B2B companies are using chatbot technology as a part of their demand generation campaigns including lead capture, lead nurturing and pipeline acceleration, per results from a recent Botco.ai survey [download page]. The report indicates that conversational AI experiences are allowing B2B companies to identify high-value website visitors, engage with them in real-time, and gather data-rich leads to target specific audiences, resulting in higher conversion rates.
The survey also found that conversational AI is viewed as a big advancement in demand gen technology, providing relevant and comprehensive customer information such as service or product interest, timeline, and budget. This information helps sales teams to better prioritize and contact leads. Furthermore, 83% of B2B marketers surveyed who deploy demand-generation programs reported that chatbots have increased their company’s lead generation volume by at least 5%.
It should be noted that Botco.ai is a conversational marketing cloud solution and it’s unclear whether or not the survey participants are Botco.ai users, so these figures should be read with some caution. Even so, the extent of enthusiasm for chatbots from respondents is interesting, and the ways in which respondents are putting them to use instructive.
According to the marketing professionals surveyed, chatbots are most effective in the middle of the funnel (43% share), nurturing leads by promoting newsletter subscriptions and webinar sign-ups among other initiatives. That’s followed in effectiveness by top of the funnel (36% share) – for lead generation or promoting content downloads. Even though survey respondents perceive chatbots to be less effective at the bottom of the funnel, about one-fifth still reported that chatbots can effectively influence buyers by inducing high-intent leads to take a lower-funnel action such as booking a product or service demo or starting a free trial.
The survey also found that chatbots have increased lead-to-customer conversion rates for virtually all of the B2B marketers surveyed, with 56% reporting that chatbots have increased their rate by at least 10%. The top reasons why respondents who run demand generation campaigns use chatbots are to understand their audience better (57%), generate new leads (55%), educate prospects (43%), qualify leads for the sales team (42%), build stronger customer relationships (42%), and segment the audience (42%).
For more, download the report here.
About the Data: The results are based on an October 2022 survey of more than 1,000 US B2B marketing professionals across industries.
