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I recently attended Baltimore’s Marketo User Group’s monthly meeting which featured a topic that appears to be gaining traction in the marketing world – conversational marketing. It was presented by Justin Bartels from a company called Drift, that is working to make it easy for all businesses to adopt conversational marketing.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is “the fastest way to move buyers through your marketing and sales funnels through the power of real-time conversations.”
In essence, conversational marketing seeks to remove the “friction and frustration” apparent in existing sales and marketing funnels so ready-to-buy consumers are connected with the people in an organization that can sell them the product or service.
What is “friction and frustration”?
According to Justin and Drift, the “friction and frustration” in existing sales and marketing funnels comes when your potential buyers aren’t able to get what they want from your business without waiting. Whether it’s waiting for a callback from a salesperson, or an email with a quote, or whatever intermediary step that occurs.
The idea is that these intermediary steps are all preventing your customer from purchasing your product.
Enter Conversational Marketing
With conversational marketing, the goal is to remove the waiting and give your customers the information they’re after through the use of AI powered chatbots.
Chatbots are becoming increasingly common and it’s no surprise that harnessing these helpful assistants can increase business, as long as they’re actually helpful. Chatbots allow you to build conversation flows for your customers, tailored to where they are in your respective sales funnel, connecting them to the right information or right action based on their position.
Response Labs has used Olark and other similar products in the past and seen success by acquiring more qualified leads and closing more sales.
Thoughts
From a marketing standpoint, I think conversational marketing is moving the B2B industry in the right direction. Every buyer in a business is a consumer outside of their job, so mirroring the buying experiences they have as consumers – being able to get what they want when they want it – will definitely help businesses perform better. By implementing this into their customer journey, companies are able to fill-in any gaps that there may have been in the customer lifecycle.
Ready to get started with conversational marketing? Contact Response Labs today.
