B2B Conversational Marketing Tips

Whether you’ve accepted it or not, conversational marketing is here to stay. As such, I thought I’d pave the way for you by giving you my B2B conversational marketing tips.

B2B marketers are required to deliver hot warm leads to their sales counterparts on a regular basis, but right now most landing pages are only converting between 2.6 - 5%. Those that have added lead bots to their landing pages have seen up to 400% increases in those figures.

If you know what your attrition rates are in your funnels

No. of Visitors it takes to convert (fill in a form) to those that turn into real conversations and those that convert into paying customers

Then you can work out what potential there is in conversational marketing yourself (before you talk to me) within your own inbound marketing funnels.

How to start conversational marketing

Firstly, to start conversational marketing, you have to already be active in some form of inbound marketing activity. Inbound marketing is a cohesive strategy bringing content, email, social media and paid search together. The ultimate ambition of this type of strategy is to position your business as an authority in its industry and create trust amongst those digesting your content.

By doing this, you create a website or landing page traffic giving your business the opportunity to create leads.

Adding your lead bot

Now you are generating traffic to your website and landing pages, you can add your lead bot. Conversational marketing isn’t controlled by AI-led or NLP bots, so don’t make that assumption. They can be, but that’s a bigger a more complex investment than most businesses actually need at this point in time.

Conversational marketing on our platform is about closing your enquiries and qualifying them for your sales team. It’s a very structured but natural way for website visitors to interact with your brand or business, pre-sales. Once your conversational marketing playbooks are written and implemented, you will see increases in your leads and often a reduction in sales cycles.

My B2B Conversational Marketing Tips

Conversational Marketing Tip #1 - Just Start

The first tip I can offer is to simply install the lead bot. Set up a basic playbook through the interface and just get going. Implementing a lead bot is a simple enough process, and as you see engagement it will inspire you to delve deeper with a comprehensive strategy.

Conversational Marketing Tip #2 - Segment

My second tip is to segment. Segmentation by product or service type will enable your team to be clear on the goals of each conversational marketing playbook you create. This will ensure that you do not waste time and keep the message flow on point.

Those that see the best returns on their investment work on a playbook by playbook strategy with constant iteration and A + B testing.

Conversational Marketing Tip #3 - Use Personas

Employ your buyer personas. Buyer personas help you build effective sales and marketing funnels. To employ b2b conversational marketing successfully, do the groundwork. No success is generated without fully understanding who your customer is, what drives them and what their typical pain points are.

Remember, buying decisions are far more emotional than logical. If you recognise typical points of pain within the industries you supply, or that your product or solution solves, then ask those questions in your playbook.

However, you can’t apply this winning formula if you simply ignore the buyer persona development work. Check out our great buyer persona ebook here.

Conversational Marketing Tip #4 - Run Kick-Off Workshops

Engage your sales and marketing teams when creating playbooks. Remove as much opportunity for a suggestion to come into play. Gut feelings and assumption, usually corrupt results in marketing funnels as ego gets in the way.

I cannot count the number of times people dismiss collaboration and go it alone. We always need alternate perspectives when creating funnels and content and conversational marketing playbooks are no different. Try running a conversational marketing workshop to get the greatest success.

Conversational Marketing Tip #5 - Maximise use of the platform's features

Use the full suite of tools. Our platform doesn’t just provide the lead bot and playbook functionality. It offers the opportunity to apply account-based marketing and set up playbooks that recognise return visitors, personalising the conversational experience.

We have a live view. This allows you to sit and watch what pages currently have traffic on them and to initiate cold conversations.

Ensure you link the lead bot to your sales teams diaries and your company CRM. This helps the recognition process for return visitors.

Make it a standard procedure that all sales teams have the mobile chat app installed on their mobile phones so that they can always catch a warm lead or prospect.

Utilise the online and offline features and ensure you change narratives to capture intent and to bring personality through to the conversation.

Updated at this point by merging another post, 10 quick conversational marketing tips.

The use of conversational marketing has been steadily rising amongst both B2B and B2C business groups. The applied use of leadbots to accelerate lead qualification isn’t a new revolution. The capacity to do this has been around for some time. However, what we are seeing is a reluctance to commit from many of the ideal adopters. This would be driven by an assumption of machine learning solutions. Drift most certainly isn't one of those.

Driving website traffic

If you are already driving traffic to your website or landing page then adding a leadbot is going to give you results. This isn’t an unproven technology. There are huge numbers of chatbot providers in the marketplace, but few offer the capacity that Drift does.

Companies that adopt leadbots qualify more, book more meetings, consultations and reduce sales cycles.

10 quick conversational marketing tips

As such, please let me list 10 quick conversational marketing tips that can give you food for thought and possibly change your mind.

The advantage of the chat app

Here are my quick conversational marketing tips. Firstly, having a mobile chat app is perfect for the mobile workforce. If your team is remote or travelling around a lot, the mobile app enables them to stay on top of the conversations in real-time. This vastly reduces the attrition rates within your marketing and sales funnels.

The notifications let your team know when there is engagement with the chatbot and they can then interact as they deem fit. This brings the relationship with your customers and leads closer and more natural.

No more filling in forms and waiting for email nurturing campaigns to lead a prospect to the bottom of the funnel. Capture intent and improve conversions with conversation.

image copyright Drift.com

Amplify your sales agents performance

Let’s face it, we’re all in business or employment to make money. Sales agents are finding it harder to close leads as more and more businesses go inbound and produce content to attract prospects. This congested marketplace is making it harder for your funnels to perform, often only converting at around 3-4% (landing page forms).

