Conversational Marketing: Myth or Reality

CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING DEFINITION

As the name suggests, conversational marketing is the direct interaction between businesses and customers on different available channels. It is a one-to-one approach to marketing where personalization acts as a fulcrum for the marketing strategy.

Conversations play an essential role in today’s world. No one likes being sold to and it’s high time that businesses around the world understand this and act to recover lost ground.

Conversational marketing is the practice of meeting or conversing with your potential buyers or people who have shown interest in your services in order to let them understand your business more and answer all their queries.

Now, this could be achieved via phone call, face-to-face meeting, an email or short messages. Initiating a dialogue with people helps you understand them more and vice versa. This is such a key element in establishing any type of rational relationship today.

When we are doing business, it really is unsaid that prospects need to know everything they got to know about us. What better way to achieve this than having a full-fledged conversation?

Conversational Marketing in Today’s Time

The ways we used to communicate with our family and loved ones have changed. The same applies to marketing our products and connecting with our potential customers.

Over the years, the channels for effective communication between two persons have changed. From letters to telegrams, from the printing press to the telephone and from fax machines to the internet, we have come a long way.

Conversational marketing has existed from time immemorial and people have marketed their products via effective one-to-one sessions to the buyers since ages. It exists now as well but the modes of communication between businesses and their buyers have changed. But how?

Enter: Chatbots and SMS text-style messaging

What exactly is a chatbot?

A chatbot is an artificial intelligence program that converses with a user through a script and performs automated tasks assigned to it.

Delivering the right information to the right people at the right time is the way to tame the game nowadays. AI Chatbots and messaging applications do just that.

Providing 24*7 customer support is difficult but with chatbots, it is just one of the many things you can do and achieve.

Imagine how hard it is for small businesses to appoint a few customer executives exclusively for handling customer queries and solving customer issues.

We surely are aware of the fact that nothing can beat human interaction but smart chatbots handle all the repetitive tasks making it easier for manpower to look after other important chores.

According to Statista’s 2017 Whitepaper Study on Conversational Commerce:

• The number of chatbots available on Facebook Messenger trebled within six months
• More chatbots are in development for messaging apps than for virtual assistants
• Consumers prefer messenger over intelligent virtual assistants when it comes to chatbots
• One in ten have already used chatbots in e-Commerce, and one-third are open to trying bots
• Companies that use chatbots are seen as less human by the majority, yet a third wants recommendations and advice by chatbots

With the rapid growth of technology and the constantly changing consumer behavior, marketers need to keep up the pace with the world and it reflects in their marketing strategies as well. Conversational marketing too has adapted to the change and it is paying off big time.

The Key Components of Conversational Marketing

For this, we can go back to the basics and ask ourselves:

What makes up a good conversation?

I am sure we all agree on the fact that a good conversation must comprise of the following:-

Context: Without context, any conversation would become pointless. We cannot just have conversations without realizing where we are heading.

Let’s say you bought some product off a marketplace and were not satisfied with it. You call the support and ask for a refund. You were given an ETA but did not receive your money back.

You called again. Now, you would be expecting the support guys to pick up the conversation exactly from where you left it off the other day. It would really be a pain to provide all the details and explaining the whole situation to them again.

And this is why context is of paramount importance to any conversation.

We need to keep track of all the information that we gather in our conversations and use this information to serve our clients better.

Personal touch: Whatever may the conversation be about, we need to personalize it. It is quite astonishing that as soon as we personalize our messages, the person at the other end feels more connected to us.

One prime example of personalization in our day-to-day lives is the reference of people by their names. A person’s name is unique and whenever you refer to them by that name, they feel they are not just one of the many out there.

This small example can work wonders for businesses if used in the right place.

Real-time: The very concept of conversational marketing is to engage with people in real-time. This engagement can be with either a human or a bot.

The whole world is growing impatient and everyone wants quick and instant results. When the conversation is real-time, people feel valued and heard. This increases our chances for better engagement as there is no gap in communication at a single instance.

Keeping these three components in mind for an engaging conversation with clients or prospects, businesses can set new standards for personalization and bond amazingly well with their audience.

The Workflow of Conversational Marketing

On paper, strategies look very pretty but in reality, it may all become very confusing and hard to implement. The same applies to conversational marketing.

Right now, we all may be thinking that we already are using conversational marketing to good effect( some businesses really are) but it is not as simple as it looks. Just having a mere presence on multiple channels and chatting with your audience doesn’t solve the case.

Sounds intimidating, right?

I am going to simplify it for you.

