August 2, 2023 Why Manufacturers Need an AI-Powered Digital Strategy

Here are 3 reasons why, if you want to stay relevant as a manufacturing company, you need to adopt an AI-powered digital strategy.

By Matt Tippets

By 2025, an exponential rise in digital interactions will break traditional sales models between buyers and suppliers, Gartner predicts. Already, we’re seeing this change take place.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused nearly everyone to gravitate online for their needs — whether it was for their work or day-to-day lives — and, as a result, people got used to the self-serve buying journey. Now, 33% of B2B buyers report that they crave a seller-free sales experience, with that percentage jumping to 44% for millennials.

It’s safe to say that the preference towards digital buying is here to stay. But while buyers have adopted – or would prefer to adopt – this digital-first approach to buying, many manufacturers have yet to match their customers’ expectations with a digital-first approach to selling. The supply of digital strategies and tools is not meeting the demand for immediate answers, personalized experiences, and frictionless buying.

If this discrepancy is left unaddressed, it will soon begin to limit growth. In fact, Gartner also predicts that by 2024, manufacturing organizations that provide a total digital experience will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both customer experience and employee experience.

So, if you want to keep attrition low and revenue high, there’s no doubt — you need to go digital and create a buyer experience that meets customer expectations.

3 Ways Adopting a Digital Strategy Will Protect and Grow Your Company’s Market Share

Though manufacturers will need a “total digital experience” to become an industry leader in the coming years, that doesn’t mean you have to completely overhaul your current processes. Instead, you should first conduct an audit of what’s missing in your go-to-market strategy today, and then think about how a digital strategy can help fill in those gaps.

Here are three of the most common ways that you can leverage an AI-powered digital strategy to rise above the competition:

1. Understand Your Buyers’ Needs and Preferences.

6sense reports that 70% of the manufacturing buying process is done anonymously. This means that your buyers are researching your products without you even knowing about them. If you don’t know who is on your site and what they’re looking for, how are you supposed to create the frictionless self-serve journey that your buyers crave?

You can’t. That is, unless you build a digital strategy that de-anonymizes your website traffic.

By leveraging AI-powered intelligence tools, you can better understand what types of companies are researching your product, what their common pain points are, and how you can best support them. You can then use this information to inform your brand’s messaging and attain a more holistic view of the buying journey.

What’s more, meeting those buyer needs becomes easier as AI allows for conversations at scale and in real time. For instance, adding an AI-powered chat solution to your website ensures that every site visitor feels welcomed and has an interactive, personalized channel to learn more about your product or service.

Not to mention that intelligence tools also allow your sales reps to have more informed conversations with their buyers when the time comes to talk to a human. Because AI-powered chatbots can ask qualifying questions to site visitors and gather information around a site visitor’s intent, sales reps go into conversations with a better understanding of the buyer’s pain points and how their product can best help solve them. With the help of a digital-selling strategy, reps can skip the small talk and get straight into questions that will really move the needle towards a purchase — saving both the rep and seller time.

2. Use automation and AI to be available when your buyers need you.

Your buyers are busy — and often that means that the only time they have to research solutions falls outside of a typical work day. But just because someone is on your website at 11 p.m. on a Thursday, or lives in a different time zone than you, doesn’t mean that they should be left without the customized answers they need to make a decision about your product or service. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean that you should be telling your staff to stay online at all hours of the night.

Conversational AI is designed to be online when your team can’t be. With a Conversational AI solution, you can set up a trustworthy, AI-powered chatbot that provides individualized assistance no matter the time of day. Good chatbots are tailored to your business and trained to respond to open text (natural language) questions from site visitors and hold humanlike conversations while surfacing help docs, answering commonly-asked questions, and even booking new meetings while your sales reps sleep.

Our research has found that 40-50% of Drift chats where meetings are booked happen outside of typical meeting hours. Half of all of your potential meetings is a huge portion of revenue to miss out on simply by not being accessible when your buyers are ready to talk. Adopting an AI-powered digital strategy can help close this gap.

3. Drive a Higher Return on Your Marketing Investment.

Let’s face it: Budgets are tight and we’re all looking at our annual operating plans with a keen eye. But the reality is that investing in an AI-powered digital strategy will pay for itself in no time. Because by knowing exactly who your buyers are and interacting with them when they’re thinking about you, you’re able to be more efficient with your resources.

Plus, AI can take tedious tasks off of your sales reps’ hands. AI can deflect support questions from the sales team and ensure they go straight to the support team — should they require a human answer at all. As previously mentioned, Conversational AI can also gather all the important initial sales data (firmographic, geographic, etc.) to help reps prioritize their day based on which accounts the data tells them are most likely to convert. And by expanding a digital strategy across your entire website (forms, events, ads, etc.) you’re able to create more opportunities for conversion on every marketing program you’ve already invested in.

Overall, investing in an AI-powered digital strategy makes it possible for your team to hit their goals without sacrificing budget, bandwidth, or quality of conversation — helping you increase your revenue while decreasing your attrition rate.

To conclude:

Your buyers are online, and you need to be there, too. But a digital strategy goes beyond simply owning a URL — it’s about making your content and website work best for both your customers and your employees. Because when you deliver a streamlined digital experience, you’re able to gather more insights about your buyers that drive better human conversations and meet B2B buyers’ expectations of a B2C buying experience.

About Drift:
Drift®, the Conversation Cloud company, helps businesses connect with people at the right time, in the right place with the right conversation. Using the Drift Conversation Cloud, businesses can personalize experiences that lead to more quality pipeline, revenue and lifelong customers. Drift brings Conversational Marketing, Conversational Sales and Conversational Service into a single platform that integrates chat, email and video and powers personalized experiences with artificial intelligence (AI) at all stages of the customer journey. More than 5,000 customers use Drift to deliver a more enjoyable and more human buying experience that builds trust and accelerates revenue. Representing less than 1% of unicorns led by Latino founders, Drift is building an equitable, enduring company to transform the way businesses buy from businesses.

For more information, visit www.drift.com and follow @drift.

About the Author:
Matt Tippets is the senior vice president of product at Drift, leading the product management, design and UX research functions. Matt brings decades of product leadership to Drift, with deep experience in strategy, management, development, and marketing of industry-leading B2B cloud products at a variety of enterprise software companies. Prior to Drift, he served as chief product officer for Total Expert, a CRM and marketing automation platform focused on financial services. He also spent a number of years leading various strategic digital marketing products for Salesforce, where he was also responsible for product portfolio strategy at the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Subscribe to Industry Today