Businesses that have adopted conversational marketing are seeing huge increases in sales, qualification, and brand interaction.

Drift for sales personnel

Sales personnel can have one conversation at one time and adding a leadbot to support that activity can keep adding a lead qualification to their call and consultation lists.

Make it easy for your consumer

Understand the emotive decision that customers make when it comes to interaction. We all like to talk, but often we don’t like making the call, that’s why forms used to work so well. Now we are moving back to conversations, hence the rise in AI chatbots, messenger bots, and apps.

Conversations make the world go around and our job as marketers and sales personnel is to facilitate the needs of the customer. Chat app usage proves the need as the chart above shows, your company needs to provide the means.

Keep it easy and direct

Focus on your lead bot playbook. Ensure the conversation is short and direct. Your ambition is to lead the prospect to the place they want to get to with minimal fuss. Leadbots shouldn’t ask numerous questions but should qualify your conversationalist.

Ensure that when your salesperson takes over, that the lead is ready to speak about what he or she was looking for. In our case, we ask

“Can I ask, is it marketing, sales, a website or chatbot development you need help with?”

As soon as the prospect has chosen their requirement (all options as buttons) we quickly qualify them with direct further questions (on the basis they picked marketing)

“What does your current marketing and sales toolkit look like?”

They are free to type their response which should be all of their marketing technology, then

“How sophisticated of a marketing strategy would you say you have?”

And we provide buttons basic, intermediate, and advanced,  once we have an answer, we want to get the prospect fully qualified

“Excellent, we can surely help you out! Do you want to chat with a person to learn more?”

Then we offer them the chance to book an appointment when we are offline or speak to a human when online (some personality added)

So you see, your prospect doesn’t want a drawn-out conversation with numerous questions, they simply want to get where they need to be.

Bring your brands personality to your bot

As you noted in my last conversational marketing tip, I mentioned adding some personality to your bot. Don’t be eccentric but we can appreciate the humour if it’s light-hearted and of course appropriate.

Every brand or business has a tone of voice that can be reflected in the conversational marketing playbooks you produce for your leadbot. So don’t be afraid to keep developing that brand tone of voice through your leadbots personality.

Ensure you route conversations to the team

The 5th of my quick conversational marketing tips. This is a simple but worthwhile note to remember. Avoid simply capturing email addresses or telephone numbers where possible, and try to route conversations to a salesperson or their calendar.

The chatbot is not there to simply replace forms in a like-for-like manner but to further engage your website visitors in a chat focused way. Therefore don’t be shy of asking the question to connect the visitor to a salesperson or team member.

Adopt multiple playbooks

The key to conversational marketing success is multiple playbooks. You cannot approach this form of marketing in a one size fits all manner and expect success.

Much like any form of marketing you need to segment by persona and create conversational marketing playbooks for each product and service you offer. You should also include a help channel.

Having separate playbooks allows you to further qualify the prospect in more detail with contextual questions. You can then serve key content in the conversation to help show more authority around your service or products.

Things like ebooks and whitepapers can be easily slipped via hyperlink into the conversation for further success.

Kick-off for free to convince your boss

Did you know that you can kick off with a lead bot for free? If your boss is suspect on the value of conversational marketing why not take the initiative and get one going by yourself? Simply sign up for your free chatbot and add it to your company website and when the conversations start happening you can ask your boss to go fully conversational.

Use it with your inbound activity

My penultimate conversational marketing tips. I say this in nearly every post, just so I can be sure that you understand this is a supplement to your inbound activity, not something to replace it. All websites and landing pages need traffic for your lead bots to make sense having, so keep up the good inbound work.

Think about funnels as you go. Leadbots should be designed to complement in-situ funnels but aim to qualify your website visitors in vastly shorter timescales. Therefore padding out an existing funnel with good traffic and adding an intent lead conversation solution must make sense, surely?

Keep on experimenting

Finally, the last of my quick conversational marketing tips, keep on experimenting. It’s vastly important that conversational marketing playbooks that aren’t getting much play are revisited to change the conversation. Those that are getting good traffic, but the conversation engagement is low, take another look. Things to consider are:

• Check for consistency in where prospects check out of the conversation
• Try adding multiple playbooks and get the conversation into a funnel as soon as possible if it’s too generic
• Add content into your conversation
• Also, release premium content in exchange for a name and email address. But keep the conversation going!
• Test the "refer to a salesperson" timing, move it up the conversation and test for results over a week or two and compare to the previous week
• Ensure you have separate playbooks for your blog categories. Try and ramp up sales conversations at these entry points. Remember not everybody is looking to download an offer

So there it is my 10 quick conversational marketing tips. Designed to help you out at any stage of the lead bot implementation. Like any form of marketing and lead generation, get straight to the point. Don’t ask too many questions and lead your prospect to the finish line.

Work with a Drift partner

As a drift partner, we are experienced in helping companies like yours add lead bots to the marketing stack, if you would like to see what a lead bot looks like on your website, talk to the BIAS BOT and request that, you don’t even need to speak to us if you don’t want to. Simply leave your name, email, and website address and leave the rest to us.

For more quality content on lead bots, chatbots, and conversational marketing, check out our blog here and why not leave us some comments, it would be great to find out if we could answer more questions for you.