The conversational marketing workflow consists of the following steps:

Seize The Moment And The Visitors

Almost every other business around us shells out a lot of money on the promotion of their services and products; just with the ultimate goal of increasing web traffic on their website.

The point to be noted here is that we want targeted traffic on our sites and not just every other web user.

So, how does conversational marketing help us out here?

We need to replace the age-old lead capture forms on our websites with conversations. Artificial chatbots and/or real-time messaging can make our jobs easier. We just need to identify our main priority web pages and let the chatbots do their thing. Web pages with the most traffic should get the deserved gift of chatbots. If we do not have enough traffic, we can surely add these chatbots everywhere. Yes, on every page.

The result?

It helps in better filtering of our visitors and identifies people who are really serious about buying our products. We can even personalize the messages in the conversations with enriched data.

All the information shared by our prospects (like email, phone number, etc.) is saved automatically by the chatbots.

Segregate The Leads

According to the Lead Response Management Study, the odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.

Sadly we are not up to the mark.

According to Drift’s lead management survey, out of 433 B2B companies, just 7% responded within five minutes. Meanwhile, 55% took 5+ days to respond or never responded at all.

With conversational marketing, you have the upper hand. With chatbots at your service, you are sure to respond at the earliest every single time. Unlike your support executives, chatbots are awake 24*7 every day of the week.

You just need to make sure that you have provided a good question script to your chatbots. The script will include all the same questions your sales representatives ask.

What is a chatbot script?

A script is a pre-defined mix of questions and answers which are fed into a bot so that it can have a conversation with the users according to their responses.

Albeit chatbot scripts vary according to the nature of the business and the different stages of the buyer’s journey, here are some general questions that can be a part of your script:

• Hey, there. Can I point you in the right direction? (list 2–4 options to click)
• Are you interested in sales or support? (Sales or Support)
• How are you thinking about using our product?
• CTA example- Talk to a live human agent/ Schedule a meeting with an expert.

You can set some qualification criteria which suits you and deliver messages accordingly. The people who qualify as leads through your chatbot filter can be easily routed to a sales representative who will deal with it from there.

Read more on how to develop a simple chatbot for business.

Closing The Deals

This is the third and final step of the conversational marketing workflow. After all the hard work of capturing and qualifying leads, it all boils down to connecting with your leads and converting them to customers.

And I think we would all agree that humans are our best bet to do that. ( Bad luck, bots! )

But even in the final stage, bots can be of paramount importance. Firstly, they can provide the leads with the option to book a demo or an appointment with your representatives and after that is done, they can send invites to both the parties.

If in case some representative is unavailable, bots can do the cleaning work by connecting the leads with the available ones or continue the conversation.

The main motto behind all of this is to let chatbots do all the dirty work for you and human interaction is saved for only the very important tasks.

How does Conversational Marketing work?

Conversational Marketing can be broken down into three simple steps:

1. Qualify

Determine buying intent by evaluating a variety of factors, including campaign attribution and browsing behavior, as well as demographic and firmographic data from systems like Salesforce Pardot and Salesforce CRM. You can also leverage bots to ask qualifying questions and help identify sales-ready visitors or book meetings for your sales team.

2. Engage

Engage in a real-time, personalized conversation with the website visitors you deem as qualified leads using:

• Chat
• Screen sharing
• Voice calls
• Targeted CTAs

3. Convert

After capturing data from your website visitors, logging the details of the conversation, and syncing it to your CRM, you can then create lead and opportunities right from the users online experience. This experience allows you to build pipeline and progress deals more quickly.

How to use Conversational Marketing with Marketing Automation

Conversational marketing is most effective when it’s integrated with your marketing automation platform. Together, the two solutions give your team a 360-degree view of your leads and help you effectively qualify and convert leads.

Lead Intelligence

Conversational marketing data combined with marketing automation data give you a holistic view of your potential customer. Sales reps have complete visibility into how prospects have engaged with every digital asset, including your website, empowering them to have timely, contextual sales conversations.

Lead Qualification

You can leverage marketing automation data to fuel your qualification engine and identify valuable website visitors. For instance, qualify visitors who have a certain prospect score or grade, or have engaged with one of your marketing campaigns or forms.

Account-Based Marketing

If you’re housing your account-based marketing data in your marketing automation platform, you can greet target accounts by name the moment they land on your website. Immediately route them to the appropriate account owner for a real time, high-fidelity sales meeting with your most important accounts.

Who should use Conversational Marketing?

