Riding the next wave of marketing with conversations

Do you know how important it is to open the lines of communication with your leads as soon as possible? According to research found in the 2017 State of Conversational Marketing Report, responding within the first five minutes of a lead reaching out to you is crucial to engaging with them.

Any later than five minutes and your prospects of getting in touch with that lead decrease tenfold. After 10 minutes, the odds of qualifying that lead reduce by an enormous 400%.

For those who follow our blog and know what we’re all about on social media, you may expect us to point you in the direction of inbound marketing and, what we often underline, are its incredible marketing advantages when it comes to nurturing prospects.

As amazing as inbound can be in a lead generation and management sense, for a lot of companies, that five-minute window can be asking a bit much, especially for those with serious growth ambitions.

You only have so many people in your sales and marketing teams, and though automation may be doing a great job at qualifying leads and giving your teams more time, a great inbound campaign naturally generating a higher volume of leads may mean that not every single one can be attended to as quickly as they should be – certainly not, perhaps, within a window of five minutes.

It can be done though if you complement your inbound marketing campaign with a strong conversational marketing strategy that aligns your sales and marketing efforts and deals with your most valuable leads in the time frames they deserve.

Read more: Our guide to conversational marketing

Instantly communicate with leads through conversational marketing

The 2017 State of Conversational Marketing Report was produced by experts in the chat marketing field, Drift, alongside consumer insight specialists Clearbit.

It’s not the only interesting statistic to focus on; the report also underlines how nine out of 10 consumers they surveyed across Europe, North America and Asia said they wanted to have real-time conversations/messages with business. 66% of those surveyed also say they prefer messaging over any other form of communications when talking to a commercial entity.

Chat marketing’s flexibility, instantaneous approach and the way it handles and nurtures leads is key to its success. Here’s how it can work for you, too.

Read more: Our guide to conversational marketing

Stick with inbound, but focus on chat marketing

There’s an interesting podcast featuring the VP of marketing at Drift, Dave Gerhardt. Published last year, he talks of his shock when he learned that the company was going to remove lead forms entirely and look to convert new leads through their own product. 40,000 sign ups later and it was a decision that looks justified for them.

Our own experiences as a Drift partner lend weight to the claim that it can be better for a business to focus their efforts on chat marketing, manage and even qualify their leads through chatbots. However, despite the above successes, that’s not a call to arms to ditch the inbound philosophy. In fact, an inbound approach combined with conversational marketing could work wonders for your overall growth ambitions.

According to HubSpot, for instance, 68% of inbound organisations say their marketing strategy is effective. 45.8% of consumers would rather communicate with a business through a messaging app than email according to ubisend, though, while 34% of executives say the time they freed up using chatbots allows them to focus on deep thinking and creating, says research from PwC.

The rise of chat marketing and the introduction of chatbots to the marketing game shouldn’t be something to worry about. Ditching lead forms sounds a bit extreme and scary, after all. We firmly believe chatbots are the next stage of an already incredible inbound marketing process though; we’ve seen the proof in the pudding as the UK’s only Drift partner, after all…

And the sooner you learn more about the benefits, about how conversational marketing works, how it instantly connects your sales and marketing teams to the most profitable leads and complements campaigns with a solid, strong inbound marketing strategy, the sooner you can begin to have conversations with the people who matter to you most.