Conversational Marketing

Chapter 6 Step One: Add Real-Time Messaging to Your Website and Start Capturing More Leads

The first step to adopting a conversational marketing and sales strategy for your business is to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to talk to you. And in a world where billions of people are now using messaging as their default mode of communication, and where 90% of consumers want to be able to use messaging to talk to business (according to a 2016 study by Twilio), that means you need to add messaging to your website.

With messaging, you’ll be able to open up a real-time lead generation channel on your website, which can yield you hundreds if not thousands of net new leads. These are the people who are already on your website looking around, but who, until now, have never bothered to engage. Or, perhaps more accurately, we are the ones who have never bothered to engage with them.

As I mentioned in Chapter One, business-to-business (B2B) companies ended up spending a collective $4.6 billion in 2018 trying to drive people to their websites with advertising. They’ve also dedicated countless resources to creating top-of-the-funnel content and to optimizing search engines and to engaging people on social media . . . all in the hope that potential customers would visit their websites. But when that plan succeeds, when potential customers do visit a B2B company’s website, the experience is akin to walking into an empty store. There’s no one there to talk to them or answer ...