Forming relationships with customers and prospects is paramount to building a successful business. Conversational marketing offers B2B businesses a method of connecting with their target audience in a way that drives engagement and boosts conversions. Sounds pretty great, but what is it exactly?

It’s been referred to as a one-to-one approach, human-centric, feedback-oriented and, well, conversational, but what conversational marketing ultimately comes down to is direct communication between a business and its leads, prospects and customers. Encompassing everything from chat bots to live chat, it allows B2B marketers to shorten the sales cycle and create a more personal, optimised buying experience.

Interested? Download our latest guide to conversational marketing to learn more about the power of conversations, and how you can include it in your marketing strategy.

What’s covered in the guide?

• The main conversational marketing mediums
• Identifying where it can fit in your marketing strategy
• The potential benefits for B2B businesses
• Top tips to getting started

For B2B marketers, tracking and measuring both the ongoing progress and the results of their campaigns is key. After all, sharing the success of campaigns is crucial in justifying marketing spend to senior management, and demonstrating alignment with company goals. As a non-traditional marketing channel, influencer marketing doesn’t seem as straightforward when it comes to tracking influencers’ activities and setting overarching objectives. However, with this medium giving 11 times more ROI than banner advertisements, it’s clear that this is something B2B businesses will need to tackle sooner rather than later.

Influencer marketing has seen rapid growth in today’s digital-first world. While typically seen as a B2C marketing strategy, it can be hugely beneficial for B2B brands too – with many B2B businesses seeing it deliver transformative results at every step of their sales cycle. Influencers can position a brand as a thought leader, boost overall brand engagement, and distribute content to a highly targeted, engaged audience.

A hybrid of both old and new marketing techniques, influencer marketing is an approach that has taken the marketing world by storm in recent years. Combining the age-old idea of celebrity endorsements with modern day social media channels and content-driven marketing campaigns, influencer marketing can be seen across the internet by millions of people every day. With influencers able to increase a business’ brand awareness, boost conversions and help with product launches, it’s not surprising that brands are predicted to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022.

Although not an entirely new concept, influencer marketing has seen major growth in today’s digital-first world. Celebrity endorsements have been transformed, through social media and content marketing, into a lucrative opportunity for businesses across the globe. For B2C brands, influencer marketing has been paying dividends – but B2B companies are lagging behind. In fact, in a recent survey, only 31% of marketing professionals who run influencer marketing campaigns said they were running campaigns for the B2B sector.