4 Reasons to Incorporate Chatbots into Your Digital Marketing Strategy

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow and change the digital marketing landscape, chatbots have been rapidly increasing in popularity—particularly in the B2B space. Driven by AI, chatbots are used to stimulate online conversations with human users, providing a highly personalized experience in real time.

Although it’s often assumed that chatbots are more useful for B2C marketing, B2B companies actually make up 58%—more than half—of websites using chatbot technology. As AI continues to advance, the chatbot market is predicted to reach more than $1.2 billion globally by 2025.

Here are four key reasons why your B2B company should incorporate a chatbot into your digital marketing strategy in 2021:

1. Automate Tasks with Chatbots to Save Time & Money

Companies are always looking for ways to save time and money—and automated chatbots are a perfect solution. According to IBM, businesses spend more than $1.3 trillion per year to address customer requests. Chatbots reduce that cost by 30% by speeding up customer response time, allowing employees to focus on more difficult tasks and answering up to 80% of routine questions.

For example, RPM International Inc., a global leader in specialty coatings and sealants, recently incorporated an automated chatbot into its recent website redesign. Within less than six months, the chatbot achieved an 80% match rate for users’ routine questions.

Chatbots can handle an unlimited number of questions, generate the same answer to multiple users, and require little time to add FAQs into the knowledge base before it can start producing automated responses. Plus, because it’s driven by artificial intelligence, the chatbot continuously learns new questions and answers, along with variants of other questions—allowing it to link related questions to answers in the knowledge base.

In addition to being repetitive, some B2B inquiries are time consuming and require multiple departments to work together to establish an approved answer. If the chatbot automatically handles these repetitive tasks, team members are freed up to handle more complex issues.

By integrating a chatbot into your B2B marketing, your company can streamline its customer service and significantly shorten user response time—thereby reducing the time and money required to keep your site visitors engaged and informed over the long run.

2. Chatbots Improve Your Lead Generation & Overall Digital Marketing

Chatbots are a great platform for automating marketing content and generating B2B leads. One of the biggest challenges when generating quality leads is ensuring they receive regular, personalized interaction. This requires that accurate, on-brand responses be presented in a timely manner. Because chatbots offer 24/7 availability, leads are likely to have their questions answered more quickly, leading to a positive customer experience.

In addition, chatbots can assist with nurturing and converting leads. Automated bots are surprisingly great at generating conversations, and most users will openly converse with a chatbot—sometimes more than with a human. If equipped with the appropriate information and download items, chatbots can provide users with relevant answers while offering free, downloadable content—such as e-books—to boost lead generation and conversion.

3. Use Chatbots to Enhance Your Customer Service

Customers want to know they are appreciated and important to your business. Most users prefer simple interactions, accurate information and quick service. This often means they would prefer to communicate via chat, rather than by phone.

The chatbot helpdesk ensures that customers can be assisted with fast support at any time. By activating the live chat feature, helpdesks can be used by bots, customer service representatives or a combination of both. This helps to keep questions organized and allows each user to feel like they are receiving a personalized response, even if it is automated.

In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that personalize offers. By using chatbots, companies can automate this personalization while continuing to build and nurture a pipeline of qualified leads.

4. Incorporate Data Analytics into Your Digital Marketing

Data analytics are an important part of any digital marketing strategy—providing timely and relevant insights that help businesses make intelligent, data-backed decisions. Chatbot data analyzes a bot’s conversations and offers insights about its overall performance and user satisfaction. This data can be used to:

• Gain valuable insight about customer trends
• Increase your company’s competitive edge
• Learn more about users and their most frequently asked questions
• Enhance the overall performance of your business

By providing businesses with this key information, advanced chatbot data can be used to predict user behavior and even offer insight into the future outlook of a company. This allows businesses to know more about their customers than ever before—in turn staying one step ahead of their competition.