Conversational marketing uses a one-on-one conversational approach to marketing that involves targeted, real-time messaging to create a more human buying experience. By using inbound and outbound marketing tactics to start a dialogue with prospective customers that can benefit from your products and services, conversational marketing will allow you to shorten your sales cycle and close more business.
To be able to master conversational marketing, you must listen to your customers just like you would listen in a conversation. Unlike other forms of marketing, conversational marketing does not involve blasting your message outward. Instead, by being an active listener, you an uncover opportunities to serve prospective customers.
Make Business Personal Again
Over the years marketers have become so focused on data and metrics. A/B testing, retargeting, and email blasts have all become key components in a digital marketing strategy. While data allows marketers to be more intentional and can provide a lot of value, it seems that many businesses have lost sight of what is most important: the customer.
As a result of the heavy emphasis on data, many digital marketing strategies have become cold and impersonal. Leads are treated as faceless entities on spreadsheets rather than actual people. Losing sight of the customer creates a bad experience, which is ultimately bad for business.
Finding a way to bring one-on-one conversation into your marketing strategy and making the dialogue the center of everything will set your business apart from the competition.
How to Master the Art of Conversational Marketing
Believe it or not, there’s actually an art to mastering conversational marketing. By embracing the following principles of conversational marketing, you, too, can make marketing personal again:
1. Real-Time Engagement.
With traditional marketing, prospects fill out static lead forms and then wait for wait for a follow-up conversation with the business that may or may not happen. On the other hand, conversational marketing focuses on having one-on-one conversations with prospective customers in real-time, whether it be face-to-face or via chatbot conversations.
The use of intelligent chatbots are on the rise, and they can be setup to address customer questions in real-time, whether it be during the business day or late in the evening. Being able to engage your customers in real-time is crucial to the success of your business because people will be willing to turn elsewhere if they can’t get their questions answered promptly.
2. Scalable Conversations.
Being able to have one-on-one conversations with customers has always been preferable; however, it hasn’t always been feasible. Historically, in order to have 100 one-on-one conversations with customers, you needed to have the manpower. However, thanks to the rise of chatbots, a single employee is able to manage multiple one-on-one conversations at the same time. Because chatbots offer the ability to scale conversations, we’ve seen conversational marketing take off.
3. Personalized Experience.
With conversational marketing, every interaction that you have with prospective customers has context. Ideally, when a customer arrives on a particular page on your website, you can use a chatbot to have a personal, real-time conversation about the content that the visitor is looking at. Offer a welcome message that says something like, “Hi! This is [your name]. Let me know if you have any questions about our product offerings.” Creating a personal, humanized experience for your customers will go a long way in helping you to earn more conversions.
4. Acceptance of Customer Feedback.
All too often, businesses are cut off from their customers and rely solely on their internal team to dream up their marketing strategies. Taking a conversational marketing approach is different, though, as every interaction with a customer provides the business with an opportunity to hear their opinions. Savvy business owners view this customer feedback as the battery that powers their marketing strategy.
As you can see, there’s nothing Earth shattering about these principals of conversational marketing. Taking this approach is simply about making the customer the focus of your strategy. It’s worth your while to listen to your customers and find a way to engage them in real-time with meaningful conversation. As a result, you’ll be able to create a personal and memorable experience for your customers, which will help you to stand out in today’s competitive market.
How New York Ave Can Help You Be More Conversational
Our team at New York Ave firmly believes in using conversational marketing to create a more positive experience for our clients. By helping you to craft personalized digital marketing strategies, we can help you make your business more memorable to your target audience.
Contact us to learn more about conversational marketing and how you can incorporate these essential elements into your own digital marketing strategy.
