What is Conversational Marketing? Learn the Basics
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.
Drift, the world’s leading conversational marketing platform, defined the term saying it is one-to-one approach to marketing that companies use to shorten their sales cycle, learn about their customers, and create a more human buying experience.
What Exactly Is Conversational Marketing?
As the name suggests, conversational marketing is the direct interaction between businesses and customers on different available channels. Conversational marketing or conversation marketing is a feedback-oriented approach to marketing used by companies to drive engagement, develop customer loyalty, grow the customer base, and, ultimately, grow revenue. Conversational marketing is based on the idea of listening to your customer and potential customer’s needs.
It is a new, personalized approach to doing business online. It moves buyers through marketing and sales funnels by using the power of one at a time questions, a lot like a real-time conversation.
With access to new technology, businesses can use these emerging platforms to easily meet consumers where they are already spending their time. People love communicating with messaging because it’s fast, easy, and actually feels like a conversation. So it’s not surprising that 90% of consumers want to use it to communicate with businesses (and the majority prefer it over email) according to a recent survey from Twilio.
The Conversational Framework boils down to 3 steps that need no further explanation:
1. Engage
2. Understand
3. Recommend
Conversational marketing — synonym for live chat?
Some people equate conversational marketing with live chat — something that’s been around for a while. But it’s much more than that. Conversational marketing isn’t about a single tool. While Facebook Messenger, Slack, SMS, email, and others allow conversations to happen, this is about the changing communication preferences of consumers that in turn, should change how you view one-to-one conversations.
Conversational Marketing is more than just chat. Similarly, it can be used in tons of different areas of your business, including:
- Email Marketing
- Forms
- Landing Pages
- FAQs
- Voice Applications (Alexa, Google Smart Assistant, etc.)
The Five Key Benefits of Conversational Marketing
According to Drift, 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 catalogue, where the only thing to greet shoppers were lead forms.
Now you can actually say “hello” to the people taking 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 on average for leads from other sources.
5. You grow your sales pipeline.
Since implementing conversational marketing, RapidMiner, a leading data science platform, has influenced 25% of their pipeline with conversations — an amount worth well over $1 million to them.
In conclusion, no matter what your business is, conversational marketing can be a fresh and highly effective tool for engaging with your prospects and customers. As chatbot technology continues to evolve, experiment with the different ways that you can use conversational marketing to shorten your sales cycle, learn new information about your prospects and enhance the empathetic element of your brand.
