Do you know how to implement conversational marketing into your company? Stay tuned for everything you need to know.
What Is Conversational Marketing and How Does It Work?
Conversational marketing is marketing that talks directly to customers rather than at them. This is a relatively new type of marketing that businesses are increasingly implementing to keep up with the competition.
Conversational marketing employs technology to talk to customers and potential customers virtually and instantly. For instance, conversational marketing employs the use of live chat programs, chatbots, and voice assistants. These tools can be installed on your website, social media profiles, and even within physical stores.
Conversational marketing essentially combines different sales, customer service, and marketing elements for an extremely effective strategy.
However, you will need to strike a careful balance between these three different elements for an effective approach to conversational marketing. Specifically, you should focus on the customer service aspect while minimizing the sales and marketing aspects for the best results.
Why Implement Conversational Marketing?
It’s understandable that you may be hesitant to embrace new technology. However, conversational marketing is more than just hype, and it’s definitely here to stay. Here are some of the reasons why you need to be utilizing this type of marketing:
- Customers are increasingly expecting conversational marketing tools. More and more companies are using these tools. When you do not, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. If customers cannot get answers from your brand in a timely manner through conversational marketing, they’re likely to go to a competitor that can offer a timely and personalized response.
- Conversational marketing is a great way to build relationships with your customer base. This is especially true if you’re utilizing live chat with real humans. Customers will see that you’re going above and beyond to cater to them. They will remember this treatment when they go to make another purchase.
- Finally, conversational marketing allows you to gather, analyze, and then utilize a whole host of data that can improve your business operations. Through conversational marketing tools, you can collect information without seeming too invasive or annoying. You can then use this information to improve things like marketing tactics and beyond.
Steps to Implementing Conversational Marketing
There are three steps to implementing conversational marketing: engaging leads, understanding leads, and pitching leads. Let’s explore each step in greater detail so that you can implement them into your business:
Step 1: Engage Leads
In this type of marketing, engagement is done through chat instead of forms. This is a more efficient and effective method of communication. The best way to do this is through a live chat feature on your website. Your representatives can quickly and directly chat with leads.
However, it’s not really possible or practical to have live support on hand at all times. In this case, you may want to consider incorporating a chatbot into your website so that all of your customers get some kind of interaction no matter what time it is.
Step 2: Understand Leads
When you’re chatting with customers, you need to quickly determine what they want and how you can meet their needs in minutes rather than days. Having highly trained representatives or intelligent software solutions can help you quickly understand your leads and improve the chance of conversion as a result.
You need to give them the solution to their problem. In this step, it’s best to utilize real human interaction to close the sale. Customers will feel appreciated and listened to when you take the right pitch approach.
Conversational Marketing Best Practices
Although conversational marketing can be extremely beneficial for your business, success is never guaranteed. Here are some conversational marketing best practices for you to follow to achieve the best results:
- While it’s understandable that you may want to incorporate conversational marketing into all of your different business venues, this probably isn’t the most economical or beneficial approach. Instead, you need to take a more targeted approach by selecting the venues where you currently see the most business.
For instance, if you get a lot of leads from Facebook, you can utilize Facebook Messenger for conversational marketing. On the other hand, if your main source of business is your website, you can utilize chat tools (both live and bot) for conversational marketing. - Another way to be strategic with your conversational marketing for better results is to come up with answers to your most frequently asked questions. Doing so helps the chat feature work more efficiently and allows you to either incorporate bots with automatic responses or at the very least allow your live representatives to give quick and instant answers. While it’s impossible to anticipate every question, the odds are that you can cover a good portion of customer inquiries by planning ahead.
- Speaking of anticipation, you can take more initiative by launching your chat features as soon as someone visits the page. Start by saying hello and include a short introduction with the most relevant information about your business. Let the customer know that this feature is available for any and all questions. Incorporating conversational marketing right off the bat can help earn you a great first impression and hopefully a lead or a sale in the process.
- In terms of the language that you use in conversational marketing, the best practice is to keep it casual and helpful. Make sure to strike a balance between conversational and professional. Also, make sure that you’re using the right tone based on your brand and the right terminology based on your customers. Finally, never underestimate the power of real human interaction!
- Sometimes if your customers aren’t sure of what they want, it makes sense to do some self-promotion. When it comes to conversational marketing, you can often preempt customers’ questions and help guide them with more promotional material. For instance, you can pitch your best-selling item right off the bat. Not only does this eliminate some of the work performed by the customer in terms of browsing and research, but it can also help you make a sale if you do it properly.
- If you’re still not sure how to do conversational marketing properly — why not ask your customers directly? This method is also a great way to gather customer feedback. You should always incorporate feedback into your chat features to ensure that you’re taking the right approach. It doesn’t necessarily have to be incredibly detailed or in-depth; in fact, it probably shouldn’t be. Instead, embrace the quick nature of conversational marketing by including a general question about customer satisfaction as well as an option to provide additional input. Based on this data, you can take control of optimization.
Wrap Up on Conversational Marketing
If you need further guidance on conversational marketing or other marketing tactics, feel free to reach out to Greg Gillman. Greg specializes in omnichannel growth strategies for direct-to-consumer brands and has helped his clients generate $4 billion in annual growth — and he can do the same for you!
Sources:
Conversational Marketing Is the New Direct Marketing | Forbes
How to Use Conversational Marketing to Build Customer Relationships | Inc.
Hack Your Growth With This Conversational Marketing Platform | Entrepreneur
