Introduction
The old ways of marketing are fast becoming outdated. With the proliferation of digital and social media, you can reach more people than ever before. However, these traditional channels do not allow for an engaging conversation with your customers.
For example, when you use a promotional email to promote a new product or service, there is no way for them to engage with you in a meaningful way. This is where conversational marketing comes in. Conversational marketing uses online digital channels and social media to develop meaningful relationships with your customers.
The goal of conversational marketing is to give your customers a real sense that they are talking directly to you, rather than some faceless brand representative who isn’t listening or caring what they have to say.
In other words, it’s about building trust between yourself and your potential customer so that they feel comfortable enough to engage with you. To connect with all of your customers, you can send them text messages using an SMS broadcast service. The best part is that you can easily automate or schedule hundreds or even thousands of texts for optimal delivery times, and you can personalize the messages so that every single recipient feels like they’re the only recipient. This helps create more effective relationships with your customers and ultimately increase customer loyalty that is unparalleled in traditional marketing channels.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is a way of advertising that allows for more engagement and communication between your business and its customers. This includes having a conversation on social media, participating in live events, or providing customer service over chat.
Conversational marketing is the act of engaging with customers in a meaningful way through conversation. It can be done on various platforms, including social media, email, or live events such as conferences or summits. Conversational marketing is different from traditional forms of advertising because it encourages two-way communication instead of one-sided.
Conversation has become an important part of our lives, and conversational marketing allows you to reach out directly to your customers through strategic conversations. This can be done by identifying their needs, solving problems, enhancing their experience with your product/service, and providing them added value, such as coupons or freebies throughout their interactions with your business.
The Key Elements of Conversational Marketing:
1. Conversations happen in customer-time.
The main focus of Interactive Marketing is to engage the customer in a dialog, with marketing taking the place of any third party. The company must be able to speak with their customers, and this can be done by providing them with useful information or even asking questions along the way.
Customer time is spent on the internet and social media, so it is important for companies to ensure that their customers are engaged if they want them to return. In most cases, Interactive Marketing involves innovative software and interactive websites that allow companies to reach out to their customers more personally.
Interactive Marketing can be used to provide more insight and information about a product or even ask customers questions. Interactive websites allow companies to create an interactive environment where their customers can enter live chats, post comments on blog posts, and comment on social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter directly from the website itself. This allows for immediate feedback while also providing additional content that they could not include in written form before hitting publish within the website or blog.
2. Conversations are scalable.
One key element of conversational marketing is that it’s scalable. In other words, conversations make it easy to develop and maintain a presence in a lot of different places at the same time.
For example, if you are planning a marketing campaign for your product or service that is going to be offered on Hotels.com, then it would be important for you to have conversations with customers about when they plan on staying at different hotels as well as what type of activities they might engage in while there. This allows the company to tailor its messaging and promotions based on these interactions/feedback from customers, potentially leading to more conversions.
3. Conversations have context.
There is context to the communication when you’re having a conversation with someone. This means that when this person replies to your message or posts something on Facebook, they are not just doing it randomly. They did it because they want feedback/information from you and, in turn, have decided what information or suggestions might be helpful for them as well.
Therefore, if these customers came across content about your company after their stay at another hotel (or any other brand), they are more likely to give you their online feedback or recommendations than someone who did not connect with your company during that stay.
As a result, these conversations can be beneficial for both sides of the conversation- the sender and receiver. This is an important distinction between marketing messages which generally do not have context due to low response rates (i.e., spam) or other forms of social media messaging such as organic search and paid advertising like PPC advertising.
4. Conversations meet customers where they are.
While many forms of marketing are effective (i.e., paid advertising, email), some other marketing activities tend to be less effective in meeting the needs and expectations of consumers. In particular, social media is one such activity that tends not to meet customers where they currently are on a computer or mobile device instead of on television or radio.
For example, people are on Facebook at home or in their office and not always walking around with a mobile device. They have time to read content and respond when they want instead of being rushed by some brand representative who wants them to spend more money on the company’s products/services.
Thus, your messages need to be relevant for customers where they currently are (i.e., from wherever you’re targeting), which is why it can work very well to set up an account on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
This means that even though you may have invested significant monetary resources into promoting your company with traditional platforms like TV or Radio, your marketing messages may not have the same effect if they are not being shared in a very meaningful way on social media.
