Conversational Marketing: How AI is becoming Marketers New Best Friend!
Hundreds of Millions of people are using different digital messaging platforms to communicate with their peers every single day, channels such as Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, WeChat, Direct Messaging and other Chat apps. Millions others are using speech-based assistants like Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. As these numbers keep growing, many traditional communication channels that businesses used to rely on in communication with their clients are becoming absolute.
As Marketing is all about Communications, Marketers have found themselves switching to the new digital and social messaging channels in order to engage their customers who naturally feel comfortable using them. But with this came great Marketing challenges, as more customers are accessible via these channels, more efforts and resources need to be put in place in order to be able to reach them with right customized and personalized messaging, that will enable us as Marketers achieve our KPI.
The need for scalable solutions, that are able to engage and communicate brand messages, advertisements and recommend content (whether products or services) to millions of targeted audiences, and are able to customize and personalize these messages based on the end receivers demography, geography, context and needs, motivated the rapid development of Conversational Platforms that are driven by Artificial Intelligence that are able to fill that need.
Conversational AI is the technology that enables machines to engage and communicate with humans in a way that mimics a natural, two sided, human conversation (either via text or voice). The ability of the machine to understand human language, and user's intent, using Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and generate proper responses, using Natural Language Generation (NLG) are two key capabilities that define the quality of any Conversational AI system.
Conversational AI Agents or Chatbots provide a scalable way to interact one-on-one with Customers.
This means, that Marketers now have the right tools that are able to help them, customize and personalize their messaging, and engage with customers regardless of where they are, or their preferred digital channel of communication, giving them the scalability to reach their audience wheters in thousands, or millions without worrying about staffing, time zones, or other resources.
Marketing used to be a linear process. Marketers used to Collect information about potential users, send information that "might" attract them, and push them to take an action, while waiting for clicks and for inbounds based on our design of the customer journey, or our expectations of the customer behavior. Conversational AI, has transformed Marketing into a more of an interactive process, with Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Natural Language Generation (NLG) capabilities, conversational digital agents are able today to interact with potential customers, personalize the customer experience they go through, advertise or recommended content based on the user's input, reaction, intent, feedback, and context.
Conversational AI agents are able to engage users and manage the conversations that are taking place with the customer at scale, as a single system can handle the load of what a fully staffed contact center used to handle, with continuous availability and consistency, thus providing marketers with tools that allows them to specifically target each customer with the personalized, and customized content that best fits her need, increasing the quality of leads, and the rates of conversion brands receive.
Marketing is reaching a pivotal point where marketers must either harness the technological tools of the future or risk their reputation by falling behind competitors. Either way, it will no longer be an option to stay the status quo. Exciting advancements are being made in this field.
Rajai Nuseibeh, MBA, VP of Marketing at botique.ai, one of the Leading Conversational Process Automation Platforms, Rajai has over 10 years of experience in Integration of Technology and Innovation, through leadership roles with different disruptive startups, in addition to leading Multi-million development projects with the US Department of State.