Messenger Marketing: Why Having Real Conversations Will Matter Again
I’ve been talking about Messenger Marketing in my last few articles and at this point I’m pretty sure you’re wondering WHY I think Messenger Marketing is such a great deal…
To start with, let’s remember together what “Marketing” is.
Marketing is all about being able to deliver a series of messages specifically designed to move prospects through what’s called “the customer’s journey”, from cold and unaware of your services or brand to a hot, engaged customer that TRUST you and it’s ready to back you up with the only real measure of success for a marketing campaign: their wallet.
And even if we could perfectly make a good case for Facebook Messenger being 800% better at delivering the messages themselves -the best copywriting in the world won’t help you if your prospects don’t get to read your messages in the first place- I personally think that the reason why Messenger Marketing is bound to become the favorite -and maybe the main- way of marketing for businesses in the next 5 years go beyond the unreal opening rates.
To be fair, the great opening rates we see now in messenger are mostly due to novelty. Those unreal 85%+ stats will, no doubt about it, quickly wear out to a more healthy 60% or so as soon as people start to get used to this new communication media.
Of course, 60% is still unheard of if you compare it with the measly 10% email open rates are currently averaging across all industries.
But this is where Messenger Marketing is going to win: CONVERSATIONS.
Strangely enough, even after having spent a good part of the last century talking about the need to “tap onto the conversation that’s happening inside our prospect’s minds”, there has never existed a technology or platform that allowed us to do just that: converse with out customers. At least, not beyond the old way that involved picking the phone or paying our client a visit to… well… have that conversation!
But of course the old way is, if well the most effective, the slower and less scalable. In this age of rapid prototyping and neck-breaking tech development, it has to be a better way. Or at least, A MORE EFFICIENT, scalable way.
And it surely is.
Enter a new way of automating conversations at scale, AKA, what we started calling “Messenger Marketing”.
And notice I said “Messenger Marketing” and not “Facebook Messenger Marketing”. Facebook Messenger is a platform. So are WeChat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat and many others.
Messenger Marketing, on the other hand, IT’S A NOVEL MARKETING APPROACH.
This approach is based on the “novel” idea that a good way of having a conversation with a prospect would be… actually having that conversation!
Irony apart, I’m of course, over simplifying it.
We did have, as digital marketers, tried to do that before. But the technology would only allow for a one-way communication, so we settled for talking the well-know principles of copywriting that had been explored and successfully deployed for over 50 years before “internet marketing” was even a word and, quite literally, started publishing mail pieces online. We simply named them “sales-letters” and, more recently, “long-form sales-letters” and called it a day.
But of course, this “one-size-fits-all” approach was too static and too limiting for this new, exciting, always-evolving and over-dynamic media we call “the Internet”.
We desperately needed more flexibility, a way to better adapt our sales messages to the different people within our audience.
Then, the advent of Social Media changed the landscape of the Internet forever providing everybody with a voice and a way to make their message heard and gain a following from people all around the globe.
But if Social Networks gave us marketers super-targeting powers, allowing us to pretty much reach any individual in the world based in a complex set of demographics and interests, the actual way of delivering the marketing messages has not evolved to get up to par. When it was clear that video was going to win the engagement battle, long-form salesletters became long-form Video-Salesletters. But the copywriting process behind them remained largely untouched.
In fact, most video-salesletters are just a powerpoint slideshow with someone reading the same old long-form salesletter in the background…
After some more years of debate and failed tries, some smart marketers finally came out with palliative solution to proper cater to each individual prospect with a more flexible customer journey. The solution was, in hindsight, a really basic one. But not for that, less effective.
Salesfunnels opened a new era of growth for online businesses and most fortunes made over the last 10 years are directly or indirectly attributable to them.
But as it happened before, people grew savvier and got used and tired of Salesfunnels.
Now, salesfunnels still work well and I see them having their use for a long time to come. But there are a few big flaws with salesfunnels, at least with the way most of them are currently being implemented:
- Commerce -either online u offline- is based in TRUST. Salesfunnels are basically built upon the idea that we have to lure people into our business with a “bait” offer -for definition a low-valu offer- to INMEDIATELY upsell them. 2, 3 or even 4 times in a row, and right there, on the spot!
- I can’t think on a better way to trash the TRUST you new acquired customer was your starting to develop toward your brand! Drawing a 2 or 3 basic paths -like in Upsell and Downsell paths- with a series of static salesletters chained along the way, IS NOT A CONVERSATION. Far from it.
The second problem is WHY messenger marketing is here to stay.
Never before we had a platform that can allow us to establish a proper conversation with a prospect.. while still keeping the power to DIRECT the conversation as we wish.
That’s the power that Messenger Marketing put in our hands.
But of course, that doesn’t mean that we’ll use that power properly. It doesn’t even mean we’re prepared for it.
The thing is, Messenger Marketing is not just a continuation of “Salesfunnel Marketing”. This is a new paradigm and it will require from us a profound mindset shift if we’re to take full advantage of this marketing revolution.
After 20 years of singing our own song to the world, we’ll have now to learn -or re-learn, if you’re not a millennial- to talk to other people, to really understand that conversation that’s going on inside their minds and, for the very first time, be able to put that conversation “in paper”, SENTENCE BY SENTENCE.
I want to welcome you to the era where meaningful interactions will matter once again, where being able to craft a good, persuasive conversation with other human being -across the room or across the world- will, as it used to be in the forgotten days of the centuries behind us, make a real impact in our lives and our level of success.
Messenger Marketing is, as I see it, a great development for marketing and a really convenient excuse for us all to start looking inside for resources we did’t know -or we forgot- were there, to connect with others and rescue together, in the age of AI, some of the very values that makes us humans.
It seems to be that, for the time being, Psychology and Communication will have a killer come back in the 21th century. Let’s celebrate that!