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Conversations bring new customers to help your business

Conversational marketing establishes relationships through the age-old concept of talking to one another, making for smooth customer conversions.


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James L Katzaman

2 years ago | 5 min read

Promote all your products and services in a more customized way

Photo by Creative Christians on Unsplash

Conversational marketing is as simple as its name implies. It establishes relationships by the age-old concept of talking to one another, making for smooth customer conversions.

“Conversational marketing engages audiences in a dialogue-driven personalized one-to-one communication,” said Shruti Deshpande. “Businesses gain unique customer insights while providing value about their products and services, but in a more customized manner.”

Deshpande has specialized in building from conversations. A business-to-business marketer with a passion for personified storytelling, she exchanged insights with digital marketing expert Madalyn Sklar about conversational marketing on Twitter.

How may I be of service? Let’s chat
Chatbots aid productivity with a human touch behind the techarvrjourney.com

“Conversational marketing lets brands have a more effective means of engaging and hence convert customers faster,” Deshpande said.

From the start, customers are guided down the right path.

“Conversational marketing involves having a dialogue-focused approach to your overall marketing strategy,” Sklar said. “By using real-time conversations, you’re able to establish relationships and move people through your sales funnel with ease.”

Marketing is greatly aided by using the right tools at the right time, as Nick Martin of social media management platform Hootsuite explained, giving these examples:

“When building your Twitter toolkit, make sure you find programs that fit your needs and goals,” Martin said.

For more recommendations, Hootsuite lists 47 Twitter tools to use in marketing strategies.

Better Than Billboards

Sklar also has her favorite Twitter marketing tools:

“Conversational marketing is great for brands that want to use personal experience strategy to capture more information about their customers,” Deshpande said. “They can use it to make their customers repeat purchases.”

Take a message to the next level
Get acquainted with messenger marketing and chatbotschatbotslife.com

She gave these examples:

  • Domino’s uses text messages to encourage previous customers to order again with a simple pizza emoji.
  • Sephora — a makeup and skin care company — automatically books appointments through Facebook messenger using geolocation to encourage people to come to the storefront.
  • Lyft — the second-largest ridesharing company in the United States after Uber — has used chatbots on various platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Slack and Amazon Echo to make it easy for customers to request rides.

“Any brand can use conversational marketing,” Sklar said. “These days, social media encourages brands to be social and develop strong relationships with potential customers. Don’t neglect that.”

Conversational marketing differs from traditional marketing.

“You can turn things traditionally seen as marketing materials into interactions or dialogue-driven activities,” Deshpande said. “In other words, it’s automated conversation with your website visitors.”

Customized for You

There is definitely a more personal approach.

“Traditional marketing is typically focused on creating a singular message to reach the masses,” Sklar said. “With conversational marketing, you’re having a personalized conversation, allowing you to make genuine connections and answer questions one on one.”

Deshpande gave these examples of conversational marketing: live chat, chat bots, voice assistants and other forms of conversational artificial intelligence such as a virtual product advisor.

“Many brands have begun using a text app as a way to connect with their audience,” Sklar said. “For example, marketer Gary Vaynerchuk provides motivational messages, tips and reminders of upcoming events. The app invites your audience to respond — kickstarting a great conversation.”

Conversational marketing is the word
People like to interact with businesses before buying from themmedium.datadriveninvestor.com

Deshpande depicts these benefits of using conversational marketing:

  • Collect accurate customer data
  • Personalized communication
  • Build more context in your pitch and shorten sales cycles
  • Build stronger relationships
  • Improve customer satisfaction
  • Can be automated and available 24–7

“There is often such a large variety of product traits, benefits, costs and customizations that the customers cannot choose the best one for themselves,” Deshpande said. “However, when they interact with a brand, they are given best-in-class context about the choices they have.

“Conversational marketing is driven by customers — like a chatbot, live chat or voice assistants,” she said. “Those should be ‘on’ as long as you want customers coming through the door.”

Much More Information

Specialized attention is the big payoff.

“Through conversational marketing, you can build stronger relationships and learn more about your customers,” Sklar said. “Then offer personalized solutions based on what they need the most at the moment.”

With that in mind, business owners can implement a conversational marketing strategy, which Deshpande broke down:

  • Step 1: Engage. Using friendly chat bots — depending on user intent — you can offer personalized solutions powered by artificial intelligence.
  • Step 2: Understand. Based on responses from Step 1, along with their behavior on your website, create customer segments while focusing on qualified leads.
  • Step 3: Recommend. Once you know what they want, recommend the most relevant option best for them. Nurture them further via email campaigns, coupons and discounts, free demos and webinars so they are ready to buy.
  • Step 4: Convert. At this stage your sales reps know far more about these leads and can hold more personalized conversations with these qualified leads, making it easier to convert them.

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Yesterday’s way to do business must change for today’s worldmedium.datadriveninvestor.com

“Make yourself available to potential customers,” Sklar said. “One way is to encourage people to start conversations with you by adding a chatbox to your website. This will make it easy for them to reach out. Plus, they can have automated responses when you’re offline.

“You can also implement conversational marketing through your social media channels and via email marketing,” she said.

Picking Proper Metrics

Measuring the success of conversational marketing can be done via metrics such as these Deshpande suggestions:

  • Increased lead engagement
  • Improved customer loyalty, net promoter scores, reviews and feedback
  • More engaged leads at each step of the sales funnel
  • Lower acquisition cost, close more deals, work faster

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” Deshpande said. “Conversational marketing if done right is one piece of tech that will get the leads.

“Greater engagement leads to greater customer insight,” she said. “That drives them further into the sales funnel.”

Powerful Marketing Funnels Pull In Customers From Every Direction
Raising awareness leads to conversions that last for many yearsmedium.datadriveninvestor.com

Some metrics are more subjective.

“Measure the sentiment of the conversations you’re having with people,” Sklar said. “Are they saying favorable things about your brand? Are they showing interest in you and your work?

“You can also measure the success of your conversational marketing efforts by tracking which conversations become sales,” she said.

TweetDeck and Twitter lists can monitor conversations. They give cues about who’s saying what, along with when to jump in to save the day with your special services. 

“I use Brand24,” Sklar said. “It’s a great tool for managing your conversational marketing activities. It’s effective for social listening and provides access to mentions of your brand from all across the web in one convenient place.”

Deshpande added these conversational tools and platforms:

  • Facebook messenger chatbot
  • Instagram messenger chatbot
  • Google Business messages
  • WhatsApp business app
  • Hubspot Live chatbot
  • Apple Business chat
  • Drift
  • Telegram bots

About The Author

Jim Katzaman is a manager at Largo Financial Services and worked in public affairs for the Air Force and federal government. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

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James L Katzaman

Jim Katzaman is a charter member of the Tealfeed Creators' program, focusing on marketing and its benefits for companies and consumers. Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as subscribing here on Tealfeed.


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