Here are some signs that conversational marketing would work well for your business:

1. You are driving prospects to your corporate website.

With conversational marketing, you can use your website to build meaningful relationships with your audience.

2. You have a team of inside sales reps.

Inside sales reps have access to a solution that enables them to get visibility into prospect activity and to reach out to qualified prospects right away.

3. You have the resources to staff this new selling channel.

Although conversational marketing is intuitive and can be woven into your existing sales workflow, it requires an investment of staff to properly utilize the solution.

4. You are looking to generate more pipeline and revenue through your website and digital channels.

By investing in conversational marketing, you are able to generate more pipeline and revenue by connecting with the most qualified prospects, faster.

5. You want to accelerate deal cycles through online channels.

By connecting with the most qualified leads sooner, your sales teams can create opportunities faster and accelerate deals.

How to implement a Conversational Marketing strategy

Here are five steps to launching a conversational marketing strategy that will move the needle in your business:

1. Assemble your stakeholders.

It’s important to get buy-in from both your marketing and sales teams early. If both sides are invested in conversational marketing, it’s going to be more impactful.

2. Define success.

As a team, agree what success looks like for your program— perhaps it’s an increase in lead volume or pipeline—and prioritize the metrics that matter most.

3. Define who is “qualified".

Identify which visitors are most likely to purchase and fast-track those visitors to live sales conversations.

4. Map out the visitor experience.

Think about the timing, tone, and placement of your conversational marketing experiences throughout your website.

5. Train your sales reps.

Orient your sales reps with your conversational marketing strategy and application. Map out shifts, so you always have good sales coverage. When your sales reps feel confident using the product, adoption will skyrocket and the program will be much more successful.

The Four Principles of Conversational Marketing

There are four core principles of conversational marketing:

1.   A Conversational Strategy

2.   A Personalized Experience

3.   A Real-Time Response

4.   A Feedback Loop

1) A Conversational Strategy

Like anything in marketing, the magic all starts with a well-devised strategy. The conversational approach is no different.

Start by taking a holistic look at how you’re inviting interaction on your website.

Compile a list of all the ways a prospect could engage: forms, social messengers, phone numbers, emails, etc. - any channel in which a customer can communicate with your brand. Be especially mindful to assess how you’re welcoming interaction on your high-intent pages, such as your pricing, service and landing pages.

Conversational marketing prioritizes offering one-to-one, personal conversations across all these channels.

Hang tight. We’ll expand on your overall strategy further down.

2) A Personalized Experience

When it comes to the copy on your website, your writers probably wrote for a wide audience. That works when users are reading a static web page, but conversations don’t work that way.

We’re talking about the difference between giving a speech to a mass audience versus talking one-on-one with an individual.

In order to create a genuine conversation, you need to address the person you are talking to, personally; not cultivate responses for a generalized buyer persona.

When considering trigger responses (we’ll dive into this below too), make sure it’s a real conversation with the person with whom you are engaging.

3) A Real-Time Response

You’re 100 times more likely to reach your prospect if you call within five minutes of their inquiry, according to a study by Lead Response Management.

How long does it currently take your team to get back to prospects?

If someone reaches out after business hours, they will likely need to wait until the business opens again to get a response, right? Even if their outreach is during your on-the-clock time, it might take an hour or more before you check your email or come out of a meeting to check your voicemail.

And if they filled out a static lead form— forget about it. It might take days to get a response from a neglected group inbox.

You’d be surprised by how quickly users change gears. If you aren’t there to serve someone’s needs when they need it, they’ll likely try to find another resource.

Conversational marketing utilizes bots, who are available 24/7 to instantly reply. That means that connections are made instantly, and engagement immediately captured.

4) A Feedback Loop

You’re always on the fast-track to making improvements for better efficiency with conversational marketing. Review your chat transcripts and use the bottlenecks within the context to fuel future content.

For example, if you notice that your AI is struggling to find a spot to send searchers for quick answers to a specific question about your services, maybe it’s time to add it to your FAQ page or set up a recognized reponse.

This is an ever-evolving process, continually living, breathing and needing to be supervised to continue to serve your customers changing needs.

After time, you’ll notice when it’s the right time to send the chatter to a real person, and what’s easiest for the bots to quickly answer.

The Conversational Marketing Methodology

How to Adopt Conversational Marketing

Use these six steps to build your conversational strategy:

1.   Map Out the Buyer's Journey

2.   Create User Stories

3.   Role Play the Conversation

4.   Identify Triggers for Next Question

5.   Identify Different Branches of the Conversation

6.   Publish and Promote

7.   Analyze and Iterate