Conversational marketing and inbound - add fuel to your fire

It's worth keeping an eye not just on your current inbound marketing campaigns, but ways to improve them in the future with new methods and channels to be as successful as possible. The next bedfellow you should be considering? Conversational marketing and inbound is our new favourite pairing, and we'll tell you why.

Inbound rocks. We’ve been preaching it for years and using it to help clients from a broad range of industries increase their sales potential, open dialogue with new customers and attract more profitable long-term leads.

One thing we’ve always highlighted to those we work with and prospects looking to grow though is that inbound marketing is an ever-evolving process. It’s always subject to change.

But that’s a good thing. The introduction of social media approximately a decade ago, for instance, has gone a long way to connecting the world for the better.

Social outreach can be a key part of the inbound marketing process. Inbound helps you keep up to date with the introduction of new channels such as social and consistently keeps you in front of your most valuable customers.

Read more: Our guide to conversational marketing

When it comes to inbound, you should catch our Drift

It’s also known as ‘chat marketing’, and we think we’re pretty good at it. So much so that we’ve partnered with conversational marketing and sales platform Drift which helps to better qualify leads and cut down overall conversion times.

We are the UK’s first and only Drift partner. That’s not just good news for us, but for our clients, too. Drift coined the term conversational marketing, after all. They’re pretty good at what they do.

Don’t believe us? Since becoming a Drift partner, we’ve used their chat marketing platform to deliver some phenomenal results for our clients. In the space of just four months, one of our clients was able to accumulate £478,500 (or $700,000) in revenue through conversational marketing alone.

Improved sales aren’t the only benefits to implementing a chat marketing strategy alongside an existing inbound campaign. For that same client, we were able to improve conversion times by 45% when compared against static leads.

For another client, 57% of the total leads we generated for them came from being a Drift partner, while 28% of all sales generated came through a strong conversational marketing strategy. Perhaps most notable was that lead costs through Drift were five times lower than static leads collected through a form.

We’ve also used Drift to flex our own marketing muscles too. Since becoming a Drift partner, we’ve seen a 15% increase in new clients, generated 23% more leads, cut our sales cycle by 33% and used it to breach the US market.

Improving sales. Generating better-quality leads. Shortening conversion times. Building relationships with customers old and new. Being a Drift partner can sound too good to be true… How can you be sure you aren’t falling for a well-crafted sales pitch?

Don’t Drift away from the future of inbound

Because we’re lucky enough to have spotted an opportunity and got in on the ground floor on the next stage of the inbound marketing cycle.

Again, it’s so important to keep an eye on evolving inbound trends; not just for your own sake but to keep close attention to how your most valuable customers are interacting with brands over the web in general.

The simple act of having a conversation is so important to modern web users, and it’s become easier than ever thanks to social platforms, the natural connectivity the internet offers and the growth of messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack and others (which can all, incidentally, host chatbots).

Personal assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home are also naturally turning people onto conversational online habits. So much so that they’re infiltrating people’s daily lives on a personal and professional level. 29% of IT organisations, for instance, have implemented AI-powered chatbots or voice assistants for work-related tasks, or plan to do so in the year ahead.

Read more: Our guide to conversational marketing

The global ChatBot market is set to grow by 24.3% by 2025. That’s great for companies like Drift; it looks even better for consumers, with approximately 45% of end users preferring chatbots as their number-one way to solve customer service enquiries.

A survey commissioned by LivePerson mid-2017, which spoke to more than 5,000 customers from six countries, found that only 11% had a negative perception of chatbots. 38% said they had a positive perception of chatbots with 51% neutral.

With the technology and conversational marketing movement still relatively fresh in people’s minds, the tech can only become better and the results more impressive than we’ve already shown, we believe. Take Microsoft, for example; they made a chatbot breakthrough in April 2018 that they believe will allow us to have more natural conversations with chatbots than ever.

Having that technology complementing an inbound marketing campaign isn’t just helpful from a lead generation perspective. Working with a chat marketing specialist (and accredited Drift partner) will help you keep on your market’s wavelength, creating meaningful conversations and experiences with them that will help take your business to the next level.