consumer attention.
Partner Content and Commerce
Borrowing existing, high-trust audiences is one of the fastest ways to attract qualified leads without relying solely on ad auctions. Identify non-competing media brands, industry newsletters, or complementary SaaS platforms that share your exact ICP. Once identified, structure an asymmetric, win-win proposition: Will you co-host a data-driven webinar? Execute a cross-promotional email blast? Establish a recurring revenue-sharing arrangement? Or bundle your software solutions? Strategic partnerships allow you to bypass the cold-advertising phase entirely by leveraging borrowed credibility.
Let Prospects Qualify Themselves
The goal of growth marketing is rapid scaling with zero wastage—which means you shouldn't be afraid to deliberately repel the wrong people. Use polarizing, highly specific ad copy and creative that acts as a filter. If your software is built specifically for enterprise CFOs, explicitly call out "For Enterprise Finance Teams" in your video hooks and text headers. Just as a high-end steakhouse doesn't waste resources attempting to cater to vegetarians, your attraction engine should unapologetically alienate low-intent browsers so 100% of your budget and sales pipeline is focused on prospects who are actually built to convert.
Start Attracting Your Ideal Customers
Of course, attracting high-intent leads is only the beginning. Once you’ve captured their attention, you have mere seconds to deliver a flawless first impression that seamlessly transitions them into your funnel.
Our article on First Impression breaks down the exact frameworks required to convert raw attention into active pipeline.
Before you dive into the next phase, here is a challenge to test your growth marketing instincts: How would you acquire your next 100 high-value customers in the shortest amount of time with a literal zero-dollar ad budget?
See what strategic shortcuts you can map out. If you want to benchmark your strategy or need an engine built for your brand, contact Deviate Labs. As a premiere US growth marketing agency that has scaled companies ranging from bootstrapped startups to billion-dollar enterprises across diverse verticals, we’ve executed these frameworks countless times to engineer extraordinary growth.