As a business owner or manager, you must recognize the benefits of conversational marketing. Research conducted by Kayako shows that 79 percent of entrepreneurs experience increased sales after implementing this alternative form of marketing. While traditional forms of marketing revolve around ads and promotional content, conversational marketing takes a more personal approach to connecting with your audience.
What Is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing involves real-time, dialogue-based interactions between a business and its audience. It is known as “conversational marketing” because it revolves around conversations. Prospects and customers will converse with the company in real-time.
Traditional forms of marketing may consist of communications between a business and its audience, but they typically are not two-way interactions, nor do they consist of real-time conversations.
Launching an advertising campaign or sending a promotional email to your newsletter subscribers will spread your marketing message to the targeted users. Those users, however, will not be able to converse with your business in real time through ads or email.
Conversational Marketing Tactics
You can leverage live chat for conversational marketing if your business has a website. Live chat is a website feature that allows users to chat with a company. Some users may have questions about your business’s goods or services. Rather than emailing and waiting for a response, they can ask questions in real-time using live chat.
In addition to live chat, you can use a chatbot for conversational marketing. A chatbot is a piece of software designed to simulate conversations with users. It allows for similar dialogue-based interactions as live chat. The difference is that a chatbot is entirely automated, whereas live chat requires manually responding to users.
You can use social media for conversational marketing. Most social media networks offer real-time interactions. Users can send you a message or start a new chat session, and you can instantly respond to their messages.
Conversational marketing is all about building relationships with prospects and customers through conversations. These conversations may occur on your business’s website, social media profiles, or other platforms.
You can collect valuable data with conversational marketing. Most businesses record their conversations. They keep records of all conversations between their customer service agents, chatbots, and users. By analyzing these conversations, they can identify common problems and areas of weakness.
How Conversational Marketing Can Benefit Your Business
With its focus on real-time, dialogue-based interactions, conversational marketing can benefit your business in several ways. You can use it to provide a personalized experience. When conversing with your customers in real-time, you can mention their names or reference their past purchases.
Personalized experiences such as this require information about the prospect or customer with whom you are conversing. Whether a user contacts you via live chat, chatbot, or social media, you should have access to some basic information about them. Applying this information to your conversations will create a personalized experience relevant to that user.
Conversational marketing can help you achieve a faster time to resolution. Time to answer is a customer service metric. It represents the average length of time that it takes a business to resolve a customer’s problem. Customers may contact your business for a resolution when they encounter an issue.
According to a study by Drift, over half of all businesses say conversational marketing allows them to respond to customers’ problems more quickly. There’s no delay between these interactions. Customers can notify your company about the problem, and you can instantly respond with a resolution. The result is a faster time to resolve.
Conversational marketing can increase customer loyalty. According to Salesforce, 71 percent of customers expect real-time interactions when communicating with businesses. Conversational marketing will allow you to provide your customers with real-time interactions, making them less likely to leave in favor of a competitor.
You could reduce your business’s marketing expenses by using conversational marketing. It is a cost-effective way to interact with prospects and customers and promote your business, and they tend to cost less than traditional forms of marketing.
For higher conversion rates, conversational marketing is the way to go. A report published by Intercom found that businesses experience 20 to 30 percent higher conversion rates after implementing conversational marketing.
The Rise of Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing has become increasingly popular. In comparison, it is not a new marketing strategy. The rise of conversational marketing is due to advancements in artificial intelligence (AI).
Some of the world’s biggest brands, from Microsoft and Google to Apple and Amazon, openly embrace AI. Businesses are jumping on the bandwagon using chatbots, a conversational marketing tactic.
AI drives chatbots. The software converses with users as if the chatbot was a natural person. Many chatbots now use highly advanced AI systems, and their discussions are nearly indistinguishable from live chat conversations. Conversational marketing, of course, includes both chatbots and live chat. With AI becoming smarter, many businesses use chatbots for marketing purposes.
Another factor that is influencing the rise of conversational marketing is mobile internet usage. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s internet traffic originates from a mobile device, according to Statista. Conversational marketing is perfect for mobile devices. Mobile users can launch a live chat or chatbot dialogue box to begin conversing with your business. Alternatively, they can use a social media messaging app like Facebook Messenger.
Conversational marketing is not just a buzzword that is here today and gone the next. It is a future-proof marketing strategy that can help your business grow. Some of the benefits of conversational marketing include personalization, a faster time to resolution, cost-effectiveness, higher conversion rates, and an overall better customer experience.
Before helming Perpetual Talent Solutions as President, Jim Hickey held several senior leadership roles in both sales and operations for two of the world’s largest Commercial Staffing organizations. Jim is a dedicated professional who has been formally recognized as a Staffing Industry Subject Matter Expert.