The Benefits of Conversational Marketing:
1. Learn about your customers
Conversational marketing aims to engage with customers in a meaningful way. The idea behind this approach is that you can fully understand your customer’s needs and expectations based on their own personal experiences rather than simply following traditional sales funnel methods which are focused on producing incremental revenue through the sale of products or services.
Learning about customers through social media allows companies to understand better their customers’ needs and expectations related to the product or service they are selling. For example, suppose you sell food products with freezers that enable consumers to make fresh meals in minutes. In that case, your company’s sales representatives from different locations around the world (i.e., offices) need to interact online using Twitter and Facebook. There are people actively searching for freezers and are interested in food recipes.
2. Personalize solutions
In order to engage with customers in a meaningful way and understand their individual needs, marketers must know where the customer is, either physically or virtually. Conversational marketing allows you to do this by leveraging technology such as software applications that allow for real-time communication between people who have an online connection (i.e., Facebook messenger).
This means that if your company wants to provide a free gift of some sort when someone signs up for a new service from your business, you can easily do that through Facebook messaging technology. Personalize the solutions that your business is offering by developing relationships with customers online so that you can offer them products or services tailored to their individual needs.
3. Create positive experiences
Conversational marketing allows the consumer to truly feel as though they are part of a conversation that is taking place between two people who care about them. This will create long-lasting, positive experiences within your customer base, whether you provide an offer or share information.
Create positive experiences with customers by developing a relationship of trust and caring. Conversational marketing allows the company to personalize and create a positive experience for customers by providing them with tailored solutions that meet their individual needs.
4. Increased cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
Conversational marketing allows for the creation of positive experiences that allow you to increase revenue within your customer base. This is achieved by allowing customers to provide valuable feedback about products and services they frequently use without ever having contact with a sales representative from your business.
This can also increase the number of purchases within your customer base by encouraging them to buy related products and services. Increase revenue through cross-selling opportunities with customers by providing interesting content that is personalized for their needs.
5. Decrease the sales cycle
Conversational marketing allows you to decrease the time it takes for a prospective customer to complete simple tasks such as registering or making an offer with your business. This is because they are no longer required to go through the steps of using traditional sales funnel methods, which are focused on producing incremental revenue through the sale of products or services.
Conversational marketing allows for the reduction of your sales cycle by allowing you to create a conversation with potential customers. This can be as simple as creating an incentive that is worth more than just money, or it could involve helping them achieve their goals and dreams by providing information about products or services they are interested in purchasing.
Create positive experiences within customers through conversational marketing by encouraging feedback on your business and offering incentives that provide value, such as discounts, free trials, and other special offers to your customers.
Conversational Marketing Examples:
Domino’s Pizza
Domino’s Pizza is a pizza company that specializes in delivering pizzas to customers. This is a big part of their business, but it also comes with challenges like maintaining quality and cost control. They have created products on both fronts, such as new delivery methods and larger pizza boxes, to help maintain quality while reducing costs.
London & Company
London & Company is an upscale lingerie and sleepwear company. They have created a new way to engage consumers via their Facebook page that allows customers to discover what London & Company has in store for them through social media interactions with the brand’s virtual saleswoman named “Kiki.” This interaction creates various types of relationships between Kiki, the consumer, and other users based on positive responses or negative ones received by each user during the social media interactions.
HelloFresh
HelloFresh is a meal planning app that allows consumers to order and prepare meals based on their personal preferences. The company uses conversational marketing through Facebook Messenger because it gives them the ability to interact with users without having to leave social media, which led up until now was used for marketing purposes only.
Sephora
Sephora has created conversational marketing through Facebook to engage customers and build brand loyalty. The company allows its users to share their experiences with the products on social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter using hashtags that are related to each product.
How to Measure the ROI of Conversational Marketing:
Take a Close Look at Engagement
Engagement is a measure of how engaged people are with your brand. Engagement can be measured in many different ways, but one way is to track the number of likes and shares on posts that you publish on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram.
If engagement increases, then it means more people are engaging with your brand, and they are doing so more often and liking your posts. If the engagement increases, but your Facebook likes haven’t increased, then it means that people are using their Facebook accounts more often to engage with you.
Measure Direct Traffic to Landing and Product Pages
To measure the ROI of a social media strategy, it is important to measure how many people are coming to your website and buying products. Whether it is through direct traffic or social media engagement, one way you can do this is by tracking the number of visits that each visitor has on your landing page and product pages. This information will be helpful in figuring out if there is an increase in sales from your online marketing efforts.
