A Guide to Conversational Marketing for B2B Companies

The B2B buying process is changing. In the past, static forms and delayed responses were enough to attract new buyers. But as more companies invest in real-time marketing capabilities, these old methods feel increasingly slow and non-personalized. If they’re all your business offers, you could miss out on leads who look elsewhere for more instantaneous answers.

That’s what makes conversational marketing worth your attention.

Robyn Lee, head of client success at Signa Marketing, defines it as “meet[ing] people where they are, online, in real-time, and on their terms.”

Brands do this through live chat support, AI agents, and conversational email, among other channels.

Keep reading to learn why your company may want to embrace a similar strategy.

What Is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing shifts the selling process from one-way information-sharing to a two-way dialogue. It uses real-time conversations to create a more interactive and personalized experience for the prospect. This helps them get the information they need instantly instead of waiting days for back-and-forth exchanges.

Traditional B2B marketing often relies on static blog posts, forms, and email drip campaigns. These can still work today, but they’re not a good fit for highly motivated buyers looking for answers now. Conversational marketing is dynamic, personally relevant, and a better experience for this segment of your audience.

However, Andy Groller, president and CEO of Dragon360, reminds us that “Conversational marketing is only as good as the conversation itself.”

In other words, to maximize performance, you’ll need the right approach for your business and its unique buyers.

Why Conversational Marketing Matters for B2B

Companies of all sizes and goals use conversational marketing to connect with buyers. But the practice can be particularly valuable in the B2B space.

Here’s why:

• Accelerated lead qualification: AI agents can score leads in real-time based on factors you define. This can help you prioritize prospects more effectively, engaging with those that are closest to buying first.
• Real-time engagement: B2B buyers sometimes research solutions after standard business hours. Conversational marketing delivers 24/7 personalized interactions, so your business responds sooner than the competition.
• Higher personalization: You can tailor conversations based on user behavior, company size, or previous engagements, delivering more relevant information to every lead.
• Shortened sales cycles: Conversational marketing removes friction, helping leads get the information they need to move forward sooner. This can shorten your sales cycle and help you close more deals, faster.

All of these can benefit your customers in some way.

Key Conversational Marketing Channels

If conversational marketing seems like a good fit for your business, the next step is researching commonly used channels. These four are the most important.

Live Chat

First, many companies offer live chat assistance on their websites. This is a good tool for answering frequent product questions, guiding visitors through features, and booking demos instantaneously.

Some companies only offer live chat support from AI agents. Others supplement instant AI answers with optional support from real humans. You’ll have to decide what’s best for your brand based on its budget and goals.

LinkedIn Messaging

LinkedIn could be another channel worth your investment. It’s a way to engage with your target audience in a more personalized way. Instead of reaching out with a company profile, you can connect with leads through individual employee accounts. This makes prospects feel like they’re speaking to an actual person, making them more likely to continue engaging.

AI Agents

AI chatbots may be the most common form of conversational marketing today. They’re great for processing initial inquiries, answering questions after-hours, and driving leads deeper into your sales funnel.

Just make sure to back up your AI agents with support from real humans. You don’t want to provide instant answers to basic questions, but then make your prospects wait for the personalized help they really want.

Conversational Email

Finally, you can also leverage conversational email to engage with more leads. This means using AI to tailor emails for more personalized engagement. For example, you might send a different welcome email based on a new user’s industry, recent activities, or previous questions.

You can leverage AI to answer follow-up emails instantly, spark conversations that help your sales team, and improve the general customer experience. Some users prefer to engage via email. Offering conversational support on that channel will help your business connect with this audience segment more effectively.

How To Build a Conversational Marketing Strategy

Now that you know how conversational marketing works, it’s time to design a strategy for your business. These step-by-step instructions provide a framework you can follow to make it happen.

Step 1: Define Goals

Start by being explicit about your goals. For example, do you want to drive more demo bookings or shorten your sales cycle? You might also be interested in decreasing your cost per conversion or speeding up average response times.

There are many goals that you can pursue through a conversational marketing strategy. The important thing is defining what you’re trying to achieve early in the process, so you have an objective way to track your performance. For example, if you want to shorten your sales cycle, you’d compare average timelines before and after updating your conversational marketing strategy.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

Next, consider your target audience. To design a strategy that delivers value to them, you’ll need to know what they care about and how they like to engage with your company. This can change across channels.

For example, prospects you engage through email conversational marketing may have different goals than leads you connect with on your website. Don’t worry if your approach is relatively undifferentiated for now. You’ll gather data once your conversational marketing strategy goes live and can adapt as needed.

As you work, focus on building personas that drive trust. David Ebner, president of Content Workshop, says, “Trust is built person-to-person, and conversational marketing is another avenue to develop those relationships.” So, take advantage of it!

