Conversational Marketing 101: A Better Way of Engaging With Customers

As digital marketing evolves, so do the needs of users and customers. Unlike before, customers are not satisfied with only receiving promotional materials from brands through emails, ads, and social media marketing. Although these strategies can still help businesses reach out to their target audience and convince them to buy their products or pay for their services, it may be challenging to do so.

If you want to get ahead of your competition and establish lasting relationships with your customers, you need to put more effort into engaging with your target audience. Although reaching out to every user to try and turn them into customers might sound tedious and challenging, doing so can provide your business with a lot of benefits. But you would need a strategy that will guide you and your team as you transition into a more engaging brand, and the answer is conversational marketing.

What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is a strategy that focuses on having real-time conversations with customers to better understand their needs and preferences. The goal of conversational marketing is to provide personalized experiences for customers while they’re engaging with your brand, as well as help them make informed decisions when it comes to buying a product or service.

Another thing you can achieve when using conversational marketing is a quicker customer journey. This can happen because instead of having your target audience go through various lead capture forms and wait several days for a response, you can use conversational marketing to address their needs right away.

Even if you and your team members are not available to talk to customers right away, you can still provide them with exceptional customer service through conversational marketing. This is possible with the use of targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots that you can add to your website and social media pages.

Making it easier for your target audience to engage with your brand can help you convert more right leads quicker. Conversational marketing makes this happen seamlessly and efficiently.

Changing the Way You Communicate With Your Customers

One of the most important rules in marketing is to meet your target audience where they are or, in this case, communicate the way they do. However, the traditional marketing methods you might have learned and used before no longer align with how customers shop.

Customers nowadays are used to utilizing instant messaging when communicating with each other because it’s faster, easier, and more natural. In fact, some of the most used communication channels by individuals in 2021 include email, SMS, and voice. There’s no surprise that this trend is the same in 2022.

On the other hand, most businesses are still stuck using the same marketing strategies that require users to go through a tedious process before a conversation even starts. The process might involve the user being redirected to a landing page where they fill out a form. Then, they become a lead in a brand’s CRM and get scored and assigned a lead. This is only when they will receive some kind of response in the form of calls and automated emails. Once the customer responds to the initial outreach, only then will they be scheduled for a qualifying call and, later, a sales call.

The whole process of having a customer be interested in a brand to get an actual person to talk to them can take several days up to weeks. For the customer that is used to instantly getting replies whenever they try to start a conversation, this kind of approach will be ineffective because it’s seen as cold, impersonal, and too complex than needed.

To fix the outdated marketing methods that you might still be using for your company, you need to make your brand feel personal. This involves focusing on providing your customers with authentic experiences that can convince them to support your business.

The Benefits of Conversational Marketing

The main reason you might use conversational marketing for your brand is to address the changing needs of your target audience. However, by doing so, you’re also allowing your team and company to enjoy various benefits, including the following:

Humanize the Customer Experience

Conversational marketing can help you humanize the customer experience by providing your target audience with real-time interactions. With this marketing strategy, your website or social media page will feel like a welcoming store that is always attended by knowledgeable staff. You can even provide customers with personalized replies to their questions and comments, further enhancing their customer experience.

Adding a more human touch to your customer service strategy allows you to start your relationships with customers on a positive note. This can then lead to a better chance of them becoming loyal supporters of your brand.

Learn More About Your Customers

Using lead forms is ideal if you want to learn basic information about your target audience. They can provide you with a quick glance into the kind of prospects you’re dealing with. However, these forms are not great if you want more context about why a user decided to visit your website, their specific needs, and the feature they are most excited about. Fortunately, conversational marketing can help you dive deeper into what makes each customer tick.

By observing how customers talk and interact when engaging in conversations with your brand, you have a better idea of their needs, interests, and even pain points. This data is valuable as it helps you better tailor the product or services you offer, create more relevant content, and personalize the customer experience. At the end of the conversation, you will also have a clear idea of what the customer is actually looking for, whether be it support or product recommendations.

Convert More and Better Leads

The traditional marketing strategies you’re using for your company might be stopping interested users from actually learning about your brand and what you offer. Having your target audience download gated content or fill out a lead form might just be too complicated for them and cause them to lose interest in your business.

With conversational marketing, you have a better chance of converting leads because they don’t need to take complicated steps. All they need to do is talk with your customer service team, and the rest is up to your automated chatbot and agents. By responding promptly to their inquiries and providing them with the information they need, you can then slowly guide them toward taking the desired action that you’re aiming for.

