As we celebrate a start of a new decade, lets quickly look back on what has happened in the last 10 years
Two mega trends have happened that have really shifted this paradigm. One is messaging, and the second is video. Messaging right now is exploding. Think of the most common ways you communicate with your friends, family, and coworkers. Now think about how you communicate with your buyers. Is it in this new, quick messaging way? Or is it in the old way, where you make your buyers jump through hoops to get what they’re looking for? The addition of AI in marketing has made it easier for a prospect to get what they want quickly. Chatbots improve the customer experience by giving them quick answers they demand, on their terms, anytime and anywhere.
We are moving into an exciting era where creativity, technology and data will become the backbone for marketing. Firstly, the explosion of information and options available to prospects that started 10 years ago which remains strong with a huge focus on omni channels. The second is chatbots – adding AI to marketing has really changed the customer experience.
Creating demand through conversations
Imagine you walk into a store today, and have to provide your first name, last name, phone number, email address, and still have to wait 10 to 20 minutes to get what you’re looking for. This is how most B2B experiences are still set up today. We need to change as businesses selling to other businesses to create better experiences that match this new way of buying. This is done through conversations and chatbots to help buyers get connected with salespeople as quickly as possible.
These days customers have an endless selection and their expectations become greater each day. They require fast replies to their queries and want to learn about product and services without downloading ebooks, whitepapers, product brochures or infographs. The evolution of chat-bots has taken the digital world by storm, revolutionizing the ways customers communicate with technology.
Multiple playbooks can be created to intercept a site visitor to qualify by engaging in useful conversations and facilitate their requests – For example, a site visitor may be looking for support – once its identified then its easy to route that visitor down to create a support ticket – another instance is someone looking for pricing (assuming you don’t list your prices on the site) the bot can route the conversation to a live person via chat. Lastly, the bot interacts with a potential prospect and engages with them during your off hours – this is crucial, prospects go from site to site and you really can’t control when they show up on your site.
Personalizing buyers experience – Video
Let’s talk about mega trend number two: Video. Think about how much you and the people around you use video today. You use video to learn things, you use it to teach people, and you also use it to communicate. So think about this from a business perspective. Aside from videos on your website, are you also using videos to connect with your customers and create a more personalized experience? Did you know that studies have shown that viewers retain 95% of a message over video, versus just 10% over plain text? On top of that, 59% of surveyed execs said they’d rather receive a message over video than just text.
So, the next time you’re looking to improve engagement rates and avoid a high bounce rate then look at integrating a chatbot and promote your videos on LinkedIn and BrightTalk to name a few choices for you.
