Conversational marketing may sound brand-new. But the idea of establishing a dialogue with a customer is as old as the marketing itself. “Got milk?”, “I’m lovin’ it”, “Just do it” – all these slogans might as well be a part of a casual conversation between two people. In 2021, brands have much more possibilities to begin an actual dialogue with their clients. This is why the 2020s are the time of conversational marketing.
What is Conversational Marketing: its trends and its benefits?
Conversation marketing is one of the best practices to establish communication between buyers and businesses via social media and messaging apps. Chatbots are part of marketing and sales that help companies to provide an excellent customer experience, converting web visitors into regulars.
As a customer base gets bigger, it can become too expensive to hire new employees. Adopting conversation marketing as a part of inbound marketing strategy. Businesses now can put a chatbot at the service of a company, making working with a huge database 24/7 possible.
If a company is more about real-life communication, live chat is a conversational marketing tool that provides customers with feedbacks from human employees. Its competitive edge over chatbots is human’s ability to better understand customers’ requests.
Aside from live chats and chatbots, current conversational advertising trends are:
- Artificial Intelligence – AI can collect customer data available online. This will help businesses to create relevant content and provide an individual approach.
- Personalization – it’s important to make sure that content will be interesting for clients, and personalization is a way to do it right.
- Voice assistants – more people start to value the comfort of asking a question instead of typing it. To keep up with the times, marketers should consider adopting this feature.
The benefits of conversational marketing are:
- Improving customer experience
- Providing clients with tips and content
- Getting more buyers through marketing and sales funnels
- Building customer relationships
How to begin to use conversational marketing?
The best part about conversational advertising is that a company doesn’t need to change its strategy for it. Chatbots and live chats can rather be incorporated into it, improving a business model, not altering it. Here are the steps necessary to introduce customer interactions into the sales process:
- Analyze – collect and examine available customer information. It’s also important to understand a company’s website and to identify where a chatbot or a human assistant can be of help, look into successful conversational marketing examples, and directly asking the opinion of website visitors.
- Design – pick a chatbot and think about the questions it can receive. If opting for a live chat, it’s worth choosing the most popular platform among the clients, as well as training a company’s sales team.
- Check – experience a customer journey and make sure that a chatbot is working and that the sales team receives messages from clients.
- Operate – maintain and constantly improve a chatbot and customer service. Qualified leads and sales reps can take care of updating the information about products and services, sending notifications on time, etc.
Which software is needed?
The choice of the right software is an important one, whether it will be conversational marketing chatbots or social media platforms.
Some of the best chatbots are:
- Drift
- HubSpot
- Botfuel
- ManyChat, and others
Social media and messengers are the best platforms available to build relations with customers. The only thing left to decide is which of them are going to be the best for the business: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. It’s also possible to integrate with Facebook Messenger, one of the most popular ones out there.
In conclusion
Conversation marketing is a form of promotion that relies on channels of two-way interactive marketing communication. Nowadays, it’s not enough to tell people about a brand via e-mail marketing, paper flyers, or build-in commercials, and the digital marketing agency can be of assistance here.
While these remain an important part of digital marketing, it’s important to make a company reachable for a customer as well. This makes conversational marketing highly effective for achieving customers’ trust, making them more engaged with a company that channels its marketing efforts in interaction-based promotion.