Conversational marketing is a term that describes an approach to increasing customer engagement, building brand loyalty, and positively impacting sales results.
Conversational marketing is enabling marketing teams to achieve their desire to have personalized conversations with their customers at scale. Thanks to this, brands can learn what matters to their audience and build ongoing relationships that help them better serve their customers.
These advancements are happening due to the use of popular messaging apps like WhatsApp. Businesses are looking for the best way to get to know their customers within these apps.
At the same time, advances in technology are opening the doors for businesses to converse with their customers on a large scale and, in doing so, learn about their needs and preferences without intrusively monitoring their online behavior.
How can Conversational Marketing help my business?
Personalized, one-on-one conversations have the power to build customer relationships, increase loyalty, and deliver great consumer experiences. Brands can use conversational marketing to open a two-way communications channel with their customers.
Marketers can use this deep customer understanding to drive business results.
Companies now operate in a sales environment that no longer dictates when, where, or how customers engage with them. With real-time messaging, buyers expect a new type of experience, where conversations happen on their own terms.
The buyer’s journey and sales funnel have changed. For years, sales and marketing teams have focused on using the “form and follow” approach to capture and qualify leads. We’re all familiar with the steps below…
Step 1: Attract people to your website
Step 2: Have those people fill out the capture forms
Step 3: Send messages by email, call or enter them into a sales pipeline
While steps 1 and 3 are fairly straightforward and usually get most of the attention, step 2 is the problem.
Capture forms have become annoying, cumbersome and seemingly outdated for shoppers. This may have something to do with the increased usage and higher comfort levels in using messaging apps.
By implementing a conversational approach, a single marketer can now set up a bot that automatically greets hundreds or thousands of visitors and asks them qualified questions.
That bot can send qualified leads to specific sales reps or help prospects place demos on a rep's calendar.
This new 'fast lane' saves time for both the buyer and the sales rep. The buyer receives real-time interaction, and the sales rep spends less time filtering out bad opportunities.
