It seems like everyone is talking about conversational marketing and boasting about its conversion rates, but what is it, and how can you implement it to make your business prosper? Check out our article to find out!
Conversational marketing is such a hot topic in the digital marketing world, but what is it, and how can you implement it in your business to develop your brand? In this article, we are going to break down conversational marketing and its principles, and show you why all kinds of products such as jewelry, fashion, no deposit bonus slots, and software are being sold by this innovative marketing method. Let’s get started!
Conversational Marketing Definition
Conversational marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on engaging with website visitors via a two-way dialogue between the customer and company. The goal of conversational marketing is to establish connections with customers and improve the buying experience by engaging customers in an instant, live, and meaningful conversation.
5 Core Principles of Conversational Marketing
To learn how to build an effective conversational marketing campaign, you need to understand the principles that make conversational marketing so effective. Let’s check them out below.
The Customer Comes First
A sound conversational marketing strategy always emphasizes the customer over the company. This means you should not be hard selling and rather focus on serving your customers. During early interactions, your salesmen should not be pressuring customers to purchase solutions, but instead, they should be acting as industry experts, learning about the customers’ problems, providing solutions, and giving them helpful information. Great conversational marketing content to send your potential buyers includes industry guides, links to your blogs, and product guides.
If there is a potential fit for your products, your salesmen should naturally explain how your products can help the customer, rather than trying to shove them down the customer’s throats. The whole conversation should be laid back and should be an even exchange, where the customer comes away feeling like they had a helpful and genuine interaction. Your employees should also make the effort of hosting a conversation where the customer feels comfortable. For example, if the customers want to email, don’t bombard them with phone calls!
Focus On the Conversational Aspect
It is time to throw away the sale scripts and the company catchphrases! If you want to run an effective and qualified conversational marketing strategy, you need real conversations with your potential buyers. When having these meaningful conversations, you need to strike a balance between casual and professional. While you shouldn’t be using slang and poor grammar, at the same time, you shouldn’t be writing an academic paper.
You want to keep the conversation relaxed and easy, but still provide valuable information to your potential buyers. Conversational marketing trends have indicated that customers enjoy talking about themselves and their personal lives, but most of the conversation should still be focused on business. Therefore, finding that balance is incredibly important when talking to your potential buyers.
Personalization and Customization Are Keys For Conversational Marketing
Generic responses and treating every customer the same is not going to work if you want to build an effective conversational marketing platform. You need to tailor your messages, style, and tone based on the particular customer you are dealing with. Some of this can be automated, for example, you can track a customer, and when they open a chatbot, send messages such as “Welcome back, we missed you”, “Hi, I hoped you enjoyed our last conversation a few months ago”.
Most of your conversational personalization has to come down to the skills of your sales staff. Your sales team needs to be able to identify different types of potential customers and have the conversations the customers want. For example, Customer A may want to chat about the trends in the industry, while Customer B might want to do a deep dive into the features of your product. Conversational marketing tools such as customer data platforms can help your sales team learn everything about the customer and tailor the conversation to their needs. The ability to give each individual customer exactly what they are looking for is a critical aspect of conversational marketing!
Sales and Marketing Need to Work Together
Conversational marketing research has shown that for a conversational marketing strategy to succeed, it needs a sales and marketing team working together! This is because conversational marketing is constantly occurring throughout the buyer’s journey, from the customer initially finding out about your company to signing a contract or hitting the buy button.
In conversational marketing, the hand-off to the sales team occurs at a much faster rate. Therefore, two teams need to work much more closely, and the marketing department needs to be able to quickly get their sales team up to speed on the buyer while the sales guys need to learn how to seamlessly keep the conversation.
Conversational Marketing Needs to Be Easy!
For conversational marketing to work, the customer needs to be able to have valuable and instant conversations which feel as natural as chatting to a friend. To achieve this, you need to take the following actions:
- Real-time response – Customers don’t want to wait around. When they message your chatbot or social media channel, they expect to connect with your team instantly. To provide this service, you need a combination of automation and team coordination.
- Customer data – To give customers what they need, you must know where they are in the buyer’s journey, what information they are seeking, and how you can exactly help them. This is where CRM platforms are incredibly powerful.
If you can leverage these two actions, your conversational marketing strategy will be a big success.
Conclusion
A well-structured conversational marketing campaign can cause your conversion rates to skyrocket and leave your customers feeling a deep connection with your company. To start implementing conversational marketing, follow our principles and start serving customers today! We would love to hear your opinions on conversational marketing. Please comment below on what conversational marketing benefits you have received and how they have boosted your business.
