Conversational Marketing

What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is a customer-led marketing strategy that uses technologies like chatbots, SMS, live chat, and software messaging applications to engage prospects in dialog that supports the customer journey.

In today’s technological environment, a growing number of prospects are most comfortable interacting with brands over text message, live chat, or on social media. A conversational marketing approach leverages one or more of these channels to start conversations with prospects, identify their needs and interests, and support their customer journey by directing them to the right resources (e.g. articles and blogs, webinars, sales representatives, etc.) at the right time.

Conversational marketing humanizes customer engagements, encouraging prospects to ask questions and share valuable information that B2B SaaS companies can use to qualify them for the next stage in the sales funnel and deliver a more personalized buying experience.

Conversational marketing helps B2B SaaS companies identify high-intent prospects much earlier in the customer journey, resulting in a shortened sales cycle, improved sales-qualified lead (SQL) generation, and increased revenue.

How Does Conversational Marketing Work?

Conversational marketing is a strategy that focuses on leveraging technology to create valuable one-to-one customer interactions at scale. The most successful B2B SaaS companies implement conversational marketing using a combination of AI-driven conversational marketing chatbots like Drift and live human sales representatives.

Conversational marketing follows a simple framework that works together with your existing marketing and sales funnel.

The conversational framework has three steps:

1. Engage – Prospects don’t want to fill out a lead capture form and wait hours or days for a business to reply – they want to engage with businesses on their own terms, through their preferred channels, and when it’s convenient for them. Conversational marketing chatbots and live chat applications provide a way for buyers to start real-time conversations with your sales team.
2. Understand – Understanding is the most important part of the conversational framework. A conversational marketing approach strives to build trust with prospects, then ask them qualifying questions to understand their goals, interests, motivations, intent, customer profile, and other factors that can help the business deliver personalized recommendations and a tailored customer experience.
3. Recommend – The final part of the conversational marketing framework is to create value for the prospect by recommending a resource, a service, or a course of action that makes sense for their specific goals and intent.

Conversational marketing chatbots like Drift can be deployed on a website and configured via a rules-based programming approach to automate the conversational framework at scale.

Businesses can use Drift to:

• Start conversations with prospects,
• Ask prospects qualifying questions to determine goals, intent, and customer fit,
• Direct prospects to relevant information and resources on their website,
• Capture contact information from prospects (lead generation),
• Connect prospects to a live chat with a human sales rep, or
• Help prospects book an appointment with a human sales rep.

What are the Benefits of Conversational Marketing?

Learn More About Your Prospects

Conversational marketing helps you engage prospects early in the marketing funnel with qualifying questions that help you understand their goals, challenges, and intentions when engaging with your business. This empowers you to deliver a personalized sales experience that emphasizes their unique challenges and desired outcomes with your product.

Shorten the Sales Process

For most B2B SaaS companies, a conversation has to happen before a sale can be finalized. Conversational marketing gives prospects the ability to initiate that conversation on their terms and take the fast-lane through your sales/marketing funnel. Identifying high-intent leads early in the customer journey shortens the sales process and accelerates revenue growth.

Humanize the Customer Journey

Digital marketing channels like PPC advertising and organic search have empowered businesses to deliver targeted, personalized messaging and advertisements to a global audience – but the buying experience can still feel very impersonal and uni-directional.

Conversational marketing humanizes the customer journey with a dialogue-driven approach that feels more natural to prospects and facilitates two-way engagement. As a result, conversational marketing helps you build trust with prospects so you can learn more about them and decide if they’re a good fit for the solutions you provide.

Accelerate SQL Generation

From a SaaS revenue standpoint, the best thing about conversational marketing is that it creates a fast-lane through your sales/marketing funnel that allows highly qualified, high-intent prospects to engage with your business, get qualified in minutes, and start talking to your sales team on the same day.

Faster SQL generation accelerates your revenue growth while driving down CAC and skyrocketing your sales efficiency.

Conversational Marketing Drives B2B SaaS Revenue

Conversational marketing is a critical component of our Marketing Operations strategy at Directive. As part of our Customer Generation methodology, we help our B2B SaaS clients deploy and configure the Drift conversational marketing chatbot to drive customer engagement and SQL generation.

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