If you want to hit your revenue growth targets, you’ll need to make sure you have the right account-based marketing strategy in place. Conversational marketing can help you satisfy leads within your sales pipeline while also drawing additional prospects. But conversational marketing can be costly and time-consuming. It’s why many businesses are turning to conversational AI for account selling. This article will tell you everything you need to know about conversational AI and how it can impact your ABM strategy. Keep reading to learn more.
Reviewing some key terms
Before diving in, it’s worth first taking a moment to review some key terms. Take a look at the sub-sections below for more information.
What is conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing is a type of marketing that centers around talking to customers. Examples of it include chatbots, voice bots, and interactive web pages.
Companies use conversational marketing through various channels, including websites, social media, and even through paid advertising.
What is conversational AI?
Conversational AI is the use of artificial intelligence in the context of conversational marketing. For example, instead of running a simple voice bot that’s incapable of improving itself, a company could use AI so it can improve over time.
Conversational AI is still a relatively new tool at companies’ disposal, but it’s quickly become clear that it will play a major role in how businesses utilize account-based marketing in the future.
What is account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing is a style of marketing that identifies the highest-value accounts and targets them jointly with a sales department.
This stems from the fact that we’re living through an age of information abundance. And marketers constantly need to fight competitors for the attention of their target audience.
Proponents of account-based marketing say that, given this competitive landscape, their limited time and resources are best spent on the accounts that offer the highest potential ROI.
Eight ways that conversational AI will impact ABM
Now that we know what conversational AI is and how it works let’s look at some of the real-world impacts you can expect to receive after investing in it.
It will be easier to understand what your highest-value customers want
Account-based marketing is all about identifying the highest-value customers and then targeting them directly. Conversational AI should help you understand your audience’s goals and needs better.
You might use conversational AI to power a chatbot on your website. You could sift through the data that the chatbot generates based on the potential ROI of the customer seeking assistance.
Then you can group all of those prospects and look for meaningful trendlines in what they’re asking. It could give you the insights you need to be more targeted and helpful during your ABM sales process.
Conversational marketing will become more affordable
Traditionally, conversational marketing needed human-to-human contact to be effective. However, as conversational AI becomes more intelligent, we’ll need less and less input from humans to keep customers satisfied and in your sales pipeline.
In other words, you won’t have to pay a human to engage with customers through conversational marketing. You may still choose to do so if you’re looking to go above and beyond the competition. But you definitely won’t need to.
This can free up resources for you to spend on other parts of your marketing strategy.
Your understanding of consumer habits will improve
Conversational AI provides a wealth of information about your customers, which you may not be able to get from other sources. This type of AI can scan all of the conversations it’s had with your customers and pick uptrend lines for you to zero in on.
Your conversational AI may tell you that customers are consistently asking a specific question after visiting your website for the first time. With that intel, you could adjust your website to highlight the answer to that question early in the process and improve your UX.
You can leverage this capability to improve aspects of your business processes. It could help you get more out of your account selling and marketing resources as well.
You’ll be able to engage with leads in real-time
When a lead visits your website, you want to make sure you engage with them right away to keep your lead on your site longer and move them through your sales pipeline.
However, a lead can visit your site at any time of the day. That makes it challenging to continuously engage with them if you rely on humans or simple AI to power your chatbot.
Conversational AI should fix this problem. It will enable you to truly engage with your leads no matter when they visit your website. This capability could help you get more out of your website visitors.
You will have a better chance of converting leads into paying customers
Experts say that conversational AI can increase a company’s website conversion rates by 40%. That’s a significant figure, which could be the difference between your company hitting its revenue growth goals in a fiscal year.
There are a few reasons for this. Conversational AI collects and analyzes data to help you develop more effective ways for engaging your audience.
But this tool should also boost your conversion rate even if you don’t take advantage of the data it collects. It can automatically engage your website visitors in more meaningful ways.
Customer satisfaction will go up
It’s 5-25 times more valuable to keep existing customers than to find new ones. Conversational AI can help you with this as well.
It provides your customers with a way to receive personalized support whenever they want. And when you offer exceptional customer service, it sets your company apart. And it should increase the likelihood that they stay loyal to your brand.
Fewer human-to-human customer service calls will be necessary
Every business needs to have customer support options available to its users. Providing these can be expensive, though — primarily if you deal with high-volume.
Conversational AI should help your company reduce the number of resources it needs to invest in human-based customer service.
You’ll be able to direct your customers to your conversational AI resources as the first support line. This should significantly reduce the number of people who need to talk with a human to resolve their problems and free up your resources.
Voice bots will become more useful
Voice bots are already beginning to improve. But those powered by conversational AI should be even more powerful in the future.
This means that companies should rely on voice bots to handle phone-based customer service inquiries in the future, thereby freeing up more resources to focus on things like outreach for account-based marketing.
Putting it all together
Account-based marketing can be an effective way to win new business for your company. As conversational AI becomes more powerful, it should help companies achieve the following goals:
- Improve customer service
- Make providing customer service cheaper
- Improve your ability to convert leads
- Increase customer satisfaction
That means investing in conversational AI is a move that could pay dividends for you across multiple parts of your business.
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One of the main reasons conversational AI is so beneficial for an account-based marketing strategy is the data it helps you generate and learn from. But conversational AI isn’t the only tool for the job.
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