Conversational marketing has been the buzz of town lately. But what makes it so unique?
Conversational marketing has become one of the latest and most effective digital and content marketing trends. People need something they can relate to, something that connects to them. As a result, more than 71% of the consumers want to communicate with businesses in real-time.
Why do you think the store employee with the best conversational skills seems to be the most popular? Even salespeople who are good at conversations tend to bring the most business. The same idea implies conversational marketing.
Therefore, many businesses nowadays are jumping on the bandwagon to include more conversationalist elements to their websites, mobile phone apps – their digital presence in general. In return, more than 79% of businesses are noticed a significant positive result in purchases, ROIs, and especially customer retention. Because more than 52% of consumers are likely to return to companies that offer direct communication or live chat.
So, having seen the statistics and knowing the latest trend, where should you begin? What are the practices you should focus on more? Let us dive in and find out.
What is Conversational Marketing?
As the name suggests, conversational marketing is about making conversation with your potential customers. Many times, you will see basic forms asking your name, emails, and other information after a call-to-action on many business websites. Even though the idea behind them is correct, they prompt zero response in terms of conversation. It’s like a librarian who’s only allowed to shush you by the gesture. People like responsiveness and human touch to everything they do. So robotic voice in marketing and promotion doesn’t work anymore due to its limited, concise, redundant, and unhuman responses. It may be providing quick responses but, you might have heard machines are not yet completely ready to replace humans. This is when conversational marketing takes the reigns starting this decade, but it is here to stay!
However, the idea behind this marketing segment is not to prompt the question but rather to expect expected behavior. An automated conversation with a buyer so they can understand more about your service or product. Now, how exactly does it work?
Understanding your audience becomes necessary if you spend time in an industry for a while. So, what kind of questions would they like? And would they rather have proper answers to them? Or wait for you to get back to them? The answer is the former. So, here’s how it works:
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Hyper-Personalization
Personalization is right at the center of any conversational marketing strategy. You need to personalize your website, bots, etc., to connect with your target customer. Because as said before, if you cannot connect with your customer, then what is the point?
Hyper-personalization helps you understand the most common behaviors in any buyer. Some social media networks and apps already use it effectively. If you’re getting ads relevant to your recent searches, then it’s the AI doing its job.
Now, how can you incorporate this into this type of marketing tactic? First, understanding the most common desires in a target audience, helps you identify the kind of answers they could give you. Since conversational marketing is not a guessing game, hyper-personalization enables you to get accurate responses.
Including on website pages, live chats, etc. So, once you understand what your audience needs, your job is to personalize your marketing approach accordingly.
1. Live Chat – Bots
Live chatbots might often prompt you, whether you go to a brand’s website or visit their Facebook page. Now, the brand’s owners or marketing experts are expecting you—as well as what you’re looking for. So, what is the most common question that live-chat bots ask you?
Besides the greetings, they’d most likely ask you how they can be of assistance. However, the answers aren’t customizable. In the case of an eCommerce chatbot, they would offer you the most common and prompted responses; like their assistance regarding a product\service, ordering procedure, tracking, etc. but you cannot expect much from automated chat responses as of yet.
But it varies from business to business. The idea is to prompt the correct answers, though most common questions.
2. Live Chat – Representatives
The best way to indulge your business with conversational marketing is by placing an actual representative on the other side of the live chat. Many chatbots give you the option of speaking to a real person. Or seek assistance on a matter that does not present in the frequent questions.
So, placing a representative to hold a conversation stands out as perhaps the most convenient solution. If the representative understands your business and knows how to deal with customers, it helps you put your brand ahead of the curve.
Interactive Advertisements
Personalized advertisements, banners with enticing headlines, and stimulating videos for promotions aren’t that uncommon. But, what about an advertisement that lets you participate? Recently, Dove launched an interactive ad campaign that allows the target consumers to see themselves—with the promised result.
Now, Unilever had planned this over 21 years ago. But the availability of proper technology and marketing evolution was still far off to accept anything like this. Nevertheless, this vision has now become a central part of conversational marketing.
One such example is many eCommerce stores using virtual reality, allowing their consumers to browse their stores from anywhere in the world.
Now, with conversational marketing on the rise, marketers effectively incorporate these tactics. Encouraging and promising a more immersive trend in 2022.
Immersive Website CTA
A website’s call to action needs to be effective. Even if you write good copy—in a conversational tone—but it does not yield any result, it hasn’t been effective. So, how do you overcome that besides making conversational headlines and the body of your website’s copy? With good CTAs.
A good call-to-action needs to lead the customer to buy the product, get in touch with you, or interact with the website. It also needs to lead the customer on a buyer’s journey. So, how does conversational marketing tie in with this?
