Marketing teams spend a huge amount of time and money to find out what motivates their prospective customers.
When a prospect finally lands on your website, those efforts have reached a critical moment: you have their attention, and it’s time to build a relationship. But too many campaigns are still using an approach that treats all visitors the same.
The best way to unearth key buying signals from your audience? Start a conversation. Online chat tools are a cornerstone of this approach, more broadly known as conversational marketing.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is an audience engagement channel that lets buyers and sellers communicate in real time, using tools such as live chat, chatbots, voice bots, and audio conversations. With conversational marketing, sellers and buyers can exchange content and critical information at the right moment, accelerating the customer journey.
Conversational marketing channels have three main characteristics:
- One-to-one engagement: A conversation between the buyer and the seller.
- Real-time communication: Messages that are sent and received instantly.
- Buyer-controlled: The buyer has complete autonomy during the entire experience.
By understanding a prospect’s tone, language, and approach, marketing and sales teams can better grasp where the prospect is in their buying journey and deliver a tailored experience.
Analysts at Forrester Research call this approach content contextualization, noting that “marketers must be able to respond to customers in real time with content that motivates the next best action.”
Conversational Marketing: Aligning With Trends in Buyer Behavior
Buyers today have the power to control the conversation from start to finish, including when, where, and how they communicate with sellers. When making a purchase, they typically want all interactions to occur on their terms.
It’s another trend that started in the consumer marketing world and quickly migrated to B2B contexts. According to Forrester, B2B marketers and sellers are now responding by “finding new ways of leveraging conversational interactions to attract, engage, and enable buyers.”
If you’re one of those B2B marketers looking for leverage, here’s what you should know about conversational marketing and how it could enhance your demand generation strategy.
Conversational Marketing in Your Demand Generation Strategy
Research shows that around half of Millennial customers would rather chat with businesses to solve problems more quickly. That’s probably because conversational marketing tools, like website chat, skip the typical array of multiple form fields and gates that buyers have to navigate.
In particular, conversational marketing helps you:
- Engage buyers early in the process
- Produce high-quality leads
- Accelerate the sales cycle
Because conversational marketing allows your sales team to connect faster with better qualified prospects, it leads to quicker conversions. According to Salesforce, close rates are three times higher if a sales development rep can schedule a meeting with a lead the same day.
Conversational Marketing in Your Tech Stack
Introducing a new platform to your marketing technology mix is not a simple answer. It can add complexity to your tech stack and make it more difficult for your team to manage their resources. Each additional platform also increases privacy risks and makes data orchestration more complicated. The goal is simplicity: finding a solution that centralizes or consolidates your tech stack.
Chat technology can identify high-value accounts based on your existing integration data, then personalize their website experience with the right content, pages, and most importantly, the right agent to handle their needs.
ZoomInfo Chat allows you to do all this with seamless integration and centralized tech stack abilities. Having a centralized tech solution leads to easier management, less training and resource allocation, and most of all a better user experience for your website visitors.
It makes it easier for your SDRs to access all the data on your contacts, view previous conversations to better target them in future interactions, and support customers faster. All the vital information is in one place, making your process smoother and smarter for all your website visitor interactions.
Must-Have Features for Your Conversational Marketing Engine
A reliable conversational marketing system can bridge the gap between your sales and marketing teams in real time. In order to build this healthy, scalable system, you need certain features:
- Visitor deanonymization: Deanonymize 80 percent of visitors on your website and get a good picture of who they are and what they’re looking for.
- Collaboration tools integration (Slack & MS Teams): Increase your team’s speed to lead by connecting with prospects right within the collaboration tool of your choice.
- Form-based acceleration and advanced chat routing: As soon as your prospect fills out the form and clicks”‘submit,” they can be connected with a sales rep on chat.
- ROI analytics: Get a high-level overview of chat performances, such as the conversion rates and pipeline created, in order to continuously optimize results.
- Audience building and personalization: Pull contextual data from your integrated martech tools and leverage it to build out and target your audience to successfully convert prospects into customers.
- Integration with martech tools: Seamlessly integrate your existing workflows and tools to keep real-time data flowing into your CRM and MAP.
- A/B testing: Experiment with various chat greetings, conversation starters and conversation flows to see what is actually driving conversations with your prospects.
- Automated meeting scheduler: Prospects can skip the forms, emails, and barriers and schedule meetings with available SDRs at the time that best suits their needs.
- 24/7 support program: Give prospects access to live agents during office hours and 24/7 chatbot support when agents are offline.
- Chat templates: Use ready-to-go templates that have the best conversion rates.
- Onboarding and implementation: There’s a solid customer success plan included with the platform to assist with all your onboarding process, implementation, and configuration needs.
- Supports account-based marketing (ABM): The right chat platform will enhance your ABM initiatives with the right integration tools and the right support from the team.
Bring Intelligence to the Conversation with ZoomInfo Chat
Schedule a demo of ZoomInfo Chat to experience a website chat solution that engages visitors and connects their conversations with your entire organization.