Drift goes Bionic

In the run up to their recent product announcements, Drift claimed that they were going to revolutionise B2B marketing. They haven't quite lived up to that claim, but they have shown how important Generative AI is to the future of conversation marketing.

Drift like to claim they invented conversational marketing. They certainly pioneered the use of chatbots within B2B, taking the personalisation capabilities seen within B2C websites and applying them to B2B buying journeys. In the years since then, they've taken those conversational capabilities beyond chatbots into email and landing page scenarios. At the same time, many Drift implementations have struggled to prove ROI amid internal pressure to adopt a cheaper all-in-one chat solution that can be used by support or e-commerce teams, as well as marketing teams. Drift is a high-end solution and comes with a price tag to match.

The main problem with Drift is that many companies are still using it to create very basic chatbot experiences, that appear very superficial to end users accustomed to in-depth support or e-commerce use cases for chat. It's rarely been a solution that customers can use to enter arbitrary questions and expect to get a relevant answer. All too often, it's used as an alternative to web forms, particularly in situations where marketers want to pre-qualify website visitors for relevance before collecting their personal information. It's pretty good at that, but can be used for much more.

Instead, the true power of Drift lies in their AI capabilities. This has been the case for a while, but is particularly true now that Generative AI has finally reached the mainstream. Last week, those capabilities received a rebrand and a GPT enhanced facelift. That allows Drift to act as a true chatbot with the ability to answer arbitrary questions using website content or associated marketing assets to train the AI model. Effectively, Drift can be used to summarise your website content and better direct visitors to the right page. That supplements the playbook scripts configured on specific pages for specific campaigns.

Site Concierge

More interesting is Drift's attempt to move beyond just being a chatbot service. They're offering a new Site Concierge user experience, which breaks out the various components of the Drift chatbot into separate floating buttons that overlay website pages. This allows for a dedicated book a meeting button to be displayed alongside a GPT-powered search button. A personalised content recommendation engine is also promised, using AI to recommend assets and pages related to the pages visitors have already viewed.

In effect, Site Concierge replaces the Drift chatbot on pages where visitor interaction is unlikely. The Drift chatbot becomes another widget in the Site Concierge toolkit that can be placed on campaign pages or entry points, in order to direct visitors to the right content for their buying stage and persona. The book a meeting capability then becomes another lead capture mechanism to be included on pricing or solution pages, as well as conversion pages.

It's an open question whether Site Concierge can replace the existing search or content recommendation mechanisms already used on enterprise websites. Drift would certainly like them to because it gives their product a stickiness that they have often lacked. I can certainly see the benefits of this approach for website visitors, for whom chatbots aren't appropriate in every situation. It won't replace the value of a good chatbot script on the right campaign page, but it doesn't need to. Plenty of website pages don't have a custom chatbot script today.