You may have heard the quote, “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” Tom Fishburne, the author of this widely popularized quote, is onto something here. The way marketers and brands communicate with their customers is changing, and conversational marketing is one of the trends we’re seeing throughout the industry.
This emerging marketing trend focuses on creating meaningful customer experiences (CX) through personalized conversations. It helps businesses understand their customers, build relationships, and increase customer loyalty. It also helps companies provide targeted offers to their customers and generate more qualified leads.
So, is this type of marketing just another passing fad, or should you leverage it for your business? Let’s take a closer look to see how businesses use it to increase their ROI.
What Is Conversational Marketing?
This customer-centric form of marketing engages prospects to create stronger relationships, build trust, and ultimately convert them into buyers. It also allows companies to reach more people with their message in a shorter amount of time, as well as track customer data for future use. But it’s crucial to handle interactions ethically while respecting customer privacy and data security.
Benefits of Implementing Conversational Marketing
Here are a few examples of how businesses in various industries have benefitted from implementing this one-to-one approach in their marketing strategies:
- Improved customer retention
- Stronger customer relationships
- Increased brand loyalty
- Increased revenue
- Shortened their sales cycle
In contrast, traditional marketing tends to be less effective since it’s not tailored for specific audiences.
How Is Conversational Marketing Different From Traditional Marketing?
In short, it offers customers an interactive and personalized experience, while traditional marketing relies on static tactics like television commercials, print ads, and billboards.
Traditional marketing is a more passive approach to engaging with consumers. It’s not as targeted and focuses on driving brand recognition by delivering a consistent message through established advertising methods. The downside of traditional marketing is that it can be costly and lacks personalization capabilities because it doesn’t rely as heavily on data as digital marketing does.
Conversational marketing takes this a step further by leveraging the data collected from customer conversations to create tailored, engaging experiences that meet their needs. This type of marketing uses tools such as chatbots, instant messaging services, social media apps, video conferencing platforms, virtual assistants, and more to engage with potential buyers in real-time.
What Is an Example of Conversational Marketing?
One example is using a chatbot as a customer service tool. Chatbots are automated programs that understand user questions and respond with relevant information or solutions. An online retailer can implement these to help customers select the right product for them. Similarly, a restaurant can use a chatbot to suggest menu items based on customer preferences.
By utilizing chatbots, businesses can provide customers with 24/7 support and solve their issues immediately. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also helps reduce costs.
How Does Conversational Marketing Work?
It works by leveraging conversational tools to interact with customers to provide personalized and engaging experiences. These tools utilize natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand user questions and respond with relevant information or solutions.
Strategies to Make the Most of Conversational Marketing
Brands should focus on building relationships and trust with customers by creating unique and engaging content tailored to individual customer needs and interests. Brands should also strive for quick response times to maintain a positive impression with their customers.
Companies should leverage analytics to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, so they can continuously optimize their conversational strategies.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) to track include:
- Market reach
- Engagement
- Customer satisfaction scores
- Conversion rates
What Is the Goal of Conversational Marketing?
It aims to predict, comprehend, and address the needs of potential customers at every stage of their journey, assisting them in progressing through the sales funnel. Brands use it to qualify leads and convert them into paying customers.
Aligning Your Conversational Marketing Strategy With Customer Goals
To align your strategy with the needs of your customers, start by understanding what customers want from their interactions with you. You can analyze past customer conversations to identify any common customer requests or issues that have come up.
This will help you gain insights into customer needs and wants. You can also use surveys or other feedback tools like NPS or CSAT scores to understand the overall sentiment of your customers towards your conversations and services.
It may also be helpful to use customer data such as demographic information and purchase history to build targeted conversations tailored to specific segments of customers. By taking these steps and regularly revisiting customer feedback, you can ensure that your marketing strategy is aligned with customer goals for maximum effectiveness.
Use Cases in Different Industries
Conversational marketing has become increasingly popular across various industries as more customers demand personalization and convenience. Here are just a few examples of its use cases:
- Financial Services: Automated customer onboarding, chatbot banking, and automated customer support.
- Marketing: AI-powered analytics for personalized campaigns, customized content recommendations based on user preferences, and automated product and service promotion through chatbots.
- Retail: Online shopping assistant bots for product selection and checkout processes and personalized product recommendations based on past behavior and purchases.
- Healthcare: Chatbot-driven diagnosis and treatment advice, health monitoring using voice recognition systems, and virtual assistants for telemedicine appointments.
What Are Some Conversational Marketing Platforms?
There are many different platforms available, each offering its own set of features and capabilities. Here are some of the leading personalized marketing platforms you might want to consider for your business:
- Drift: Drift is a robust platform that enables businesses to converse with their customers in real-time through chatboxes embedded on websites. It can help companies generate leads, qualify them, and deliver more personalized experiences.
- Intercom: Intercom is a customer communication platform that allows companies to communicate with customers across multiple messaging apps, websites, and social media platforms. It provides a suite of tools to help businesses build relationships with customers through automated messages and personal conversations with team members.
- HubSpot: HubSpot is an all-in-one software solution with various features, including CRM, email automation, sales automation, and analytics tools. Its tools include live chat functionality and an AI-powered chatbot builder, which helps businesses create natural-sounding conversations with their customers over various channels, including the web or Facebook Messenger.
- ManyChat: ManyChat is a powerful tool for creating automated conversations on messaging applications like Facebook Messenger and Slack. It helps businesses increase engagement by creating campaigns involving text messages, images, videos, and even GIFs in their customer conversations.
- Pandorabots: Pandorabots is an artificial intelligence platform for creating intelligent bots for customer service or marketing purposes. It allows companies to create custom conversational experiences for their customers across various channels, such as SMS, web chat, voice calls, or messaging apps like Telegram or Kik Messenger.
Need help with Drift? Our team of experts can assist with integrations, campaign augmentation, personalization, custom bot builds, training, maintenance and support. Get in touch for your free strategy session.
Ready to Implement Conversational Marketing in Your Organization?
By engaging in conversations with customers through chatbots and messaging applications, companies can gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, deliver personalized experiences, and build customer loyalty.
Businesses can use this customer-centric form of marketing to shorten the sales cycle by generating leads and qualifying them. Additionally, businesses can use it to provide automated customer service solutions that don’t rely on manual processes.
With the right strategy, conversational marketing can help businesses improve engagement, drive more sales, and become more efficient by automating routine interactions.
