What is meant by Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing refers to the use of dialogue-driven activities and content specially designed keeping in mind the conversational sensibilities of people in marketing strategies. By doing so, the customer feels better heard which leads to increased engagement rates.
It focuses on one-on-one marketing that is live, or happening in real-time, across multiple channels. This also helps in building relationships with the customers. Conversation marketing is done using chatbots, live chat, and messaging apps.
Advantages of Conversational Marketing
While not a new concept at all, conversational marketing is also constantly updating. With the advent of AI, it has become more efficient. Some benefits of conversational marketing have been given below:
Much more exciting way for customers to get their answers
As people use their phones for almost everything these days, marketers are constantly working on creating content that is mobile-friendly.
People prefer to consume content in the form of videos, social content as well as message-based interactions. This is one of the primary reasons why conversational marketing is so effective.
Faster and more effective lead generation
Owing to the engaging manner of this type of marketing, customers can get better clarity of what the brand and its products are all about. Their experience is widely better and this leads to more conversions, from visitors to paying customers.
Effective lead generation is not just great for conversions, it also proves to be extremely helpful for the sales team since they’re able to understand how to tackle people better. They’re able to understand them better, essentially.
Get to know your customers better
Just think about it, you get to learn about the likes, dislikes, preferences, and everything in between from your customers themselves. It really doesn’t get better than this.
You get a much better understanding of your customers, valuable insights directly from them with no interferences whatsoever.
Cultivate lasting relationships
Like social media has provided you with so many more ways to reach your friends and interact with them, conversational marketing does the same for marketing purposes.
It creates a never-ceasing conversational thread between a brand and its customer. Since these are highly personalized as they are one-on-one, questions that people are afraid to ask for the fear of looking stupid or some other reason can easily be asked.
Basically, it instills a feeling of trust in the customers that helps in forming lasting relationships between them and the brand.
People like a more personal and supportive form of communication and this is exactly what conversational marketing provides them.
How To Use Conversational Marketing?
Every marketing strategy that is created is done by keeping the business’s main goals in mind. It is no different for conversational marketing. Content or possible conversations have to be customized keeping in mind the specific aim.
The best way to approach this is to figure out what exactly you want to talk to your audience about, how will you go about solving any issues they might have, should they raise any, and what problems you want to resolve with the strategy.
Steps that should be followed when building a conversational marketing strategy are:
1. Selecting the channel(s)
Study your audience and figure out, based on their preferences, what channels you’ll be needing and what will be the purpose behind each channel. This purpose could be basic FAQs, specific information about some upcoming launch, assistance in the purchasing process, or promotions.
2. Creating questions and answers
Depending on the purpose, your content team and sales team needs to get together to compile the perfect list of questions and answers that will cater to the different questions of the audience, at various levels of their customer journey.
3. Personalization of content
Now after observing the behavior of your customers and taking into account the stage at which they are in their customer journey, providing the relevant information at the right time is important.
These are the personal touches that people like since it saves them a lot of time and effort, and further cements your relationship with them.
4. Optimization
For a marketing strategy to be effective, or effective as it can be, optimization is vital. You have to keep a track of how your content is faring and if there are any glitches or blind spots in the content, resolve them as soon as possible.
5. Get feedback
This is another important but often overlooked point. Conversational marketing is all about making the experience of customers better. Take their feedback and work on improving your strategy so that it is more effective.
Conclusion
Conversational marketing is all the rage right now since it all about improving the experience of customers and marketing is all about the customers. So if you haven’t started incorporating this strategy to boost your sales, you’re making a huge mistake. You need to start working on your conversational marketing strategy today.
For more such content, don’t forget to check out Digital Ready’s Blog section. Further, go over the various digital marketing courses that we offer and take your first step towards becoming a digital marketer.
Image Source – Google | Image by Digitalready
Content Source – Google | Content by Digitalready
