Marketing automation, omnichannel marketing, personalized communication, video marketing, AI, influencer marketing… Can you keep up? If you can check the box for at least two of these items, you are doing a good job already. Keeping up with today’s ever-changing marketing environment is not an easy task.
The web is evolving every day, just like your target market, your competition, the struggle for attention and your digital strategy.
Too often I see companies struggling to keep all the plates spinning. This is exactly why you need to be introduced to Conversational Marketing. Conversational Marketing will not only make your life easier, it will also improve your marketing and sales processes drastically; in a short amount of time.
Discover what Conversational Marketing is and why you need to start doing it today further down in this article.
WHAT IS CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING?
Conversational Marketing purely means having one-on-one conversations with your prospects and customers. Sounds obvious, right? The concept is there for ages. Think about visiting a physical store where a regular salesperson kindly asks you if they can help you. This seems old-fashioned yet why are we forgetting this in our online strategy?
The web and instant online connectivity have exposed us to a mass audience. To reach this mass audience we came with strategies to send bulk emails and to throw ads at our prospects. To a certain extent this ad-hoc activity worked. However, prospects are immune to our extensive shouting. We need to go back to one-on-one conversations. The technology is here and it’s able to help.
CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING EMPOWERED BY TECHNOLOGY
Conversational Marketing technology will help you drive one-on-one conversations with prospects and customers on a large scale by automatically providing personalized messages based on behavior, available data and new information driven by the conversation. Once the lead is qualified, the software will automatically route it to the right salesperson so they can have a human one-on-one conversation.
WHY DO I NEED CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING TECHNOLOGY?
1. Buyers have changed
You probably don’t need another 10 lines of explanation to know that buyers have changed. Technology made several barriers disappear, which shifted our expectations. You know that you can answer right away, so why not do so? Take next-day delivery in e-commerce for example. Some companies are now even shifting to same-day delivery. If you don't deliver tomorrow, they will find someone else who will. We are used to getting everything right now.
Don’t lose time and customers. Convert them right away instead. Always be available to answer.
2. Scalable solutions
Having one-on-one conversations sounds easy, but in a constantly connected online world you can get hundreds or even thousands of visitors simultaneously. Using the right technology will enable you to address all of these visitors instantly.
3. Lead Generation
Everyone knows about the classic inbound story. In order to drive traffic to your website you spend a lot of money on creating content to promote on different channels. After a while people will finally fill out that one oh-so-precious form so the lead gets captured and can be followed-up a few days later, or so you hope. This can work if you are doing it correctly. In fact, content marketing stays very important. However, these conversion rates do not live up to the expectations way too often. By driving a one-on-one conversation, you can collect data more intuitively during the without scaring people away with overly complicated forms. Result: you will collect more qualified leads!
4. Data collection & feedback loop
How often do you listen to your customers and prospects? If you are, are you asking the right questions? Where is the information stored? We lose a lot of info because marketing and sales alignment is most often limited or sometimes even non-existing. Using Conversational Marketing technology you will get to know your prospects and customers better and will allow you to start feeding conversations with relevant information. You will see that being more relevant will enable you to get even higher quality data.
5. Start small
Last but not least: unlike several other technology solutions, Conversational Marketing technology does not require weeks of implementation. You can start light and grow at your own pace, whenever you are ready. There are no excuses to not start today!
Convinced you need Conversational Marketing technology or have any further questions? Reach out!