By talking them into it. What sort of response do you usually have with generic CTAs? You may give them your name, email, or phone number to “get a quote.”
However, if it had a human touch, guessed your answers for you without you having to type it, then it might be a different story. So, using an immersive website, CTA is bound to help you stand out among your competition.
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Using WhatsApp
WhatsApp is a great marketing tool. It’s a different rendition for businesses that indicates its role in the business community. It has two things you will need for conversational marketing:
- Business prowess.
- Conversation tools.
Any business encouraging their customers towards a WhatsApp number is bound to stand out. It warrants the human touch that so many buyers desire. It also guarantees an immediate answer to queries, resolutions, etc. So, employing it needs to be on top of your list.
Urging customers to contact them has been the recent trend of brands using social media. Therefore, you, too, should make the most of it.
Customer Resolution Centre
Not every business has this sort of solution for their customers. Once you sell a product or service, there might be feedback, complaints, etc. Providing them with a platform for after-sales affairs is bound to elevate your brand.
So, how to use it with conversational marketing? By employing the same approach that many businesses do these days. Encouraging common responses, helping your customer towards a swift and unyielding solution. How would it impact your brand? By ensuring you stand out as a customer-caring one.
As we all know today’s consumers have a strong array of defensive and offensive weapons, and suppliers that fail to settle complaints correctly and equitably. Thus, customers ask for instant resolutions. Therefore, having a customer resolution center will help you solve after-sales problems quickly and autonomously.
CRCs are vigorous and auditable, that is how they make the business comply with increasingly complex and changing regulatory obligations. There are backed by stable and responsive tech and tools for smooth interactions between companies and their customers.
CRCs are a great way to analyze data about customer sentiment, and business responses. This is how they inform to make the communication happen. They also allow swift resolution of client issues and queries. As a result, businesses can build customer trust and rebuild old connections for strengthening their business.
What is the reason behind focusing on CRCs?
Well, instant and robust customer resolution centers tend to facilitate the customers with the best responses with convenience and timeliness. Thus, it influences the audience’s buying behavior towards the brand or business. This approach works in ways that are incomparable to ads and promotions. The best part of the deal? It only costs you a fraction of the marketing expense and you don’t have to reach out to a bulk of the audience. Instead, they reach out to you themselves, but the catch is to be there with a rapid solution.
Customized CRM Strategy
The importance of effective communication and the necessity to develop a full-fledged connection with your prospects can no longer be overlooked. Therefore, you’ll need a dependable yet automated CRM, especially with SMS, emails, and in-app conversational tools integration, to develop this type of interaction with your valued clients.
1. Prompted Messages
A majority of target customers believe businesses should communicate with them regularly via SMS. This is because the channel is faster and more reliable, meaning it serves as a perfect tool for delivering secure and timely information and notifications to the target customers. In this regard, you can use SMS to send quick messages and updates whenever a case is edited or notify the staff in case of the assignment of tickets.
2. Prompted Emails
One of the most underrated features of CRMs is their ability to make email outreach more effortless and more effective with automated email senders. Given that 80% of buyers prefer to receive relevant emails from their favorite brands. Therefore, you need a strong email strategy with effective, prompt, and convenient messaging perspectives. With thousands of clients and millions of prospects, you can’t talk over email with each of them or spend 10-15 minutes creating each email. Instead, you need competitive resources and tools to thrive in this modernized era. Thus, using CRM’s email and automation tools you can speed up the outreach process without sacrificing personalization, quality, or wasting any time.
Conversational Apps
Conversational apps are making a tremendous difference in creating a better user experience for both businesses and clients. As customers and prospects expect responsive interactions, they also want to feel as though they are communicating with companies directly and on a personal level. These apps offer the most engagement and effectiveness. Where conversational apps like WhatsApp and Messenger are a great way to cut down the delivery time for users by a good 40%. At the same time, it enables the business to get more projects and sales, which can go up to 25% of increased business.
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Conclusion
Modern customers like a hassle-free life with convenient ways of shopping. Thus, they require everything at their fingertips without the need for long waiting lines. To provide for the customer’s conversational marketing technique is the fastest way to go.
Therefore, conversational marketing is rapidly becoming an essential digital marketing technique, just as VR. If you haven’t heard of it before, this guide must have been a real discovery for you! So, now that you know everything, what are you waiting for? Start planning your strategy and see real-time results.
This article is written by Aimen Kahn. Aimen is a skilled writer with vast experience in providing content writing services at Pro Content Club having served several different industries she’s now exploring the digital marketing side and helping businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs establish their online presence with compelling content. Having worked with numerous big names, she aims to help the struggling ones on priority for a change.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
