What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational Marketing revolves around talking to people. It’s a conversation that prioritizes the consumer can focus on a product, service, or particular pain point.

Those conversations allow branding to market themselves in a more meaningful, impactful manner.

It hinges on the belief that selling is easier when a business has a good relationship with its target audience.

Ultimately, consumers feel a need to be understood. So when we feel that we can talk directly with a brand, that’s a good thing.

Conversational marketing lends itself well to modern business because of the two-way nature of the internet.

Conversational marketing is the fastest way to move buyers through your marketing and sales funnels through the power of real-time conversations. It builds relationships and creates authentic experiences with customers and buyers.

How does Conversational Marketing work?

A Proven Methodology for Converting More Traffic into Qualified Leads.

Implementing conversational marketing doesn’t force you to blow everything up and start from scratch. It’s the fastest way to move buyers through your digital marketing and sales funnel.

It’s more like turning on a new lead-gen channel that complements your existing marketing efforts. We boiled it down into a simple framework called the Conversational Framework: “Engage, Understand, Recommend.”

Let’s do quick definitions:

What is live chat? Live chat is a communication channel you add to your website that lets visitors message a member of your team directly. That means you can offer assistance in real-time, and save visitors the trouble of digging around your website.

What are chatbots?
Chatbots are software programs that mimic natural language and conversation. They can also be pre-programmed with targeted messages, which lets you get many of the benefits of live chat without needing someone to actively monitor chat windows.

If you visit a website and have trouble finding personalized solutions, live chat, and intelligent chatbots can be extremely helpful. Especially if your question is highly specific, it’s faster to just ask a question than it is to find an answer on your own.

Live chat marketing has been around for a while, and it tends to be most helpful for people who are already close to making a decision (and just have a few final concerns).

Chatbot marketing, on the other hand, is relatively new. Because chatbots don’t take a real person to run 24/7, you can keep them active…24 hours a day!

A lot of websites are using intelligent chatbots to greet every visitor and collect some information (including contact information) in lead forms.

In a way, this type of chatbot marketing is a less annoying form of a pop-up.

Although pop-up lead capture forms are universally annoying, anyone who’s used one knows that they convert crazy better than other types of calls to action.

Data from Sumo shows that pop-ups, done well, can hit pretty high conversion rates. The top 10% of pop-ups in their sample converted to over 9%.

Here are the five biggest benefits of using conversations to capture and qualify leads:

1. You create a more human buying experience.

With conversational marketing, your website no longer feels like an empty store or generic catalog, where the only thing to greet shoppers were lead forms. Now you can say “hello” to the people taking the time to visit your site, allowing them to start a conversation when it’s most convenient for them.

2. You learn a ton about your buyers and customers.

Lead forms can collect contact info, but they’re not great at providing context. Conversations can easily show you why a buyer came to your site in the first place, what their biggest pain points are, and which product features are most important to them.

3. You convert more leads and better leads.

At Drift, we’ve added 15% more leads to the top of our funnel with conversational marketing. Those are leads that were never going to the trouble of filling out a form before we gave them an alternative.

4. You shorten your sales cycle.

Leads qualified through conversations (called CQLs, or conversation qualified leads) tend to close faster than leads qualified through traditional methods. Digital marketing agency “ThriveHive’s” sales cycle for CQLs lasts four days on average, compared to 11 days for leads from other sources.

Ways to build a successful conversational marketing strategy.

— Respond in real-time

Live chat means that people can get instantaneous (or at least very fast) personal solutions to their questions.

Sometimes a question can’t wait.

You know that feeling when you’re looking for an answer to a question and it just feels like it should be easier to find? Your questions seem like they should be common ones, and yet you can’t seem to find anyone answering it.

Often, this is the kind of question that an expert could answer in just a few seconds. But it seems impossible to find the answer online.

And if you don’t have the resources to have live chat running All day long, chatbots can help people out in the meantime.

Why do people like your landing page?

Research shows that by far the biggest reason for liking a website (76% of people said this) is that the website makes it easy to find what you want.

When you use conversational marketing, you make it easier for people to find what they want. This means they like you more—and have the information they need to have before they convert into a customer.

– Live chat (supported by voice-of-customer research and staffed by real people) creates authentic experiences, which engages leads.

Having a human tone is hard to scale—if you have more people talking to you than you have people to operate live chats, you could have long delays.

So even though it isn’t the same as talking to a real person, intelligent chatbots feel more personal and human than submitting a vague contact request form.

– Personalization.

Everyone wants to be treated like a unique individual.

Personalization is one of the latest trends in marketing. Instead of treating everyone the same, doesn’t it make sense to treat them as individuals and solve their problems individually?

Even though “personalization” is a long word, the underlying concept is simple. It’s just treating each individual as a unique individual.

How does conversational marketing help you treat people like individuals?

• Solve individual problems on demand
• Break people out of generic funnels
• Collect additional information (and use it to follow up)

When people contact live chat or chatbots, they often have specific problems they’re dealing with. Instead of directing them to generic content that’s sort of about their problem, a live chat agent can provide human-to-human interaction.

It’s a much more personal customer service experience.

– People want to know how you can offer assistance and Provide solutions.

And sounding a little more human and conversational is an important step to getting them to listen to you.

The Benefits of Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing isn’t new we have conversations every day, and as you saw from the timeline above, it’s been that way for a while. So must use tools that optimize conversations for business.

• Conversation marketing is a more delightful way for customers to get answers.

People are increasingly turning to mobile to shop and make purchases. As a result, more people are interacting with content that is more mobile-friendly. Consumers that use their phones as their primary internet device have grown to prefer video content marketing, social content, and messaging-based interactions.

Consumers spend a lot of hours per day on their phones. I’m guessing it’s your first line of defense when looking up an answer to a quick question. Conversational marketing channels like messaging apps and email are innately mobile-friendly. It’s a lot easier to chat with a rep or even a bot to get an answer than spend time scrolling and clicking through a company’s website. Messaging apps allow customers to provide information specific to their problem so the business can give quick, personalized support.

• Conversation marketing is a great way to gain new, valuable insights about your customers.

Chat interfaces can record data that can then be used to optimize for better customer interactions, product improvements, more helpful content, and more.

• Conversation marketing is a great way to build trust.

With messaging apps and social media, we’ve found a way to talk with more friends, more extreme. Conversational marketing can drive lead generation by reaching new audiences on different channels or by giving people a more convenient way to get in touch with support.

Bots allow companies to collect a lot of information naturally. Instead of coming face-to-face with a long-form, customers can share a little information throughout multiple conversations. HubSpot was able to attract 20% more qualified leads by merely adding live chat as a communication channel.

And not only is conversational marketing more convenient for customers, but it’s also a great way to show off your brand’s personality. Through copywriting, images, emojis, and videos, you can give your messaging conversations a personality — one that reinforces your brand. Customers and prospects are likely to keep engaging with your branding if you make it enjoyable and easy to do.

Live chat allows you to collect information about qualified leads contacting you.

That could mean getting their phone number to follow up on a call. Or it could mean getting more information about their industry, company, needs, and challenges.