Using chat marketing to grow your B2B prospects

Could your sales and marketing teams be doing more to attract better B2B prospects for your business to work with?

For many CEOs and senior managers looking to accelerate their growth and work with new commercial partners, how they identify and approach prospects is key to reaching the next level. Statistics show that their teams may not be on the same wavelength as them, though…

According to Think With Google, 71% of B2B researchers start their planning with little more than a generic web search. They also highlight how researchers also perform as little as 12 searches on average before engaging with a specific brand’s site.

While there isn’t really any specific amount of searches you should or should not be making, those statistics seem to suggest that a lot more planning could be done before teams reach out to prospects; certainly if you’re targeting much bigger fish as part of an ABM strategy.

Similarly, HubSpot points out that B2B companies that blog more than 11 times a month have almost three times more traffic than those who don’t blog or only do so once a month.

Holding back on your content production strategy is one of the worst things you can do when you’re looking to attract key decision makers though, with 96% of B2B buyers wanting content with more input from industry thought leaders.

For those that feel they’re lagging and can do better when attracting B2B prospects, inbound marketing is one of the best ways to shape up. For those looking to supercharge their growth, though, there’s little better than throwing conversational marketing into the mix.

Read more: Our guide to conversational marketing

The incredible benefits of conversational marketing for B2B

For those who have never heard of it, conversational marketing (also known as chat marketing) is a fantastic way to interact with prospects and leads by starting conversations with them as soon as they visit your site with a chat interface.

The benefits of doing chat marketing properly can be astounding. Even if you or a member of your team are unavailable to talk with a prospect when, say, they visit your site late at night, choosing the right software will help you to create scripts that converse with them, encourage them to leave their contact details, and even book meetings with you at a later date.

Drift is our conversational marketing platform of choice. They pioneered the term in its current guise, and their technology is helping over 100,000 companies across the globe reduce lead times, increase lead quality and allow sales and marketing teams to converse with prospects as soon as they arrive. In fact, we love Drift so much that we’re are the UK’s first Drift partner.

Read more: Our guide to Drift and conversational marketing

As a Drift partner, we can extol the benefits of chat marketing first-hand. We’re getting the best out of the service for ourselves and our clients by combining it with an inbound approach; we’ve seen a 15% increase in new clients and cut our sales cycle by 33%, while for one of our clients, 28% of their sales have come through Drift leads while we’ve also cut their lead costs by five.

Perhaps our crowning glory though is how, for one client, we’ve managed to provide them with £478,500 (or $700,000 USD) of revenue through Drift leads whilst also making lead to customer conversion 45% faster than traditional static leads.

How working with a Drift partner can help grow a B2B business

Being the UK’s first Drift partner is putting us at the front of the conversation when it comes to chat marketing, and we want to take our clients with us. So, how can implementing a strategy and working with chatbots help grow a B2B business in practical ways? Here are just some of the benefits it can provide:

• Instantaneous contact: A point we’ve already touched on, but implementing Drift can offer other benefits when you’re looking to talk to the leads that matter to you most. Push notifications can alert you on your smartphone, for instance, when a prospect you’re looking to do business with visits your site, allowing you or a team member to approach and talk to them instantaneously.
• A personalised approach: At the same time, Drift can allow you to personalise messages to your target accounts when a B2B decision maker visits your site. What sounds better? Having someone you’ve courted professionally for a while visit your site, then get turned off by having to fill in various forms? Or greeting them warmly by name and getting straight to the nitty gritty while they’re there?
• A wider approach: No matter your current inbound approach, conversational marketing can be implemented alongside it to begin to converse with your leads as soon as possible. If you’re already practising B2B marketing, platforms such as Drift can work alongside others such as HubSpot, Terminus and others to enhance its impact and accelerate your overall growth strategy.

Though inbound, in our minds, is still the number-one marketing philosophy out there, so many are still tied to traditional lead generation methods such as waiting for prospects to visit a site, fill out forms, nurture them through emails, qualify them, call them and close the sale.

Conversational marketing, particularly when it comes to B2B, can cut a lot of that filler out, putting you straight in front of B2B leads, ready to talk about how you can help each other out, deliver them to further information, book meetings and generally grow the busy. It’s good to talk, after all…