Inbound and conversational can improve sales and marketing alignment

With the right conversational strategy in place, you can significantly improve the efficiency, reach and results of any digital inbound marketing campaign.

We don't say that lightly. As a Drift partner, we've seen it first hand for ourselves and the clients we provide Drift support to when implementing conversational marketing into their wider inbound campaigns.

Way back when we first started using conversational, we generated 23% more leads for ourselves in the first six months, cut our sales cycle by 33% and saw a 15% increase in new business.

These are just some examples of complimenting an inbound strategy with conversational marketing.

So how can this partnership help you boost your brand's growth potential and align your teams?

Improving your sales and marketing alignment

Although no inbound campaign is exactly the same, they will have a lot of things in common; mainly using a variety of interactive channels to attract prospects.

These interactive methods improve engagement across social media channels, email marketing, content, paid and more to attract people at each different stage of the buyer journey.

Bringing conversational marketing into each of these channels can help accelerate your engagement and make the lives of your marketers much easier.

We've previously discussed how research by HubSpot revealed that salespeople only spend a third of their day actually selling. The rest of their day is spent writing emails, data entry, prospecting, researching leads, scheduling calls and going to internal meetings.

Bringing conversational into the mix can change all that by helping to better qualify leads, speed up the sales process and, through the use of chatbots, deal with the high-level requests for you.

With marketing and sales both happy, they'll be better aligned and this ultimately leads to better growth.

Find out why chatbots are key to business growth in 2020.

The power of conversational marketing and inbound

Using a chatbot on your website means you can engage with targeted leads at all stages of the buyer journey. Your sales and marketing teams can write scripts answering basic, common questions that people at the start of their journey may ask. You can also use chatbots to put experts and high-level representatives in front of prospects partway through their journey, and connect with them one-to-one when they're at a stage to buy.

That means, instead of spending money on paid search to drive traffic to your website, your team can talk to prospects instantly instead of seeing them bounce away when they realise they have long, static forms to fill out and boxes to tick.

Drift can do much more than that too including scheduling meetings when people contact you out of hours, collecting and qualifying data in GDPR-compliant ways, directing people to where they need to be onsite instantly and much more besides.

Not only can it help to improve ROI, but marrying conversational marketing capabilities with a strong inbound marketing campaign can go a long way to building stronger customer-client relationships, making your brand more visible and human, and making the sales journey more seamless, painless and efficient than ever before, both for your customers and your sales and marketing teams.