Chatbots and Conversational Marketing: The B2B Marketer's Guide

How to take advantage of chatbots to drive conversion and generate sales-ready leads.

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B2B marketing is all about communication and yet, so much of what's published really lacks the personal touch to 'cut through the noise'.

With conversational marketing, you can overcome this and communicate with your prospects naturally in a way that they find engaging and, most importantly, human.

By adding a responsive channel like a chatbot to your marketing mix, you can tap into a new world of conversational opportunities and deliver added value to your prospects at every stage of their customer journey.

Let's explore how conversational marketing and chatbots could help your business.

WHAT IS CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING?

To put it simply, it's the use of chatbots to engage with your prospects in a conversational manner and push them through the marketing funnel.

Instead of navigating your website, filling out forms and stumbling across the content they need, prospects engage with a chatbot that guides them until they’re ready to engage with someone on your sales team.

Person Typing with a Quote on Consumer Communication

And conversational marketing can help with sales engagement too. By giving prospects direct access to a sales person's calendar, prospects can book their own meetings or demos, through the chatbot with ease.

Consider conversational marketing as a facilitator, designed to help your prospects help themselves in a way that's both friendly and familiar.

WHAT ARE CHATBOTS?

In a nutshell, chatbots are AI-powered tools that use logic and machine language learning to talk with prospects on your website like a human, but without a human behind it.

A bit complicated, we know, but in reality they’re pretty easy to get along with. Think of them like your own 24/7 concierge that lives on your website with the goal of helping your visitors.

Chatbots communicate using conversational language, but instead of just talking at you, chatbots also offer the opportunity to interact with you and control the conversation.

Metal Cogs with a Quote about Chatbot Automation

THE BENEFITS OF CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING AND CHATBOTS

Chatbots Help B2B Businesses Scale

Offering your prospects the chance to talk and interact with an unmanned brand representative, chatbots can help them progress through each stage of the buyer journey.

Because chatbots are fully automated, your resources are never stretched as the role of humans only extends to the setup. So, whether you're chatting to 1 prospect or 200, you still have the resources necessary to deliver a personalised conversational experience to each and every one of them.

Conversational Marketing Humanises and Streamlines the Customer Journey

Chatbots don’t just stop at conversations either, they can do so much more, in fact with the right plug-ins, your chatbot can even go as far as capturing your prospect’s data and allowing them to book sales meetings directly into your calendar.

You can set qualifying questions in your chatbot too, to ensure your calendar is only accessed by prospects offering genuine potential.

Two Screen Views of a Person Messaging Litmus Bot

THE DRIFT CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING FRAMEWORK

Introducing Conversational Framework: 'Engage, Understand, Recommend'.

As a Drift Partner, we align with their strategic direction on all things conversational marketing.

Drift Conversational Framework of Engage Understand and Recommend

Drift's Framework explains how you can take full advantage by developing a strategy that naturally drives engagement and leads. Their strategy is broken down into 3 stages: Engage, Understand and Recommendation.

Engage

Engage is all about incorporating chatbots into your website to help your prospects with the challenges they're experiencing. These chatbots can help prospects navigate their way through your website, promote content that may be of value and capture data. This approach eliminates the need for forms, and makes lead capture much more natural as it's just a small part of the bigger conversation.

Understand

Understand is all about determining the relevance of a lead and responding accordingly. If you have a red-hot prospect in your pipeline who really wants to make a purchase, you need to act fast!

You have 5 minutes to respond to a prospect or the odds of qualifying that lead drops drastically. Being where your prospects are when they want you to be is now more than half the battle, and chatbots can help you do that just that.

Red and Purple Image with a Quote about Chatbots

Recommendation

Finally in the Recommendation stage, your chatbot needs to help the prospect take action and move onto the next step of their journey. This may be done by sharing content, booking a meeting or pointing them towards some helpful pages.

Armed with the right questions, your chatbot can effectively qualify leads and alert you in real-time when there’s a hot-lead. At that point, you can jump in and initiate live chat directly through the chatbot, to engage with the prospect.

Man in a Coat Looking out to Sea with a Quote about Chatbots

MacBook Showing a Digital Litmus Presentation Slide about Chatbots and Conversational Marketing

Want to learn more?

Download our free guide to Chatbots & Conversational Marketing for B2B Marketers and learn how to develop a chatbot strategy that gives your prospects what they need, when they need it.

CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING IN ACTION: CASE STUDY

You know what they say, 'seeing is believing' and we agree. Find out how in 6 months we generated over 340 sales qualified leads and $1M influenced pipeline for GeoSLAM using conversational marketing and chatbots.

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