With all B2B marketing campaigns, tracking and measuring the results is crucial – not only to determine ROI and justify budgets, but also to shape future campaigns. This is the same with conversational marketing: as a non-traditional marketing channel, it’s vital to prove its worth to senior management, demonstrate the campaign’s alignment with company goals, and plan how the campaign will progress in the future. But how can a B2B business measure the impact of something as abstract as ‘conversation’?
Whether you’re using live chat or chatbots, it’s important to gauge the contribution of these activities to your business’ revenue. Here are three ways you can track the effectiveness of your conversational marketing efforts:
1. Capturing information
Whether you’re looking at sparking conversations with your customers via voice applications, live chat or AI-powered chatbots, one of the key advantages of this more ‘human’ digital interaction is capturing authentic customer data. Up until recently, lead capture forms have been the primary method of doing this, but many buyers can be put off by the lack of immediate response to their query.
Conversational marketing, however, allows customers to receive the answers they are looking for straight away. Chatbots can be programmed to ask for consumer data at any point in the conversation, whereas a one-to-one conversation in live chat often involves capturing data to help solve the buyer’s query. When measuring the effectiveness of your conversations, therefore, we recommend that you keep track of how much information you’re capturing, for example, how many new email addresses you’ve collected since the start of the campaign.
2. Booking meetings
A key metric for any sales and marketing function is the number of appointments set and, historically, it can be difficult for sales representatives to get these meetings in the diary – they are often the result of many back-and-forth emails. However, with conversational marketing channels the entire process can be shortened dramatically – with meetings booked quickly and intuitively over in real-time. In fact, most chatbots can be set up to schedule meetings without any human interaction at all, including during out of office hours.
It is worth considering, however, on which pages these ‘book a meeting’ conversations should occur. Conversational marketing platform Drift, for example, expects a 22% email captured to meeting booked rate on their ‘Request a Demo’ pages, whereas product pages are only expected to reach 5%. When deploying your conversational marketing campaign, make sure to tailor your conversations to where the visitor is on your website, and take this into consideration when tracking the overall number of meetings booked.
3. Generating leads
As one of most important metrics for sales and marketing teams, lead generation has the potential to be transformed through conversational marketing. By talking in real-time with visitors to your website, you can engage with potential leads that previously would have slipped through the net.
However, it’s not only crucial to measure how many leads are generated via conversational marketing – it’s also important to measure just how many of these leads are high quality. Due to the nature of personal one-on-one discussions, targeted prospects are nurtured with a continuous dialogue which advances them through the sales pipeline. Therefore, with channels such as chatbots and live chat, it is much more likely that only higher-quality leads will be generated, allowing you to filter out the noise easily and focus on the leads that are most likely to convert.
For each of these metrics, it’s vital to compare each result with the results from other channels to see how this ‘conversational’ approach compares. It’s also important to remember that, although B2B marketers often prefer to capture and track quantitative data, the qualitative data you gather from these discussions with customers is invaluable: from capturing specific phrases used by customers that can be harnessed in other conversations and marketing campaigns, to feedback which informs the business’ product development.
Would you like to learn more about the benefits conversational marketing could bring to your business? Download our guide to conversational marketing, available now on The Knowledge, and take your marketing to the next level.