Track Your Reputation
One effective way to measure the effectiveness of your conversational marketing strategies is by tracking how much people are talking about you on social media channels. If customers love or hate a company, this can be an indication that they have made an emotional connection with them and, therefore, will likely buy their products more often as a result of this. Another way to look at reputation is whether or not consumers trust what your brand has said through conversations on social media platforms. This can be done by tracking if people are asking questions about your brand or leaving negative reviews and comments.
Get Customer Feedback
In order to determine if a campaign is successful, it’s important to measure the return on investment. Some companies track the number of clicks on their website or the number of sales they receive after a particular campaign.
However, these metrics can be difficult to interpret because many factors could have caused those numbers to be high and low, such as changes in weather or advertising campaigns. Therefore, some companies have started using customer feedback as a way to measure the success of their campaigns.
Look at The Cost of Obtaining UGC (User-Generated Content)
By measuring the cost of obtaining UGC, marketers can determine their ROI on using conversational marketing tactics. With this in mind, it is important for marketers to understand the data they are getting from UGC posts.
The cost of obtaining UGC and its ROI depends on how frequently content is shared as well as how valuable the content is to users. This value can be based on the likes or comments that a post receives. The ROI of conversational marketing to companies is higher than traditional advertising because it can create a deeper relationship with customers and build loyalty.
Tips for Using Conversational Marketing Successfully:
1. Choose the right eCommerce platform
Conversational marketing campaigns are best suited for platforms that allow customers to make purchases directly from within the platform. Facebook and Twitter have been popular choices, but other options include Pinterest and Instagram. The key is to ensure your company’s product or service can be adequately promoted without turning off existing fans who may not want their posts used in promotions anyway.
2. Humanize your chatbots
In addition to using conversational marketing for promotions, there are other ways it can be beneficial in the eCommerce world. For example, a chatbot could offer customer support and provide information about your brand or product line. Consider adding links to products from your website on Facebook Messenger, and Twitter chats so customers will have access to them at all times without having to leave their messaging interface.
3. Integrate with your email marketing and social media
Integrating email marketing and social media is critical to the success of your conversational marketing campaign. You need to be always available for your customers, look at what they’re saying and act on it.
It’s important to always be in contact with your audience. This allows you to know what they want so that you can provide them with an experience that meets their needs. It’s also important for you to keep tabs on what your customers are saying about you, as this is an excellent way of knowing whether or not they’re happy with the products and services you provide.
4. Focus on the user and customer experience
By creating a great user experience, you’ll be better able to build relationships with your customers and convert them into loyal fans. After all, as mentioned earlier in the article, conversational marketing is about building meaningful connections with people by providing an engaging customer service experience over time.
As such, it’s important that users have everything they need from your product or service when using chatbots for e-commerce promotions whatever it may be.
It would help if you made it easy for customers to complete the process they want them to, making sure that you provide a smooth experience. This will keep your followers engaged and make it easier for them to return later on when they have more questions or are ready to buy.
5. Monitor and adjust the process
By monitoring and adjusting the process for using conversational marketing successfully, you can ensure that your campaign runs smoothly. For example, if there are times when people aren’t engaging with your chatbot, but they eventually do after more time has passed, it’s best to leave them alone and let them continue to interact without any interruptions.
Similarly, if someone seems confused or all of a sudden becomes passive-aggressive while interacting, it’s best not to respond to their comments. Remember to monitor the social media content and conversation as it’s important that you keep up with what your followers are saying both positively and negatively so that you can make changes if needed.
Conclusion
Conversational marketing is all about engaging with your customers in real-time. It’s a new way of connecting with your customers that can benefit businesses in many ways, but it also comes with some challenges.
In order to ensure that you have the right tools and strategies in place, I recommend that you first answer these questions: – What are my goals for conversational marketing? – Who am I trying to reach? – How do they want to be engaged, and what channels should be used? Once you’ve answered those questions, it will make it easier for you to put together an efficient plan on how best to execute our desired campaign.
In conclusion, conversational marketing is a great way to connect with your customers in real-time and increase customer satisfaction. Conversational Marketing is a tool that can be used by any business or brand. However, there are some common misconceptions about conversational marketing. One of the most common misconceptions is that Conversational Marketing will cost too much money. This misconception has been spread through different sources such as social media platforms, blogs, and websites. The main problem with this misconception is that it’s not true. Conversational marketing doesn’t cost too much money, but you might need to spend a little bit more on advertising your brand or business.