What is conversational marketing?

Traditionally, companies would market to customers by creating media and publishing it on publicly-accessible platforms, such as newspapers, TV, and the internet. Prospects then consumed content passively, without any direct engagement with the brand.

However, conversational marketing aims to turn that paradigm on its head. Instead of putting content in front of consumers, firms engage them directly.

What Is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing, as the name implies, means talking to customers in a two-way dialogue. It’s the art of conversing to move them closer to conversion.

Conversational marketing can take various forms. Proactive chats occur when the business initiates a conversation, and the consumer responds. These tend to be the most common. By contrast, reactive conversational marketing occurs when the customer gets in touch first. For example, website visitors may fill out a form on your website or talk to you through a live chat app on your homepage.

The purpose of conversational marketing is to understand, anticipate, and respond to customer needs during their journey toward making a purchase. Most firms use scripts to move them down the sales funnel. Hence, conversations aim to:

• Qualify leads
• Speed up the sales process
• Clear up any confusion customers might have
• Direct customers to the right products
• Maintain relationships with existing clients
• Recommend new products or services
• Respond to queries and use them as a selling opportunity

The following table shows some of the key differences between traditional marketing and conversational marketing:

Differences between traditional and conversational marketing

How Does Conversational Marketing Benefit Businesses?

The benefits of conversational marketing are considerable. Getting it right could provide you with a significant advantage over your rivals. Here’s how:

Enhanced Lead Generation

Generating leads from generic marketing materials is challenging. Optimising the customer experience and getting leads to enter your sales funnels is harder.

But with conversational marketing, you have more power. Chats let you assess customers in-depth, learn more about their needs, and make recommendations. In short, you can ask them the right questions, setting them on a path towards conversion.

Improve The Customer Experience

Conversational marketing also improves the customer experience. Reps or chatbots can learn more about clients’ pain points, helping them find the right product or fix.

Once you know them better, sending them relevant emails and targeted messages is more straightforward. You learn how to target them in-depth.

Remember, 46 per cent of customers get frustrated when firms cannot provide answers immediately. Therefore, effective conversational marketing is always real-time. Customers can get in touch immediately and find genuine solutions to their problems.

Move Prospects Through Your Sales Funnel Faster

Lastly, conversational marketing lets you move buyers through your sales funnels faster because it connects your sales and marketing teams.

In a traditional setup, marketers produce content and distribute it on platforms. Customers then contact firms, and sales teams take over.

But with conversational marketing, sales teams become marketers. They sell to customers and website visitors in real time.

The Difference Between Chatbots And Live Agents In Conversational Marketing

Brands have a choice over how to communicate with customers for conversational marketing purposes. Most use a conversational UI of some description, such as chatbots, live agents, or a combination.

The hybrid approach is currently the most popular because it leverages the advantages of both. A typical conversation begins with a chatbot pop-up on a brand’s homepage asking visitors if they have any questions or would like help.

If the chatbot can resolve the issue without resorting to a human agent, it will. (Common examples of this include answering frequently-asked questions). However, if the AI can’t, it’ll pass the visitor onto a human agent.

Today’s chatbots are considerably more capable of conversational marketing than just a few years ago. They can:

• Communicate with customers using natural language processing (NLP)
• Integrate with customer relationship management tools (CRMs) to make individual leads easier to track
• Chat with leads across multiple platforms
• Improve their responses through training and machine learning
• Provide programmed responses to users’ trigger words
• Record, organise, and analyse customer data, website interactions, company information and more

The primary function of chatbots is to answer frequently asked questions and route website visitors to suitable human agents. They are also helpful for promoting products or gathering feedback.

However, despite recent advances in chatbot technology, today’s solutions can only assist customers within a narrow domain. They can’t yet function identically to human agents, particularly in more complex matters.

Therefore, live chat agents augmented by the proper technology can be helpful. These professionals interact directly with customers via chat messaging, providing additional services not available through chatbots.

For instance, agents can answer more complex questions involving contextual knowledge. They can also solve more complicated problems, including rare, multi-faceted issues.

Lastly, agents tend to be better than chatbots at building rapport. Customers often prefer to interact with them because of the way they communicate.

Live chat can integrate into various messaging apps and platforms for even greater user-friendliness. Depending on customers’ needs, agents can communicate over Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Zoom, or SMS.

Conclusion

In summary, conversational marketing is a powerful technique to communicate with customers in highly-saturated markets. Agents or chatbots can quickly discover their needs and bypass pain points through two-way interaction. Ultimately, it overcomes many of the limitations of conventional marketing methods.