Using chatbots on your website and getting your sales people into conversations with buyers is a powerful and easy tool you can use as an extra to what you're already doing with your marketing.
Most people use websites now to do research on problems they're having and to look for solutions.
Chatbots are a great way of helping your website visitors find what they're looking for, whether it's an answer to a simple FAQ, to register for an event, to point them in the direction of a useful download, or to signal that they're ready to speak with sales.
There's a number of conversational tools you can use on your site like Drift and HubSpot, which provide the chance to get started with conversational marketing for free, before making any investments.
We'll let Drift take over at this point and offer their take on why you should consider Conversational Marketing as part of your inbound marketing and sales strategy.
"Rather than forcing high intent prospects to jump through hoops to talk to your team, make it easy by qualifying your traffic in real-time. You can layer chatbots onto any website, no matter how bad it is. In fact, if your website is bad, conversational marketing can be more beneficial as a means of helping users navigate to the information they need and get their questions answered."
Sounds great right?
Conversational Marketing is also an effective way of humanising your sales and marketing strategy.
Why use Conversational Marketing
Chatbots make it much easier for prospects to find their way around your website, find answers to the questions they have, and engage prospects with your sales team instantly.
One of the biggest problems websites have is that they require visitors to navigate around them looking for answers. Using chatbots, you can ask a couple of simple questions and instantly point people in the right direction.
Also, chatbots can be useful in the lead nurturing process.
Here's 10 more reasons you should consider a conversational marketing strategy
Aligning Conversational marketing with the buyer journey
Asking people to fill out forms on landing pages can be annoying (especially as most of the content people download isn't helpful).
Instead, they can use your conversational tool to tell you what they're looking for, and then be sent to the information without giving their information up.
If they don't convert straight away, your chatbot can continue to serve up content useful to them if they come back to your site at a later date.
It means you stay engaged with prospects, and they get extra value every time they come to your site rather than having to find their own way around.
But don't forget that you should align your Conversational strategy with your buyer lifecycle journey and create conversations based on where your prospects are in that journey.
There's no point pointing prospects still in the awareness phase of researching and buying towards a technical piece of content that won't be useful, for instance.
This includes trying to point prospects towards content that they have to submit details to get, when they aren't ready.
If it sounds like conversational and inbound marketing are a good fit for each other, it's because they are.
How to set up Conversational Marketing
- Design your conversations and build your bots
To design your conversations there's a couple of things you should consider.
First, who will the bot be engaging with? For this you should lean on your buyer persona and targeting information.
Second, what page or pages will the bots be sitting on?
You should have different bots for different pages because the information you give will likely be different.
For instance, a conversation on a home page will be different to one on a pricing page.
To decide which page to put your bots on, use your most high value/ high traffic pages first and then build out more bots in the future.
Third, where did the person come from to get to your bot? Did they come from one of your other web pages or via a search engine or other page. This will again change how the conversation is built
Once you've got your conversations designed and you know which pages the bots are going on, you need to install the chatbot widget onto the relevant web pages.
Make sure you spend some time training your sales and support teams on how to use the tools effectively. It might take some practice but chatbots can't just be turned on and then left. They take ongoing development. Plus, it's not going to put you in a good light if people use your bots and get no replies.
Have a read of this blog for more information on designing chatbots that will engage and convert leads on your website.
Measuring Conversational Marketing
As with everything you do within your inbound marketing and sales you should be measuring everything (especially quick win metrics) so that you can figure out what is going well, so you can do more of it, and what is going wrong so that you can either fix it, or stop doing it and focus your efforts elsewhere.
There's a couple of key things to keep an eye on:
Total and new users - Obviously you want to be keeping an eye on whether anyone is actually using your chatbots. If you're not getting any users then you need to revisit your tactics, make sure you've got bots on the right pages and that they're working. If you have people continually coming back and not moving further down the lead stages then you're bots aren't doing the job they're meant to.
Engagement and conversion rates - How are people engaging with your bots? If you're bots are sitting on a page and no-one is using them, then they're not useful. It could be that you've put them on bad pages, or that your copy isn't engaging enough. Similarly if your bots aren't converting people then you need to revisit them.
Using Conversational Marketing can be an effective quick win tactic to use within your inbound marketing and sales and help get your lead generation moving at a much quicker pace.
They're not just a quick win though and if you monitor conversations and improve them over time, you'll find conversational marketing an effective long term strategy as well.