Step 3: Choose the Right Tools

The next step is finding the tools to facilitate your vision for conversational marketing. That may mean investing in:

• Chat platforms like Drift, Intercom, and Zendesk Messaging
• AI assistants and chatbots, like ManyChat and Ada
• Conversational email tools, like Polymail, Mailshake, and Customer.io

While researching, make sure each tool fits into your existing tech stack. Integrations enable you to use data across platforms to drive deeper insights into your target audience. You’ll learn less if the tools you choose can’t feed data back into your sales and marketing platforms.

Step 4: Map Conversational Flows

Now you’re ready to map out the conversations leads will have with your AI tools. This means:

• Anticipating user questions and designing logic for branching, qualifying, and escalating
• Creating pre-determined conversation paths based on user intent
• Giving users the ability to escalate to humans
• Testing flows to see how they function in practice and refining over time

Iulia Vasciuc, CEO of ScaledOn, says the real magic happens when brands combine instant answers with personalized content: “The customer gets the speed and convenience of automation — answers now, 24/7 — without sacrificing the feeling of being understood and treated as an individual.”

Additional Reading: ‘7 Everyday Ways Generative AI for Marketing Supports Small Teams’

Step 5: Align With Sales and Customer-Facing Teams

You’ll also need to connect your new conversational marketing strategies to existing customer engagement processes. That means making sure sales and customer-facing teams:

• Know how and when to step into a live chat or conversation
• Have the training to use your new conversational marketing tools effectively
• Get to provide input into the kind of messaging and tone that resonates with prospects
• Offer input on measuring lead quality and overcoming conversation gaps

This alignment ensures that all your customer engagement efforts work together to drive value back to the company. You don’t want humans and AI working in silos, where insights gleaned in one group never benefit the other.

Step 6: Measure Performance

Finally, create a system for measuring your conversational marketing performance. Think back to your initial goals when deciding which KPIs to track. Or, measure the following common ones:

• Response rates
• Conversation-to-lead conversion rates
• Time-to-first response
• Average conversation length
• Chat-to-demo or chat-to-close rates

Not all of these metrics will fit your business, but they are a good starting point. 

Best Practices for Conversational Marketing

Let’s wrap up with some best practices and common mistakes to avoid, starting with the steps you should take:

• Personalization is key: Focus on delivering a unique experience to every prospect. You can use company data, user browsing history, and AI-driven insights to deliver more individualized value.
• Keep interactions human: Even automated chats should feel natural and consistent with your branding. Jaye Cowle, CEO & Founder at Launch Online, says, “When automated in an intelligent and sympathetic way, [conversational marketing] delivers short and long-term value.”
• Provide value quickly: Chris Cozzolino, CEO and co-founder of Uptown Creative, says you should “focus on understanding the customer’s problem before introducing your solution.”
• Ensure a quick hand-off when needed: Create a clear escalation process to connect leads with human agents quickly and avoid drop-off.

Along with best practices, there are some common mistakes to avoid with conversational marketing. 

Common Mistakes To Avoid With Conversational Marketing

You can get more value out of conversational marketing by avoiding some of the most common mistakes teams make. Here are four to keep in mind as you build your strategy:

• Impersonal bots: AI should feel responsive and thoughtful, not like a chatbot from 10 years ago. Piotr Roclawski, CEO of Yetiz, says, “In the near future, AI will replace a live human on the company’s side.” If that AI feels robotic, your business will struggle.
• Treating all leads the same: Every person who reaches out to your company is a unique individual with their own goals and history. Your marketing tools should reflect that.
• Not aligning with the full buyer journey: Users will engage with your conversational marketing tools at different stages of the sales cycle. Your AI should provide appropriate answers based on user intent signals, not follow a one-size-fits-all script.
• Ignoring post-sale opportunities: Leverage your new conversational marketing capabilities to upsell and continue engaging after initial conversion. Doing so could help you increase your lifetime value per customer without much extra effort from your team.

Keep both mistakes and best practices in mind when putting together your team’s conversational marketing strategy. 

The Growing Importance of Conversational Marketing

We’re moving into a world where B2B buyers expect personalized answers whenever they request them. Conversational marketing tools can help your brand stand out in this changing landscape. But to get the most out of your investments, you’ll need a custom approach designed around your target audience.

Combine your automation efforts with the empathy and individualization of real human interactions. Doing so will help your business form more real-time buyer connections and drive new conversions.

About the Author

Anna Peck Content Marketing Manager at Clutch

Anna Peck is a content marketing manager at Clutch, where she crafts content on digital marketing, SEO, and public relations. In addition to editing and producing engaging B2B content, she plays a key role in Clutch’s awards program and contributed content efforts. Originally joining Clutch as part of the reviews team, she now focuses on developing SEO-driven content strategies that offer valuable insights to B2B buyers seeking the best service providers.

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