Title: The Next Phase of B2B Marketing — Conversational Ecosystems
Subtitle: Start Building Your Conversational Ecosystem with LinkedIn and Frictionless Click-to-Human® Experiences
Table of Contents
- Introduction – The B2B Conversational Ecosystem — Say What?
- Chapter 1: Making Sense of a Conversational Ecosystem
- Chapter 2: Starting to Drive Better Engagement with Conversation Ads
- Chapter 3: The B2B Conversational Ecosystem – Putting it all Together
- Chapter 4: Building Your Conversational Ecosystem and Preparing for the Future
- Conclusion: Your Conversational Ecosystem and Brand Activation
Introduction – The B2B Conversational Ecosystem — Say What?
Marketers are an adaptable bunch; they are great at pivoting as buying behaviors change. The recent wave of digitization, changes in the buyer’s customer journey, and tighter regulations around data handling are set to bring about more big changes for B2B marketing across industries.
Many marketing teams have already begun to move to more omnichannel customer-centric, conversational strategies — using strategic targeting, personalized messaging, meeting customers where they are, going beyond the chatbot with large language models, integrating AI-powered decisioning, and considering the overall experience they are providing.
These trends will be important factors when it comes to reaching customers, collecting the data that matters, and boosting KPIs like customer lifetime value (CLV).
In preparation for making this change to being more customer-centric, marketing companies should look at creating a conversational ecosystem. Your conversational ecosystem will focus on the conversations and interactions you are having with customers. This strategy generates demand for interaction, rather than pushing content to generate leads — making it a more customer-centric approach because the customer is coming to you.
For example, LinkedIn recently created the Conversation Ads, Conversation Starter Ads, and Click to Message Ads features to help B2B marketers meet the needs of buyers. The new products help marketers efficiently create conversational, customer-centric, one-to-one marketing strategies that people can interact with and save for later when they are ready to move on to the next step or share with others involved in the decision-making process.
While that is enough to get you started — the next leap is to take that one step further and fully develop your conversational ecosystem across all channels.
Chapter 1: Making Sense of a Conversational Ecosystem
Searching through the latest opinions on the direction of B2B marketing, you will find numerous blogs speaking about how the B2B buyer’s customer journey and expectations are changing. They are looking for quality content and higher and more personalized engagement all in channels the way they expect.
Here is what buyers are typically no longer looking for:
- They don’t want to “listen closely as menu options have changed,” or be bombarded with emails and phone calls.
- They are not interested in reading pages upon pages of fluff to understand what your product or service does.
- They will hang up the phone or abandon a chat when they are stuck in an endless loop trying to find certain information or reach a human.
What buyers are looking for:
- Clear and direct explanations of products and services.
- Quick ways to access the information and people they are looking for.
- Non-invasive friendly marketing that provides the customer journey they individually seek.
Now that you understand what B2B buyers are generally looking for, how do you know if you don’t already have a conversational ecosystem?
Start by taking a realistic look at the conversations you are having with customers and prospects now. You can ask questions like:
- What do my campaigns, assets, and webpages look like now and how do they measure up with engagement?
- How do I come off? Is my wording or approach appropriate for the times and audience, and direct and easy to read?
- Are my emails or messages tailored to the receiver?
- Am I taking advantage of tools like Conversation Ads to better understand where my customers are at in their journey?
- What types of experiences am I offering people?
- Are my webpages and assets mobile friendly?
- Am I contacting people in their desired manner?
- Is it easy for customers to contact the specific people they need at my business?
- Do I have a conversational strategy that is horizontally scalable across all mediums?
- Am I able to provide real-time engagement?
- Do I have ways that allow customers to access experts or sales when they need them right away?
- Am I starting to get a handle on what large language models like Chat GPT can do for me?
- Have I looked at how to integrate new technologies and use them to my advantage?
- What do my KPIs measure today?
- How do my marketing KPIs lineup with sales today?
- Can the metrics I use now account for the new types of engagement and technology?
- Does my lead scoring model account for immediacy and new ad types?
That’s a long list of things to think about, but if you start chipping away and building processes now, it will pay off in the long run. To start becoming more conversational and less salesy; take a dive into Conversation Ads and what a campaign would look like, while peppering in other aspects of a conversational ecosystem.
