What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational Marketing is based on one-to-one interactions in real-time across multiple channels. It enables you to foster customer relationships and improve your online customer experience by communicating and customising interactions online.
This style of inbound marketing puts a focus on interactions with the customer, not simply one-way transmission by the brand. Conversational Marketing aims to create relationships with the customer by building trust through conversations and by making the buying experience as smooth and easy as possible.
This approach doesn’t mean stopping your other marketing efforts and converting everything to Conversational Marketing – this is just a new tool available to marketers and a slightly different way of thinking about the objectives. Essentially, it is all about connecting your marketing activities directly with the sales team, ideally through one platform, so the customer has a smooth (and often faster) journey down the funnel.
Conversational Marketing is a method of engaging with website visitors and converting leads via dialogue-driven activities.
This journey is achieved by using tools to understand and communicate with the customer in the way they want. This can be done by using tools that integrate options like chatbots, live chat, messaging apps such as WhatsApp, SMS, phone calls, and social media into one platform. This holistic approach means that the customer and the sales team are seamlessly linked up, allowing for Conversational Marketing to take place.
What does a Conversational Marketing solution look like?
A conversational marketing strategy is usually built around either one or multiple solutions that allow you to reach out to your website visitors and engage them. A typical solution is built up of the following elements:
Conversation starter
This is the message that usually appears at the bottom right-hand corner of the website to encourage website visitors to click and engage. The button appears together with a message that can be personalized to fit the exact action, landing page, or product.
Lead capture tools to qualify
After clicking the conversation starter, users then enter a short conversation with a lead capture tool, like a chatbot. This process is where the chatbot will ask a series of simple questions in real-time to understand if the user needs customer support, sales assistance or looking to make a transaction. This is a good opportunity to inject some personalisation and make the potential customer feel like they’re in a real, meaningful conversation with the brand.
The chatbot (which is often tied to a social media account) qualifies the leads and either completes the sales process (in the event of a simple purchase intent) or gets the user to the right person to deal with more complex questions and requests. The concept is to segment assisted and unassisted sales as quickly as possible, providing value for the user as they are able to either complete transactions quickly or they can reach an expert on the sales team without changing their device or channel.
Live messenger
Qualified leads are then put in contact with a member of the sales team. The Conversational Marketing platform should provide the staff with notes on the user’s qualification and answers to questions. This is where the real value is added. Sales reps or call center agents should be able to guide users through the options, with a view to creating a customer through a sales conversation.
Live streaming video
Arguably the most challenging aspect of a Conversational Marketing solution is capturing visitors and engaging them. This is particularly true for higher value products, coaching or consultancy firms, and professional services. Sophisticated solutions let your sales team either share interactive content via web or app or alternatively broadcast live product demos or conduct Q&As in real-time. This means the conversation starter offers customers the chance to interact and engage with the sales agents in real-time, which offers real added value.
This can also be shared through social media and other marketing channels.
Why do you need Conversational Marketing?
There are many issues with current marketing activities that have led to this new development but in short, people are demanding more. Most companies would agree that their customer base wants more from their service and product, and more from the buying experience. A study by Forrester suggested that 87% of companies know that a traditional buying experience is no longer enough to satisfy their customers. Conversational Marketing is a response to this demand for a better experience in the digital age.
Conversational Marketing is more than just a buzzword
A recent report by Gartner into digital marketing and advertising highlights that Conversational Marketing is currently just entering the vocabulary of many marketers and will soon pique the interest of managers. There will soon be a lot of hype and expectations around this concept. Companies who are seen as early adopters stand to benefit from this.
Conversational Marketing is particularly powerful for complex or high-involvement purchases, such as financial products, coaching, professional services and consulting, telecoms, cars, and travel.
Customer experience is as important, if not more important than the product.
The world of commerce has never been so competitive. The growth of the internet has brought with it a wave of cheaper alternative products and services to claw market share away from more established brands. This means that the customer now has more choice and also that many products and services appear extremely similar, meaning buying experience now has a huge role in the purchase decision. From Netflix to Uber to Amazon, these are businesses that sell convenience and great customer experience as well as their product.
Research shows that 67% of buyers would consider an alternative brand if the online buying experience was difficult, showing that ease of purchase is a major factor when deciding what product to buy. This means users will pick services and products where the process is easier, more fluid, and quicker. Conversational Marketing helps produce this as it allows the consumer to do what they want when they want.
Consumers want to message you
Blaming social media for a lot of issues is popular at the moment, however, we all as mobile phone users have become accustomed to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and other types of social media. This habit change means we expect to be able to send a message and receive a response, in real-time. Traditional web forms stand in direct contrast to this, hence why their abandonment rates are so high and the industry average is 2.3%. A lead capture form alone is like Netflix’s DVD delivery service compared to its current online streaming – now it just feels out of date. In fact, a recent study found that most consumers actually want to message companies.
Landing pages are also converting at an all time low of just 2.35%. Marketers are fast realising that customers have moved on from the old clunky ways of communicating with brands.
Customer interaction means opportunity
When deciding on a new product or service, despite having all the information online, how many potential customers still like going to the store and chatting face-to-face? Granted, this footfall is decreasing over time but it is this gap between what people miss about face-to-face experiences and what’s currently available to them on websites where Conversation Marketing steps in. Using this approach provides companies with a huge opportunity to make the most out of their new store-fronts, their website, apps and social media pages.
Conversation Marketing leads to Conversational Sales
Conversational Marketing is the platform and technology used to engage, qualify and convert leads that want unassisted sales. It is basically the way in which you can work out exactly what users want and offer them the appropriate service or marketing. For those customers that need more assistance or have queries, they are put in touch with a member of staff. In order for Conversational Marketing to work, the concept of dialogue must not stop after qualification, it must be implemented also in the sales team and across relevant stakeholders.
Conversational Sales is what happens within the platform between the customer and the member of staff.
In many ways, a conversational approach comes more naturally to sales staff than it does to marketers. This means getting your sales team on board and trained upon presenting and video calls. This will prevent a disconnect between the online marketing experience which a customer may have and the sales team. If linked up well, this will create a smooth buying experience and help you create customers, faster and at a lower lead generation cost.
For more information about Conversational Sales, please see our article Conversational Marketing Leads to Conversational Sales.