Provide Personalized Recommendations

People want to feel like they’re understood and that their needs are heard. What better way to show this to your customers than by providing them with personalized recommendations?

When you invest in conversational marketing, you can easily offer each customer the product or service that is relevant to their current needs. You can achieve this by using automated chatbot tools that can analyze customer preferences and provide them with the best recommendations. This allows customers to feel like your team is listening to their needs and that you are offering them solutions tailored to their specific requirements.

Using conversational marketing also allows you to nurture leads until they’re qualified or ready to buy. To achieve this, you can use chatbots that will provide users with relevant information about your products or services that will move them further down the lead funnel. This helps increase your chance of successfully converting leads into paying customers.

Have a Shorter Sales Cycle

With the help of conversational marketing, you can accelerate your sales cycle. You can do this by using automated chatbot tools that will provide customers with all the information they need about your product or service 24/7.

This is more efficient since customers don’t have to wait for a customer service representative to answer their inquiries. Chatbots can provide answers instantly and accurately, allowing customers to gain the knowledge they need without wasting any time. This makes them more likely to make a purchase decision faster, shortening their sales cycle.

Enjoy Improved Engagement

Customers don’t always want to talk about sales. Sometimes, they want to engage in conversations that can help them learn more about a particular product or service.

By using conversational marketing, you can provide a platform for your customers to engage in meaningful conversations with your team. This helps build relationships, as well as increase customer engagement and loyalty. It also allows your brand to stay in the minds of your customers, which can then lead to more sales.

Getting Started With Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing pushes you to step away from the traditional methods you are using. However, investing in conversational marketing does not mean that you need to throw away all your resources and start from scratch. Instead, you should treat starting with conversational marketing the same way you would a new lead generation channel that can directly complement your existing marketing efforts and provide you with a new way to engage with your target audience.

To get started with conversational marketing, you need to understand the three steps of the conversational framework:

• Engage
• Understand
• Recommend

It’s an innovative way of interacting with your target audience, establishing relationships with them, and encouraging them to move further your sales funnel. Let’s discuss each step.

Engage

Businesses that allow their customers to instantly start a conversation without having them spend several minutes filling out a lead generation form enjoy various benefits. For most of them, this strategy results in higher conversion rates, better relationships with customers, and more sales opportunities.

To generate more leads and improve your conversion rates, you should grab the chance to talk with your customers whenever possible. This means starting a conversation with them when they download content, contact your sales team, register, or book a demo. After the initial contact, you can then move users along your sales funnel instead of having them wait for hours or days for a follow-up email.

However, it might be hard to always have someone monitoring your messages and responding to customers. After all, you and your team still need time to rest and do other tasks. This is where chatbots come in.

Chatbots are AI-powered software that can simulate human conversations, are programmed to follow specific rules, and walk customers through the sales funnel. They can also help qualify leads by asking them questions about their needs and preferences. With this technology, you can engage with users whenever they want to interact with your brand.

You can also use chatbots to send targeted messages to users who are most likely to buy from your brand. Instead of waiting for them to initiate the interaction, you can take the first step by providing them with assistance. This way, you can increase the chances of turning your prospects into customers.

Understand

The next step you should do when you begin with conversational marketing is to understand what your target audience needs from your brand. Being able to give what your prospective customers are looking for in a short period will help you build trust and increase your chances of closing more deals.

According to a study done by the Harvard Business Review, you can have better chances at qualifying a lead when you respond within five minutes of initial contact. Waiting any longer than this period can drastically affect your odds of qualifying a lead, decreasing it by 400%. But you can only successfully qualify a lead when you have an idea of their pain points and what they want from your company.

To better understand your audience’s needs, you can use your chatbot to ask them specific questions. Make sure to program your chatbot with similar questions to the ones you ask on forms or during qualifying calls.

Recommend

The final step of the conversational marketing framework is recommending a product or a service to the customer. After you understand what your customers want and need, it’s time to present a solution that fits their requirements.

To ensure that you recommend the right solution to your target audience, it’s best to transition to human-to-human interaction. Although chatbots nowadays are advanced enough to provide a relatively good consultation service, nothing beats the assurance that comes with talking to a real person.

You can make the transition from a chatbot to a sales agent more seamlessly with automation. Doing so will also help you ensure that your customers will be directed to the right customer representative who specializes in the customer’s particular needs.

Start With Conversational Marketing Today

Conversational marketing is an innovative strategy that suits the way customers shop and interact with each other nowadays. It is also an effective way to generate more qualified leads, increase customer engagement, and build trust with your target audience. By following the outlined steps, you will be able to make the most out of this strategy.

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