Chapter 2: Starting to Drive Better Engagement with Conversation Ads
Why start with Conversation Ads? LinkedIn customers utilizing Conversation Ads have reported a 50% decrease in CPC expenditures while increasing engagement. They also had clickthrough rates 5 times higher than other methods and an overall higher ROI.
B2B marketers can use Conversation Ads and partner with companies like PingPilot for its Click-to-Human Human® Technology, and Sprinklr to make better customer-centric decisions. Together, enabling you to build out your conversational ecosystem.
Creating a Conversation Ad
Conversation ads give you the ability to integrate multiple pieces of a campaign for customers at different parts of the sales funnel. While this might seem complicated, it doesn’t need to be, and you have the added bonus of understanding your customer better.
Start by defining your campaign:
- What is the ultimate end result?
- How do you plan to get people where you want them?
- What opportunities do you plan to give people to gain knowledge where they need it?
Here is an example: GBX Holdings is having a difficult time getting qualified leads about its complex digital transformation SaaS and consultation offerings. They distribute educational campaigns and have a lot of information on their website but are not getting the results they seek. The company understands who its customer is and wants to start building out their conversational ecosystem.
The GBX Holdings marketing team assembles a conversation ad that takes readers down the funnel to be distributed at their preferred point. They start the conversation with:
Hello Brooke,
I’m Brett with GBX Holdings. Digital transformation can be a confusing process with goals and outcomes that are hard to define – making execution risky to your bottom line. We offer best-in-class solutions for analyzing, organizing, and revving up your digital transformation processes. Are you ready to learn more?
Yes
No
Maybe
Rather than sending a straight InMail, GBX Holdings can meet customers where they are in their digital buying journey. By clicking on the first choice, the recipient is then led to the second part of the conversation about analysis packages.
Thank you for your interest!
We are here to help! GBX Holdings can help you keep up with the competition while simultaneously saving money. Learn more by:
Reading “Consultation – What to Expect” eBook. The eBook discusses common problems that we address, like siloed data and disparate systems. It also contains a few questions to ask yourself about your digital transformation readiness and gives insight into how we can help your company operate more efficiently.
Or speak with one of our knowledgeable digital transformation experts, to have your questions answered right away.
As you can see, the Conversation Ad format gives people more choices than binary static posts and InMail, making it more engaging. People can use the conversation ad to easily access the information they are searching for or move straight to speaking with a sales representative on the phone, covering all stage of the sales funnel. The choices, or CTAs that you give, should be well thought out and lead to places where people will want to go.
Conversation Ad CTAs
Here comes the real planning for any campaign: Where should each link lead? With LinkedIn, you have choices. In the Campaign Manager, you can set up conversation ads that lead to multiple CTAs containing at least two links to websites or a lead generation form and a website.
Your CTAs can lead to informative content, registration pages, and even to live people using tools like PingPilot to offer a frictionless Click-to-Human® experience. The point being that you want to take readers to places that interest them rather than handing everyone the same asset or dumping them on the home page of your website and leaving them to figure it out.
Giving the option to speak with a specialist or salesperson in addition to offering useful information is a great way to show buyers that you care about the experience they have with your company. However, just like managing message replies, the promise of human interactions can become difficult quickly. That’s where tools like PingPilot come in.
PingPilot allows you to place a CTA link or pinglink that leads to a calendar to schedule a meeting or talk directly to a human. The link can also be associated with your company messaging or email service to interact that way, simplifying the overall experience.
Design: Some Examples of PingPilot
LinkedIn Conversation Ads are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your conversational ecosystem. Conversation Ads and LinkedIn’s other conversational content offerings are a great place to begin testing the conversational waters and start building your conversational ecosystem marketing plan.
Chapter 3: The B2B Conversational Ecosystem – Putting it all Together
By now, you probably have an idea of what a conversational ecosystem involves — offering people the information they need in the form and delivery method they prefer, while simultaneously saving them time.
Think Instacart. Most people do not take pleasure in dragging themselves to the grocery store to buy food periodically. People are on their phones, and Instacart turns what used to take up a couple of hours each week into a digital experience that lasts minutes — profiting off giving people what they want, when they want it and saving them time.
Findings by Jay Baer and StatSocial shows that the time factor probably accounts for more than most would consider with 2/3 of customers reporting that responsiveness and speed just as important as price. They also found that 2/3 of customers expect a reply to a “Contact Us” form within 24 hours and a quarter of all those surveyed within four. And the real kicker is, “when you don’t win on speed that’s invisible to the business.”
In the case of B2B marketing. A targeted buyer might see a static ad in their LinkedIn feed but might not be in the right mindset to take action. Then, when they’re ready to take a deep dive into your products and services they are turned off by the amount of work and waiting they must do to get the information, like waiting for a response or searching your website. When you create a conversation using a LinkedIn, the conversation ends up in their LinkedIn inbox.
Maybe they don’t click on it right away, but when they do, they have options. The potential buyer can take their time and read assets that have been provided, watch an expert hosted webinar, sign up for a workshop, or contact someone using a pinglink when they have time. In other words, your conversational content meets the buyer where they are at, saving them time by reducing clicks and searches.
The companies that will be the most successful at this will have mastered how to:
- Talk simply and directly
- Give people the information they want in the way they want it
- Reduce the amount of work it takes to gather information and reach out to desired contacts
Take another look at the list in the first chapter and think about the changes you can start making and partnerships you can form to build out your conversational ecosystem.
Scorch has a successful record of driving demand generation and activating brands by creating conversational content that B2B buyers and others are drawn to — and the development and use of PingPilot, which creates a simple way for interested parties to contact businesses by email, phone, or text.
Design: Breakout Quotes from Customers about PingPilot or conversation ads Placeholder
Chapter 4: Building Your Conversational Ecosystem and Preparing for the Future
The long-term goal is to move away from predetermined menu options and allow the customer to control the conversation. You can get started right away by changing the way you engage through assets you already have.
Most companies gate informative content in exchange for a potential customer’s contact information. Customers know, the second they download your eBook they are going to receive emails and calls about your products, which is a big deterrent to filling out forms with truthful information in the first place, read “Gated Ungated” for more information on this.
That said, your best assets can still be used as the foundation of your conversational content. Give them a quick makeover by freshening up the content and adding pinglinks or QR codes throughout the asset. Pinglinks help give new life to existing assets by providing people a simple way to connect to technical specialists or salespeople. In this model, your sales team or other customer success specialists drive revenue by answering incoming calls. They work with people to get them the information they need to make a decision they can feel good about with a company they feel good about working with.
If your team’s calendars are completely packed, another conversational option is to lead people to a trained large language model chatbot to speak about products and services just like a technician, using it as a next gen, intelligent chatbot. A chatbot like this can understand oddly phrased questions, provide answers beyond the website FAQs, and direct users to the correct people and departments, similarly to a live person. While this is a viable option for when your team is at capacity, it’s important to remember that customers generally prefer to interact with humans when they can. A recent survey found that only 22% of respondents felt positively about their interactions with chatbots, they felt that chatbots are too impersonal, not helpful, and they would prefer to talk to a real person when they are unable to find answers on their own.
On the other hand, large language model software like ChatGPT can be useful within the business for other things like personalizing email responses, optimizing social media, using it as a content concierge, for just-in-time assistance, analysis, and re-writing existing content with the Ping upgrade.
Conclusion: Your Conversational Ecosystem and Brand Activation
Activate demand generation and your brand by making meaningful connections with people and make it clear you are ready to communicate at every touch point openly and honestly. To do this, move away from the limited nature of choose your own adventure chatbots by hooking up more live humans to the back end and making the “conversational leap” toward informative conversational content, combined with informative assets, attention-grabbing CTAs, and frictionless Click-to-Human® experiences to help you get the engagement, clickthrough rates, and qualified leads you need to activate your brand.
Meaningful connections are the best way to improve CLV metrics and set you on the path for success in the future of B2B marketing.
And remember, building your conversational ecosystem doesn’t have to be a huge and daunting task, make use of the things that you know work. Take your best performing assets and make them more reader friendly while integrating ways for potential customers to get in touch with the people they need to talk to. Then, use conversational tools like LinkedIn Conversation and Click-to-Message Ads to reach customers where they are and provide content and information at multiple levels of the funnel. These small changes will make a world of difference.
Read “How to create a frictionless click-to-human® experience in the conversational content era,” to lean more. Or Ping us, we’d love to give you a peek at how we’re helping our clients drive real conversations and build their conversational ecosystems.